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

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

For a boy of fifteen living in suburban upstate New York, Jimmy’s reading was both worldly and idiosyncratic. Wilde, Saki, Maugham, Nicholson, Green, Logan Pearsall Smith—in fact, with the possible exception of Evelyn Waugh, all of the male prose writers he and Oshei mention reading in high school were gay. The queer slant of Jimmy’s early reading did not escape his mother’s sophisticated eyes. When, at an unknown age, Jimmy informed Margaret that he was gay, her response was “Just because you like Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t mean you have to do all those things.” Most of his favorite writers were English and wrote with a careful attention to their prose style, which tended to be clear and elegant, if sometimes mannered. Once Jimmy had decided to be a writer (of prose), he consciously modeled his prose on that of his heroes, and his heroes’ heroes. For example, he said, “I was very affected by reading Somerset Maugham’s Summing Up in my teens. In that book he describes how he really tried to learn by copying out long passages of Dryden’s prose. I did the same thing, only I chose Walter de la Mare and Cardinal Newman.” He also traced his habit of stitching together sentences with colons, often in evidence in his long poems of the 1970s, to his high school reading of Harold Nicholson’s Some People.

One afternoon when he was about fifteen or sixteen years old, while lying in his backyard tent and reading Logan Pearsall Smith’s memoir Unforgotten Years, Jimmy experienced a life-changing epiphany. In the first part of the twentieth century, Smith was a well-known literary figure, famous for a book of rather precious short prose sketches called Trivia. Unforgotten Years, published in 1939, tells how when Smith was a young man growing up outside Philadelphia in the early 1880s, he and his family became friends with the aged Walt Whitman, who used to travel from his home in Camden, New Jersey, to stay with them, and how through his friendship with Whitman, the youthful Smith became aware of his own vocation as a writer. While reading this in his backyard tent, as Jimmy later recalled, “I looked up and the whole landscape shimmered, and I said, ‘Yes, that’s it.’” In that moment, he realized that, “rather than an architect, I wanted to be a writer and would be one.”