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

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

When Tom spoke to Jimmy in the morning, he seemed much as he had the evening before. Tom was still worried, however, especially after he called him again later in the day and got no answer. At around 3:00 in the afternoon Tom went up to the room. He found Jimmy sprawled on his bed, unresponsive and unable to talk, almost unconscious. He had wet himself and everything in his room was knocked about. When Tom asked what was going on, Jimmy could only laugh and make ambiguous hand gestures. Tom then called Raymond Foye, who came down from his apartment. They called an ambulance, but while Raymond was out in the hall meeting the medics, Jimmy had a seizure and flung himself to the floor. When Jimmy had finally been loaded into the ambulance and it had begun to pull out from the front of the hotel, a car ran into it, and the first ambulance had to wait at the accident scene while another one was sent for. Finally Jimmy made it to St. Vincent’s, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit. A CT scan and other tests showed that Jimmy had had a stroke and a heart attack, but the heart attack had been more than twenty-four hours earlier. That evening, he remained unconscious and was on a respirator.

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

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

Jimmy had already decided that he wanted to write a long, book-length poem of about a hundred pages during the visit. Two or three days after arriving in East Aurora, he sat down at the typewriter to begin. To himself he designated that morning as “the morning of the poem,” and that became the title. From that point on, he spent most of his mornings at the typewriter.

As he had done in writing “The Crystal Lithium” and “Hymn to Life,” he began by setting the margins of the typewriter as wide as they would go, and typed each line more or less to the end of the page. He soon recalled, however, that in setting the two earlier poems in type for their original publication, many of the lines had had to be broken and anything from one to four words at the end were dropped to an indented line below. It made a strong visual and rhythmic effect, and although it was not his original intention, Jimmy came to like the syncopation of the alternating longer and shorter lines. Although “The Morning of the Poem” was also begun in long unbroken lines, early on Jimmy decided to preempt the typesetter and retype the poem, making his own secondary line breaks and indenting the shorter lines. While the first part of each original line retains its initial capital letter, the second, indented part is not capitalized, a deliberate move “to indicate that it was all one line.”

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

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

Jimmy’s first months at 250 East Thirty-fifth Street were quiet and lonely. A kind of anticlimax set in, and he found himself unable to write: “I sit down at the typewriter, and a big fat nothing happens,” he complained to Clark Coolidge. Jimmy was also conscious of getting older: “This Friday I’ll be fifty, a fact totally unreal to me. I never thought about getting to be fifty.”

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

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

That summer, the Porters were again on Great Spruce Head Island, leaving the Southampton house in Jimmy’s care. Not wanting to leave him alone again, Fairfield and Anne tried to think of someone who could share the house and its responsibilities with him. After approaching several of Jimmy’s friends, they finally came up with Ruth Kligman.

Kligman was famous as the girlfriend of Jackson Pollock, who had been with him in 1956 when he drove, drunk, into a tree in Springs, New York, killing himself and a friend of Ruth’s who was with them. Frank O’Hara cruelly dubbed her “Death Car Girl.” A beautiful, vivacious, and sensual woman, she was attracted to famous and successful painters and writers, and they to her. Anne Dunn recalled meeting her around this time at Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan’s New York apartment, where she was wearing a dress of white broderie anglaise, and thinking she was “staggeringly beautiful.” To Harry Mathews, who had a brief but intense fling with her, she was “the greatest courtesan of our times.”

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

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

When the doctor again tried to persuade Jimmy to come with them to the hospital, Jimmy turned to his friends and asked, “What do you think I should do?” It was Joe, according to Kenward’s recollection, who “took command” and was finally able to persuade Jimmy to get into the police car. John rode to the hospital with Jimmy, acutely uncomfortable, and struck by the pathos of the situation, which reminded him of the last scene of A Streetcar Named Desire, when Blanche DuBois is finally persuaded by “the kindness of strangers” to go off to a mental institution. During the drive Jimmy turned to him and said, “John, you do believe that I’m the Resurrection and the Life, don’t you?” “Sure,” said John.

For Kenward, the breakdown, “horrible” as it was, was also in a way “an enormous relief” after his tense anticipation of it for the preceding two weeks. Writing shortly afterward to Ron Padgett, Kenward admitted, “This has been an ‘awful’ happening … that kind of intensity is demonic, and one can’t survive with it. Not for long. Or unless one has incredible experience & training, to get one accustomed to it.”

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

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

By this time, Jimmy was moving slowly toward a manic period. Although he was still in “denial” about the Porters having asked him to leave, and there was no open reference to it in his letters or poems, his anxiety found outlet in increased activity. For the time being this energy was channeled constructively into poetry. Unable to sleep one winter night in Southampton, he picked up a facsimile edition of Whitman’s original Leaves of Grass. He started reading the poem, hoping it would help put him to sleep, but “of course it was the wrong hour to do it because it is an incredibly stimulating work,” he recalled. Obviously, he had read Whitman before this, but confronted anew with “Song of Myself,” it came as a fresh revelation. Within a few days he was inspired to try to write something “like it,” and he began “The Crystal Lithium.”

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

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

C, which Berrigan began as a way to publish his and his friends’ work, was one of the earliest “mimeo” magazines, assembled of mimeographed sheets stapled together, a quick, unfussy form of publishing that would become a hallmark of the growing activity around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village. Most of the magazine’s run of thirteen regular issues (ending in 1966), plus two special issues of C Comics, had cover art or illustrations by Brainard, lending the publication a distinctive visual identity. The magazine’s involvement with the earlier generation of the New York School began with issue number 4, which included a large selection of Edwin Denby’s poems. It was Denby who advocated for publishing Schuyler in C, whetting Berrigan’s interest with a group of unpublished early poems and prose works. After “The Infant Jesus of Prague” appeared in 1963, Berrigan asked permission to publish Schuyler’s story “The Home Book,” as well as some of the poems Edwin had shown him. Jimmy agreed, and they appeared in February 1964, along with Unpacking the Black Trunk, a short play he had written in collaboration with Kenward Elmslie.