Ann Arbor Variations

“Beacon Hill was the dirtiest place in the world and the best,” O’Hara characterized his new neighborhood in the novel he was working on during the summer of 1950.

Certainly the once fashionable residential area running up alongside the Public Gardens and the Common to the gold-domed State House had seen better times, its status as the preferred home of Boston Brahmins having given way since the nineteenth century to its present more colorful and bohemian mood. But much of its past was still intact, including 72 Myrtle Street, O’Hara’s new address, a four-story red brick townhouse with shuttered colonial windows set on a gaslit, cobble-stoned street. Its owners, the parents of his photographer classmate Cervin Robinson, conformed to an older generation of Beacon Hill residents. Judy Rubenstein recalls attending a small dinner at 72 Myrtle Street where Robinson’s mother descended the staircase wearing a hat with veil and carrying a purse. Many of the Robinsons’ peers, however, had permanently abandoned their central city homes, leaving behind them a picturesque jumble of cast-iron fences, stair rails, balconies, waxed windowpanes, footscrapers, rose-red brick Georgian facades, and giant elm trees. The neighborhood’s resulting haunted state was first evoked by O’Hara in a whimsical student poem, “Beacon Hill”:

The houses are ghettoes of ghouls

and out in the stagnant pools

the heads of maidens

deflowered on whim

decompose

and rise to the rim.

O’Hara began his first summer away from Grafton as a stage apprentice at the Brattle Street Theatre. While his gofer’s job consisted almost entirely of hunting down stage props and painting sets, the theatre was imbued with enough residual magic to keep him entranced for a few weeks. The Brattle had been founded after the war by a group of Harvard students. It had evolved into its present incarnation as a professional company housed in a tiny theatre off Harvard Square from its cradle at Sanders Theatre, where a 1947 production of Shaw’s Saint Joan had felicitously transformed the lecture hall’s transept into a vast Reims Cathedral. A showcase for the virtues of mixing more mature veterans with younger student actors versed only in prep school skits, the Brattle’s activities had been front-page news in the Crimson from its inception as the group ambitiously imported name actresses such as Luise Rainer and Hermione Gingold (in her American debut in a musical revue), corresponded with George Bernard Shaw on his suggestions for a male actor for Saint Joan, and earned the enthusiastic championing of F. O. Matthiessen as well as the praise of W. H. Auden (for Jerome Kilty’s Falstaff). Their performances of classics during O’Hara’s four years included Pirandello’s Henry IV, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Sartre’s No Exit, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, Richard II, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and The Tempest with a new score by Lukas Foss. All the excitement and debate stirred up by the Brattle was given a more worldly context by Boston’s function as an out-of-town testing ground for big Broadway shows. Harvard’s students were able to get a jump on New York critics, arguing among themselves later at the Window Shop, a Viennese pastry and coffee shop on Brattle Street, the merits of such new plays as Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. O’Hara’s own tastes in theatre during his college years veered between verse plays and more popular mainstream dramas and musical comedies, and would for the rest of his life.

O’Hara had spent several summers loitering at the stage door of the Red Barn Theatre, since actors and actresses held a great fascination for him. He loved their shuttlings between reality and fantasy, personality and stardom. Sympathy for an actor had led him to write “A Prayer to Prospero,” which he dedicated “to David Hersey who created him for me,” removing some of the sting of the Crimson reviewer who had panned Hersey’s performance in the Brattle production in the spring of 1949 as “disappointing.” (Critics were lifelong enemies of O’Hara who described one as “the assassin / of my orchards” in his poem of the following January, “The Critic,” and whose own later art reviews tended to be appreciations rather than critiques.) O’Hara’s closest brush with acting came during his apprenticeship on the Brattle’s production of Julius Caesar, which opened on July 4 and starred John Carradine. He performed a brief walk-on as a Roman soldier, a record of which remains in a publicity photo that captures O’Hara dressed in a tunic, holding a long pointed spear, looking out with a panicked expression from his shiny helmet. Five years later, O’Hara recalled this experience when he was writing one of his many elegies to James Dean, whose tragic death had set him up as one of the most romantic of the actors O’Hara had so admired on the screens of the Worcester movie theatres as well as at the Red Barn and the Brattle. By a sort of method poetry, O’Hara located himself, in “Thinking of James Dean,” at the same age as Dean when he died, twenty-four, acting on the stage of the Brattle, trying to enter into the screen idol’s death by empathic identification:

had I died at twenty-four as he, but

in Boston, robbed of these suns and knowledges, a corpse more whole,

less deeply torn, less bruised and less alive, perhaps backstage

at the Brattle Theatre amidst the cold cream and the familiar lice

in my red-gold costume for a bit in Julius Caesar, would I be

smaller now in the vastness of light?

While this fragment of O’Hara’s apprenticeship was later incorporated into poetry, he mostly found his job interfering with writing and so decided at the beginning of August to quit. “I am looking for a job for the fall and so do not spend so much time at the Brattle as I did,” he wrote to Osgood on August 2. “It was really very taxing, at least 12 hours a day (through performances) and weekends were much worse. For the first five weeks I had only one evening to myself (I saw The Scarlet Empress and was entranced with Dietrich, von Sternberg’s direction, and the wonderful eclectic decors) and had not written a line, naturally.”

While O’Hara looked fitfully for a job, Ciardi was setting in motion a plan that would determine a different future for him. At a spaghetti dinner at the Ciardis’ one evening attended by O’Hara, Edward Gorey, and Donald Hall, Ciardi suddenly announced to O’Hara, “You go out to Michigan and get a Hopwood!” and then and there wrote a letter to Roy Cowden, the university’s creative writing professor, who had been his own teacher when he had won a Hopwood eleven years earlier. “He is inquiring whether I can get into Michigan U. graduate school but it is so late now that I rather doubt that I will,” O’Hara wrote a bit self-protectingly to Osgood of Ciardi’s campaign, its last-minute timing similar to that of his application to Harvard four years earlier. O’Hara’s backup was simply to share an apartment with John Ashbery in either Boston or New York. When Ashbery heard of the Hopwood plan, though, he found it so “hotsy-totsy” that he too decided to apply to the University of Michigan, which at the time offered one of the few master’s degree programs in creative writing outside of the Iowa Writers Community and Stanford. Ashbery, who had recently earned an M.A. in English Literature at Columbia, writing his thesis on Henry Green, asked O’Hara whether he thought Ciardi might write a recommendation for him too, diffusing the competition he must have felt could have been provoked by such a suggestion by adding, “Of course we both can’t win the Hopwood, but I feel we’ll write so well we’ll be glad we didn’t.”

When Ashbery came up to Cambridge to stay for a week at the Robinsons’, he and O’Hara took in Olivier’s Hamlet and Panic in the Streets, a film about a cholera epidemic in New Orleans starring Richard Widmark. But most of their volleying took place that summer by letter. Ashbery, for instance, sent O’Hara a “mad madrigal” he had written. O’Hara, inspired by its elaborate stanzaic form, quickly dashed off his own “Madrigal for a Dead Cat Named Julia” written on the occasion of George Montgomery’s rushing his typhus-infected cat to the Animal Rescue League. Ashbery informed him in turn that the form “which you used so well” had been borrowed from Hopkins’s “Wreck of the Deutschland” and suggested that O’Hara “would do well to take a half hour out to read this.” Their pedagogy was mutual. Ashbery was reading Melmoth the Wanderer, the Reverend Charles Maturin’s nineteenth-century Gothic novel about a satanic hero, partly because O’Hara had bothered to write his own “Melmoth the Wanderer” the previous December. The novel appealed to O’Hara who was increasingly glamorizing himself as devilish, as it had appealed before him to Scott, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde (who had adopted Melmoth briefly as his own nickname). When O’Hara mailed Ashbery two recent poems (“Quiet Poem” and “Today”), Ashbery replied—enclosing a copy of John Wheelwright’s “Why Must You Know?”—that O’Hara had been reminding him recently of that idiosyncratic 1930s Anglican Socialist Boston poet: “he is somewhat like you, though not too much.” This appraisal was to stick in Ashbery’s mind so that he would write in Book Week in 1966 that O’Hara’s death was “the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed by a car in Boston in 1940.”

O’Hara was spending many of his free afternoons with George Montgomery, as they were both holed up in the empty Beacon Hill house. They had always had a rather private friendship, befitting Montgomery’s quietly elusive personality. “We weren’t lovers ever,” claims Montgomery. “Many people thought we were, but we never were.” A student of medieval philosophy from Berlin, Connecticut, who never finished at Harvard, Montgomery was a bit of an enigma on campus. His cryptic nonverbal manner and mastery of such arcane arts as mobile making and the Zen arrangement of stones and tiny objects allowed him to serve as a still center about whom a group of much more verbal and frenetic people moved. He was also good-looking in a very refined way—as one Radcliffe graduate put it, “George Montgomery was the most beautiful creature then who ever walked the earth.”

Montgomery persuaded O’Hara to pose for photographs in the Robinsons’ garden as all the animals in a medieval bestiary, including a snake crouched up in a tree, a fitting allegory for O’Hara, “the serpent in their midst” from his 1956 poem “In Memory of My Feelings.” O’Hara, reciprocating, captured Montgomery for posterity in his poems, not only indirectly in “Madrigal for a Dead Cat Named Julia,” but also in “A Walk on Sunday Afternoon,” which records a relaxed stroll with Montgomery around Beacon Hill, the Common, and the Navy Yard during which Montgomery remarks tersely and inexplicably, in one of O’Hara’s earliest uses of direct quotation in poetry, “Rio de Janeiro / is just another fishing / village.” Both were entranced with all things avant-garde, though Montgomery’s interest was more stubbornly purist than O’Hara’s. This difference in emphasis created strains on their friendship as late as the 1960s when Montgomery, living in a loft above O’Hara’s on lower Broadway, often criticized him for not spending enough time at his typewriter.

O’Hara passed most of his August evenings drinking and talking with his Cronin’s circle, a more accomplished version of the Bloomsbury Circle of his previous summers in Grafton. “And you think you’ve got patterns!” he wrote to Osgood of his regular beer-drinking sessions. The Circe of that circle, of course, was Bunny Lang whom he described as “my constant companion solace and inspiration this summer.” Ever adamant and opinionated, Bunny Lang was constantly praising or criticizing everyone’s poems. Ashbery became piqued during his July visit when she disliked a poem titled “Mencius on Mill Street” and told him he took his art too seriously. “You and I are much better than Violet whose high-hatted attitude somewhat nettled me,” Ashbery wrote O’Hara voicing an opinion he later retracted. When O’Hara showed her his “Madrigal for a Dead Cat Named Julia” she backhandedly praised its “neatness.” (“The shit,” he wrote to Osgood.) Writing “A Letter to Bunny” in October, O’Hara thought back wistfully on their 1950 Cambridge summer, which had included the Brattle (“All day long at the theatre”); so many controversial first drafts of poems (“I wrote, ‘it’s grey and monstrous’ which / is false”); a compulsive reliance on one another (“When anyone reads this but you it begins / to be lost”); an artistic intimacy bordering on romance (“Be always my heroine and flower. Love, Frank”). Adversarial and sure of himself, O’Hara had found his match in Lang and so allowed himself, as if trumped, to worry insecurely in front of her; “my / nerves thank you for not always laughing,” he wrote.

Missing from Cronin’s was Osgood, a favorite not only of O’Hara’s but also of Bunny Lang’s. Writing to Osgood he voiced an exaggerated jealousy of his relationship with Lang: “She is looking very beautiful and I adore her even though I used to get annoyed when she used to cart you away for whole days at a time. (I didn’t mention it because I was afraid you’d become difficult and skittish).” When he showed one of Osgood’s letters to Ashbery, O’Hara, who liked to flatter his boyfriends by stressing their importance to his other friends, reported to Osgood that Ashbery moaned, “Oh Frank! do you suppose someone will write letters like this to me someday?” O’Hara invited Osgood to travel from San Francisco to meet him in Cambridge, “knowing that you enjoy assuming the masculine role in such matters as transportation and pursuit.” Cast fully adrift by now into the world of homosexuality where roles could not be assumed as the natural consequence of biology or society, O’Hara was quite comfortable with a theatrical attitude toward romance, adopting with Osgood, as with most of his lovers, a complicated pose at once passive and powerful.

By the end of the summer O’Hara had plunged into the ambitious project of writing a novel titled The 4th of July. He spent many hours typing in his Spartanly furnished room at the Robinsons’ where he slept on an Army cot and used a large frying pan as an ashtray, perhaps the frying pan of “Memorial Day 1950”: “How many trees and frying pans / I loved and lost!” On the surface the unpublished novel gives a sense of O’Hara’s daily routine and impressions through Bud, a twenty-four-year-old writer and composer, who lives in his mother’s house on Beacon Hill situated almost precisely on the same spot as the Robinsons’. One chapter follows Bud on the day before the “4th” of the title as he abandons his small room, walks past his favorite Louisburg Square, its statues of Aristides and Columbus “standing with their backs staunchly to each other all through the years,” and down to the seedier Scollay Square, the site of the Old Howard where Bunny Lang would soon be performing her bump-and-grind dances. From there he caught the Orient Avenue express subway to the beach, a favorite destination of O’Hara’s, “ankle deep in the glassy water, feeling it suck away from his feet and then flood back in, watching the patterns appear and change and disappear and change, like abstract and instantaneous photographs.”

The novel offers glimpses, through O’Hara’s eyes, of the Charles River “thick with boats and canoes tied by buoys,” the “huge copper and black trees” of the Public Gardens, the State House’s “flashing gold dome” behind which run “the smooth black ribbons of streets,” and, by night, a sawdust bar called The Gulch, its red-haired torch singer named Lotte helping link the club to the Silver Dollar, a mixed bar with heavy gay overtones in Boston’s Combat Zone. There a woman in a crazy gown played the organ nightly above a din of drunken soldiers and sailors and their girlfriends, sleazy drifters, homosexual hustlers, and Harvard boys. “Everyone looked heroic and beautiful,” O’Hara wrote of the thinly disguised Silver Dollar in an inebriated prose. “Powerful in their evil or cheapness, atypical, stoic in hidden suffering, knowing their own meaning and not denying it, not licked yet.”

The novel also reveals those conflicts with which he was struggling at the time, especially that between his mother and her alcoholism. Thematically the novel is a prose version of “Memorial Day 1950.” These conflicts buzz about the head of Billy, the novel’s twelve-year-old boy hero, whose father, Lewis Amanti, works in a textile mill, while his stepmother, Ethel Amanti, stays home sneaking swigs from a hidden bottle of sherry. Billy is forever running away to the home of Mrs. Helen Jarvis, a piano teacher who lives on Beacon Hill with her son, Bud, and daughter, Sarah. Mrs. Jarvis, described in Joycean terms as an “artificer,” enjoys mostly playing the works of Schoenberg and Scriabin while carrying on an affair with the town’s Mayor Humphrey Ide. Obviously the setup is between O’Hara’s increasingly undesirable Grafton family home and the more scintillating, avant-garde Beacon Hill townhouse filled with the atonal strains of twelve-tone music. O’Hara’s special passion that summer was Schoenberg’s Third Quartet.

The picture drawn of Billy’s stepmother, blatantly based on Katherine O’Hara, is harrowing. “Billy! Come help your mother!” she sobs as he peers in the kitchen window at her “lying on the kitchen floor” having “gotten the bottle from under the sink and . . . pulling the cork out with her teeth.” When Lewis comes home to find his wife’s kitchen a mess and “the ash trays . . . all filled,” he also discovers the telltale “nose of the sherry bottle peering out from under the bed” and gives it “a vicious kick.” After pouring herself a tumbler of cooking sherry one evening, Ethel takes her bull terrier named Boy for a walk to the local bar where she picks up an overweight salesman with a loud tie and goes back to his apartment to make love, his huge body lying “like a hillside in the moonlight.”

If O’Hara’s characterization of his mother in the novel is extreme, so was her life. During the time when O’Hara was writing The 4th of July, and in the upcoming years, his mother was to become more like Ethel, the mirror in which she was reflected so darkly. According to Maureen O’Hara, her mother once ran into the cement traffic light post in Grafton Square in broad daylight while drunk, she often called Maureen on the phone when she was away at high school and threatened that she was “going to walk in front of a bus” if Maureen did not return home; and in the mid-1950s she underwent a brief marriage with a gas meter repairman whom O’Hara never met that quickly disintegrated. Philip poured alcohol out of bottles to prevent his mother from drinking and picked her up from a local bar to force her to return home. “Frank saw his mother fall apart and have a nervous breakdown and become an alcoholic,” says Maureen O’Hara. “She was someone who I’m sure he loved very much. But she became a monstrous person.” O’Hara achieved some distance in the novel by making the mother a stand-in and by idealizing Billy’s real mother, the woman dead in childbirth whom Lewis describes to himself as “Shaking her head like a bright young horse bitted only by my tongue in her grinning way, the boy’s true and only mother.”

Billy’s father was O’Hara’s dream come true, a solution to the problem of Russell O’Hara. He is a blue-collar worker, sometime farmer (“my father works in a stable”), and sometime garment worker. A Navy veteran whose World War II experiences duplicate O’Hara’s, Lewis Amanti is also a fantasy of masculine sexuality. Working off his anger at Ethel by lifting weights in a gym, “His flesh smelled, stank, and the hair on his body was flattened in little rivulets against his skin; his genitals were cool and wet with sweat.” Lewis also exhibits some of Russell’s submerged violence, he directs it toward Ethel whom he hits on one occasion. He also begins to frequent The Gulch where he befriends a young black homosexual named Bucky (although O’Hara in the manuscript keeps indecisively shifting Bucky from “he” to “she”). Lewis is a depository of O’Hara’s warmer feelings toward his father, the incident of the rose bushes and the conflict over homosexuality deleted. These were feelings he expressed at the time in his conversations with Ashbery. “He always seemed passionately fond of his father and disliked his mother,” recalls Ashbery. “He once told me, to give an example of how awful his mother was, that he happened to walk into their bedroom while his parents were making love and his mother was smoking a cigarette. I guess he, like anybody, had problems with both parents, but my feeling was that he was on his father’s side, but not on his mother’s.”

There are no traditionally balanced families in The 4th of July. Instead there is the bizarre and black wit he showed in a “little bagatelle,” which was praised by Gorey a bit archly as his best work: “Dearie dearie me / mother is out to tea / father’s the lover / of mother’s brother / what is there left for me?” The happiest relations in the novel are homosexual, especially that of Bud and Mike, a sailor stationed at the Charleston Navy Yard, whose white uniform, looking “fresh and odd in the light of the streets, the heavy bells slapping against his ankles as he walked,” is always catching the narrator’s eye. Bud explains the joys of his situation to his sister, Sarah, with whom he has a playful friendship similar to O’Hara’s with Bunny Lang, based on dancing fanciful waltzes together while whistling Arensky or discussing the poems of Rimbaud. He exclaims, “Poor dear, you haven’t the faintest concept of the intensity of homosexual love, how it fosters itself amidst the alien corn, triumphant in its own found identity, this magnificent facade thrust in the face of hostile society!” after which he and Sarah collapse in laughter. The permissive blessing on this intense love is of course the bisexual father figure, Lewis, who enjoys hanging out at the beach with the boys, including Bud and Mike.

Unfortunately O’Hara had trouble making his novel work. Although Bud remarks to Sarah when she enters his room, “My god you look like something out of Vainglory,” the novel’s Firbankian nonsense dialogue and lines of pure poetry are always at odds with a more sentimental, even confessional, American domestic tale. Early on, twelve-year-old Billy recites to Mrs. Jarvis a long Surrealist tale supposedly told to him by his loom-operator father, beginning, unconvincingly, “I looked no longer inward toward that grace which transforms existence into life.” O’Hara complicated such jolts by inserting much of his earlier Harvard prose writing, including his 1948–49 journal, a few short stories, and his Navy memoir “Lament and Chastisement.” The shiny objects in this unsifted soil are predictably its bright imagistic descriptions of avenues “hung with pale light tulips, like amber on a wet string,” a policeman whose “bare head looked like an airplane in the rain, lit by his eyes,” or Mayor Ide’s pajamas “sprinkled and looped with arabesques and dots like Persian musical instruments.”

Frustrated, O’Hara continued on the novel until the middle of September, when he was finally notified of his acceptance to the University of Michigan’s graduate program in creative writing. He decided to take the novel along to finish as his submission for the Hopwood contest the following April. Required to arrive at the Ann Arbor campus by September 20, O’Hara was left with only a few days to pack. His Cambridge friends, feeling a bit abandoned, found the move perplexing, inspiring, threatening, and sad. Their mood was summed up by Bunny Lang when she soon wrote to O’Hara, referring to money given by his Aunt Grace to help pay tuition costs, “You are not going to have this invaluable year (which I know it will be) at your Aunt’s expense, you are to have it at ours.” As Ashbery had not been accepted, O’Hara’s prospects seemed solitary. Self-reliant, but afraid of the loneliness ahead, he set off for the Midwest carrying a suitcase full of his favorite books, including Joyce and Rimbaud.

“Surely Ann Arbor is the only place in the western hemisphere where cafeterias frankly put out a neon sign saying simply and clearly: FOOD.”

Such was the tenor of O’Hara’s first reports from the Midwest, a mixture of humor and surprise, but not the solitary pain he had anticipated. “So far this is not at all a bad place,” he wrote to Osgood a few days after his arrival. “I do not mind being alone as much as I thought except for odd moments of really intense lonesomeness for you all and Jim’s and the roto-rooter ads in the MTA.” O’Hara had chosen to rent a small room in an oversized Victorian house at 1513 South University Avenue, one of many old family homes converted into student apartments serving as alternatives to the standard campus dorms and to the formidable row of fraternities and sororities, known as the Greeks, just down the street. Falling back on reserves of independence uncovered in the Navy, O’Hara decided to hunker down in this epitome of a college town to work on his writing, a resolution that was to result in a burst of almost ninety new poems and two new plays over the next ten months. This productive spree was all the more surprising from a poet who supposedly required a crush of close friends for his inspiration.

The University of Michigan was as American as Harvard was European. Its scale alone was a reminder of the campus’s location in the middle of the vast expanse of the American continent, a sensation of coastlessness that made O’Hara a bit nervous, as was evident in his poem of the following July, “Ann Arbor Variations”: “We are sick of living and afraid / that death will not be by water, o sea.” Divided by a long and much-traveled stretch called the Diagonal, the main campus was a collection of stone and brick buildings such as the Union, a men’s drinking and socializing hall that resembled a railroad station, its Taproom tables carved with decades of alumni initials; the League, the women’s counterpart until escorted co-eds were finally allowed to join the men in the Union after December 1950; Angell Hall, its pillars and countless steps leading up to floors of classrooms as well as to the Hopwood Room, an old-fashioned sitting room with round wooden tables covered with poetry magazines and shelves crowded with books, where O’Hara’s writing professor, Roy Cowden, held his weekly conferences with students. Unlike Harvard’s Yard, hemmed in by the traffic and bustle of Massachusetts Avenue and Harvard Square, Ann Arbor’s campus was given over to the relentless strolling of its students. In the winter, this strolling was slowed down by heavy snowdrifts; in spring, when the air was heavy with the fragrant scent of lilacs, its main drag, South State Street, served more in the early 1950s as a boulevard than as a busy thoroughfare.

The so-called police action of the United Nations forces headed by General MacArthur in South Korea dominated the front page of the student paper, The Michigan Daily, during O’Hara’s entire year, and the conflict took the blame for the state university’s decline in enrollment to 21,000. Many of the students felt personally threatened by the draft, but the Ann Arbor campus remained a showplace for a certain buoyant Joe College spirit evident in autumn “football madness,” pep rallies, and enthusiastic fraternity pledging. More casual in its dress code than Harvard, Michigan was a school where male students tended to walk about in sweaters, shirt sleeves, saddle shoes, and argyle socks, while the women wore turtlenecks, pearls, and peasant blouses, with their hair cut short and conservatively brushed back. The social exchanges between these students were quite a bit more low-key and friendly than at Harvard where intense factionalism and sharp repartee were the norm. “At Michigan everybody was kind to each other, or pretended to be,” says Donald Hall who taught at the campus in the late 1950s. “There was a kind of convention where people spoke softly to each other.”

O’Hara, too, modified his manner at Ann Arbor, concealing the sharpened wit from all but a few. “He was very warm and very empathic and you just sort of loved Frank,” says Susan Wexler (then Siris), editor of the campus literary magazine, Generation, which first published “Homage to Rrose Selavy” and “Women” in 1951 as well as a selection of five poems from O’Hara’s Hopwood manuscript in 1952. Jascha Kessler, a poet in the graduate writing program who often watched O’Hara walking alone in denims and sneakers or moccasins with a kind of gliding gait down the corridors of Rackham Hall, the graduate studies building, was aware of his intense private air. “He struck me as faunlike,” recalls Kessler. “He had a hurried walk and a sidelong glance. He didn’t meet one’s eyes. His gaze was half-lidded. ‘Cool’ was the word in those days. Or ‘laid back’ we’d say nowadays. You could see that this was a self-possessed person.” O’Hara’s distance was compounded by his age difference as a veteran from all the undergraduates as well as most of the graduate students.

Roy Cowden, the writing teacher who administered the Hopwood awards and with whom O’Hara had come to Ann Arbor to study, was a grand old man on campus, a sort of urbane Mr. Chips who had graduated from the University of Michigan in 1908. He had received a master’s degree at Harvard in 1909 and then returned to devote his life to the cultivation of young poets, playwrights, and novelists, the Hopwood having already been awarded by the time O’Hara arrived to such future successes as Arthur Miller, John Malcolm Brinnin, and Howard Moss. A large, white-haired man with a benevolent mien, Cowden met weekly with his students in a light pearl gray seminar room where he guided them in the study of the original manuscripts of Keats and Hardy that he had retrieved from the British Museum. He prodded them to discover why these writers had changed a word here or shifted a sentence there, setting up a lofty historical context for their own early efforts. A break in the poring over of mimeographed paragraphs was provided each session by a chosen student reading from a work in progress. Cowden’s method was to gently help his charges find their own way, to nudge them from the nest. “Remember you’re doing this to get answers to questions you may have,” Cowden constantly reminded them. “Not to answer questions that others may have about what you write.” As O’Hara wrote to Osgood of Cowden’s suggestion that he write whatever he wanted at whatever speed, “Professor Cowden is surely the only person in the world who would dare to say to such a class ‘I am interested in quality, not quantity.’” Averse to most critical editing from professors, O’Hara enjoyed Cowden’s laissez-faire approach enough to dedicate to him a sonnet titled “In Gratitude to Masters,” concluding:

he leads us to the light,

there where it so naturally

falls upon the unknown sea.

In addition to a writing seminar, O’Hara was required to take two other courses autumn term, one in the English Department, for which he chose Shakespeare, and another in an outside department, for which he chose Plato. O’Hara subjected these Titans to some witty reevaluations. Uncowed, even provoked, by their reputation and canonization, O’Hara found himself annoyed with the sweep of Shakespeare’s historical dramas, which he compared for sheer tediousness to a play of Dryden’s: “I must say I think that Henry 6—Richard 3 vaudeville ensemble is loathsome in the extreme. I’d rather read The Conquest of Granada over three times than go through it all again.” The course picked up for him, though, with Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, all of which he felt to be “SUPERB.” Paying Shakespeare what for O’Hara was a high compliment he discovered in the plot and dialogue of Cymbeline qualities reminiscent of Gorey’s favorite, Ivy Compton-Burnett. “Do you think Ivy will ever replace the Wall?” he asked in a letter the following spring. In the same play he had uncovered a couplet, “Briefly die their joys / That place them on the truth of girls and boys,” which for him was “just like that other master of the English language, P[aul] Goodman.” O’Hara needed to make Shakespeare part of his own private world of in-group references in order to appreciate him. This was consistent with his intelligence, characterized by Osgood as carrying “some kind of feeling or emotion behind every thought he might express. There was very little detached, analytical thinking in Frank’s character.”

Plato received the same treatment. “I had never read any Plato and really adore him so far, these dialogues are the best thing since Mutt and Jeff!” he campily informed Osgood. “Really that Socrates is such a bitch! I’m sure it’s piles that makes him try to spoil everyone’s game, and nothing more abstract. You can see where Ivy Compton-Burnett got her style of writing conversation.” O’Hara’s strange enjoyment of Plato resulted in his trying to use some of his ideas, or irresponsible versions of them, in The 4th of July. Following along with required reading assignments in Plato’s Republic, O’Hara coyly turned his Mayor Humphrey Ide into a bumptious version of a modern-day philosopher king. The Ann Arbor passages of his novel can be dated by the unlikely appearance of such Platonisms as the mayor’s admission that “I thought about Plato’s city, and I thought about my duties and how best I could execute them,” and his heady exclamation, “I’m the city. You already know me. It’s not that I’m good, it’s that people are good and love me.”

O’Hara was not entirely incognito at Ann Arbor. He made one friend, Kenneth Jay Lane, with whom he allowed himself to carry on in the fashion he had become accustomed to in Cambridge and whom he immersed in Firbankian aesthetics. Lane, who went on to become a well-known jewelry designer, was then a seventeen-year-old freshman from Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. Though younger and less sophisticated, like Osgood before him, Lane was fascinated by O’Hara and entered into a sort of younger brother-older brother relationship with him. “Frank changed all my interests so that I never saw another old friend again,” says Lane. “All of a sudden I had so much to read. Lots of Firbank. The whole thing was very Firbankian. I became so precious. I had left my middle-class environment, my middle-class family, my middle-class values, and I met total nonsense, which I hadn’t really known until then. He gave me the sense of nonsense for the rest of my life.” Lane’s mother was so furious at the Svengalian hold she felt the older poet had over her son that she burned a George Montgomery photograph of him that Lane had brought home from school. “My mother loathed the very idea of Frank O’Hara,” admits Lane.

The two went to dinner together several nights each week at the Old German, which served wonderful hasenpfeffer and spätzle, or to the Pretzel, a jock hangout famous for its green beers on St. Patrick’s Day. Under the influence of O’Hara’s profligacy, Lane began writing his own poems so that they could read each other new lines on the phone every day, a distant re-creation of O’Hara’s working phone friendship with Bunny Lang. Lane even published a few poems under the pseudonym Robert Meadle in Generation. They both owned rose geranium plants and took great pleasure in putting the pungent leaves in their underpants to soak up the body’s perspiration. “To go out without a rose geranium was heresy,” recalls Lane. Taking Lane with him on long winding walks down through the Arboretum, a huge nature preserve in Ann Arbor cut through by the Huron River, O’Hara created for Lane “the closest thing to Brideshead in Ann Arbor.” One of the park’s many trees was captured by O’Hara in “The Arboretum”:

This tree is black with dry feathers

sprawled as if the sun had smashed it

cluttered with broken bicycles

the river flops on the grassy roots.

(Bicycles were a ubiquitous form of transportation around Ann Arbor.) Lane, in turn, earned points with O’Hara by possessing the first Mabel Mercer LP. There was much mouthing of “Remind me not to find you too attractive” between them in the style of O’Hara’s earlier Eliot House sing-alongs to Beatrice Lillie with Hal Fondren.

Lane sustained O’Hara by his freshness and availability. “Part of the reason Frank liked me was that I was so much younger than he was,” Lane assumes. “I made him feel younger.” However, the youthfulness that attracted O’Hara was primarily mental and psychological rather than physical. Their one attempt to go to bed together collapsed in comedy. “Frank and I were never lovers,” says Lane. “We got very drunk on his last night and very giggly and Frank told me he was madly in love with me, and he put on more Marlene Dietrich, and we had to consummate it. So we started to, but we giggled so there was no way. I don’t think we could even kiss because you can’t kiss and laugh at the same time, and it was more fun laughing.”

When O’Hara was alone in his simple room on South University Avenue, minimally outfitted with a bed, a typewriter, a few plants and books, he was writing poems that went well beyond his Firbankian nonsense mode. It seemed almost as if the openness and cleanness of the tree-lined streets and regular lawns of Ann Arbor, its fresh air and wide open spaces, were giving his poems a new clarity of language and concreteness of detail, their self-conscious preciosity being tempered by American pragmatism and imagism. The first poem O’Hara wrote on arriving in Ann Arbor, “Les Etiquettes Jaunes,” is the account of picking up a fallen yellow leaf from the sidewalk:

Leaf! you are so big!

How can you change your

color, then just fall!

The poem is clear, colloquial and brief. The quietly haunting images in “Morning” in which “the buses glow like / clouds,” “I stand / rattling my keys the car / is empty as a bicycle,” “Last night the stars / were numerous and today / snow is their calling / card” moved Ashbery, to whom O’Hara had enclosed the poem in a letter, to write back that “it makes me think how wonderful the midwest must be and want to come there.” In “Ann Arbor Variations,” written the following summer, he draws his most sustained picture of the town and campus:

Wet heat drifts through the afternoon

like a campus dog, a fraternity ghost

waiting to stay home from football games.

The arches are empty clear to the sky.

The poem is filled with images of ordinary people done in very accessible language: “Along the walks and shaded ways / pregnant women look snidely at children.”

Of course O’Hara’s more direct new poems were not just the result of his moving to Ann Arbor. Equally important, though quite appropriate to his stay in Middle America, was the growing influence of the poems of William Carlos Williams. O’Hara had been reading Williams for a few years, attracted to the New Jersey poet’s resolve to shake off what he felt to be the overly cosmopolitan and intellectualized poetry of the expatriate T. S. Eliot in favor of an indigenous American poetry grounded in colloquial speech rhythms and filled with such locally observed objects as wheelbarrows, ambulances, locomotives, and locust trees. Freshman year O’Hara had purchased The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (first published in 1938 by New Directions) and in 1950 he had bought Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), an early work with which he connected strongly because of Williams’s attempt to write prose poems in the manner of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, as O’Hara had tried to do in his own Grafton pastorals. But it was Paterson, Williams’s epic poem about a city, the first four books of which appeared between 1946 and 1951, that he found most energizing. After reading Paterson 4, he wrote to a friend that he found the work “so incomparably lucid and beautiful, my frontal lobes are awhirl.” According to editor Donald Allen, “In conversations with me in 1958 and 1959 Frank spoke several times of WCW as being the only poet around that he could read in the late forties (when Paterson was appearing).” By 1951 O’Hara was well on his way to ranking Williams, along with Whitman and Crane, as the only American poets better than the movies—the claim he would make for them in “Personism” eight years later.

As early as August 1950, O’Hara had been writing to Ashbery of his enthusiasm for Williams, to which Ashbery replied, “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. . . . Please open Parts of a World this instant and read a poem called ‘Yellow Afternoon.’ That poem has completely floored me with its greatness—every time I read it I am ready to turn in my chips and become an osteopath.” Ashbery’s poems were to increasingly become a record of whatever thoughts, memories, or words were in his mind at a given moment, while O’Hara’s poems, especially his “I do this, I do that” works of the later fifties, were more often kaleidoscopic pictures of events in time. In early December 1950, Ashbery mailed O’Hara a new poem titled “Illustration,” filled with melancholy statements such as “Much that is beautiful must be discarded / So that we may resemble a taller / Impression of ourselves.” It sounded in its musings on life as art similar to his favorite “Yellow Afternoon,” in which Stevens writes, “This is the mute, the final sculpture / Around which silence lies on silence,” but using the couplet form of other poems in Parts of a World. Intimately informed of Ashbery’s fine-tuning of his craft, O’Hara was able to write in a review in Poetry magazine in 1957, using the hyperbolic style with which he was most comfortable as a critic, that Ashbery’s Some Trees, just published by Wesleyan University Press, was “the most beautiful first book to appear in America since Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium.”

O’Hara always liked to keep some irritating distinction operating in his friendships with his aesthetic soul mates, as in his squabbles with Bunny Lang over Auden and Rimbaud. With Ashbery the need to define his own voice and stance was even more crucial as the poets’ voices actually sounded alike. As Ashbery wrote in “A Reminiscence,” “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.” Early in December 1950, Ashbery rebuked O’Hara for his constant contrariness. “You always disagree with everything I say,” he wrote accusingly. “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 Shostakovitch, while I preferred Keats and Prokofiev, etcetera.” The prose was a bit of a ruse, though, for Ashbery’s confidence was ticking strongly enough for him to continue writing poems that were picking up on, and furthering, Wallace Stevens’s lofty experiments in imagination and poetry. As Ashbery had written in “Some Trees,” a Harvard poem that is still perhaps his most popular, “Our days put on such reticence / Those accents seem their own defense.”

In December O’Hara and Ashbery were briefly able to resume their subtle games of art and friendship in person. The occasion was O’Hara’s Christmas recess, which began on December 22. “You can stay in the repulsion of my room as long as you wish,” invited Ashbery. “I do hope the Soutine won’t close before you arrive. I can’t decide which kind of party to give.” The reference was to an exhibition of the Expressionist painter Soutine at the Museum of Modern Art, a shrine at the time to all the young painters whom Ashbery had recently befriended. O’Hara’s excitement at the prospect was more than conveyed in “Song,” written that season: “I’m going to New York! / (quel voyage! jamais plus!) / far from Ypsilanti and Flint!” While his visit required spending the holidays in Grafton, an increasingly thankless obligation, O’Hara’s true destination was the promised welcoming party in a furnished room Ashbery had moved into on West Twelfth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It would prove to be a crucial party in a life soon to be filled with parties.

Ashbery had decided to throw a literary party, with many members of the Partisan Review crowd present, including Delmore Schwartz, and lots of other Uptown types in suits and black cocktail dresses all crowded, drinking like crazy, into one large, high-ceilinged room. O’Hara, the guest of honor, arrived dressed down in Army pants and sneakers, smoking cigarettes heavily in his soigné manner, and producing the fast comments and instantly intimate responses for which he had already earned a reputation among many of those present. O’Hara’s energies, pent up for months in Ann Arbor, were rapidly disseminated. The guest he was most anxious to meet, though, was the painter Larry Rivers, whom he had missed on his last trip down from Harvard when Rivers had been away in Europe. Rivers, to whom Ashbery had already shown “Morning,” was primed to meet O’Hara, too, assured by friends that the young poet would certainly be attracted to him.

At twenty-seven, Rivers was easily O’Hara’s equal in sheer charisma, a charmed, romantic, and unpredictably volatile figure, described later by O’Hara as a “demented telephone,” whose presence invited almost involuntary speculation and interest. Yizroch Loiza Grossberg, who had been born in the Bronx to Ukrainian immigrants, changed his name to Rivers in 1942 after the jazz band in which he played saxophone was introduced one night at a nightclub as Larry Rivers and His Mudcats. He had been discharged from the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1943 for a disease diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, which never progressed, and returned to studying music at Juilliard in 1944, as well as taking up painting; he took drawing classes with his neighbor Nell Blaine, studied abstract painting techniques with Hans Hofmann for two years in Provincetown and New York, and with William Baziotes at New York University. By the time of Ashbery’s party Rivers had the aura about him of someone certain to be a famous artist someday. His one-man exhibition in 1949 at the cooperative Jane Street Gallery had already earned him the praise of Clement Greenberg in The Nation as “a better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himself in many instances.” (Rivers had been inspired in his paintings filled with golden nudes and sunny studios by the impact of the Bonnard retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948.) Rivers’s messy life further embellished the bohemian myth. He had married Augusta Berger in 1946, divorced her a year later, and continued to live with his easygoing mother-in-law Berdie Berger; Steven, his baby by the marriage; and Augusta’s first child, Joseph, all crowded into Rivers’s lively and noisy studio, the mood of which he would later document in “The Studio,” his 1956 version of Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio of 1855. Rivers had recently returned from a long trip to Paris and Italy where he had written poetry by day and walked the streets by night. “I probably was acting out some nineteenth-century idea of the artist searching for experience,” he said later. The restlessness and romance of the trip were still driving him upon his return to New York.

Both Rivers and O’Hara were big talkers so that their eventual conversation that night was as voluble as it was inevitable. The two even resembled each other a bit—wiry, trim, electric. Rivers’s prominent forehead matched O’Hara’s widow’s peak. His hawkish nose was as noticeable a vanishing point as O’Hara’s broken one. But the accents in which they carried on—art and gossip being the favorite topics—were quite different, as different in sound and effect as their two instruments of choice, concert piano and jazz sax. O’Hara’s nuanced voice insinuated itself tirelessly and ironically, while Rivers’s exploded in more disorderly loud blarings, just as the excitement O’Hara generated was largely mental and disguised by a body seemingly languid and in repose, while Rivers acted out his passions more physically, often seeming to be larger than any room he happened to inhabit. This was the difference in tone conveyed in Kenneth Koch’s poem “Fate,” a memory of an evening a year later in which “Frank said Uh hun. . . . and Larry if he / Was there said Boobledyboop so always / Said Larry or almost.”

O’Hara was unreservedly impressed with his new acquaintance. “I thought he was crazy and he thought I was even crazier,” wrote O’Hara in a 1965 memoir of their first meeting. “I was very shy, which he thought was intelligence; he was garrulous, which I assumed was brilliance—and on such misinterpretations, thank heavens, many a friendship is based. On the other hand, perhaps it was not a misinterpretation: certain of my literary ‘heroes’ of the Partisan Review variety present at that party paled in significance when I met Larry, and through these years have remained pale while Larry has been something of a hero to me, which would seem to make me intelligent and Larry brilliant. Who knows?”

There was a sexual teasing and testing going on between the two as well. It was the case of a charmer being charmed by a charmer. Rivers in those days was toying with at least the notion of homosexuality, feeling drawn by the spirit of fun that seemed to characterize what he called “queerdom,” as well as being narcissistically flattered by the attention paid him by certain homosexual men. “I as usual was on the make for anything,” Rivers later said of the evening at Ashbery’s. “I liked—you know, boys, girls, animals, dogs, houses—anything.” Rivers’s heterosexual credentials endowed him for O’Hara with the sort of ambiguous masculine sexuality of Lewis Amanti in his novel, while his avid passion for matters artistic and literary made him romantically Left Bank. So O’Hara felt compelled to exercise his considerable powers of seduction and camouflaged pursuit. “As the party was going on I sort of glanced at one of the windows of my furnished room and I saw two pairs of shoes protruding from the drape,” says Ashbery, “one of them being Frank’s usual white sneakers and the other being Larry Rivers’ shoes.” Hidden behind those drapes, O’Hara whispered to Rivers, “Let’s see what a kiss feels like.” As the two kissed, Rivers claims to have felt as if they were experiencing a kiss for the first time, as if they were reinventing the kiss. For O’Hara this first surreptitious kiss would eventually seem like the insight granted by the poet’s muse in his 1957 poem “A Young Poet,” which “comes as a kiss / and follows as a curse.” O’Hara’s future love and friendship with Rivers were to prove as complex as they were tempestuous.

The painter Jane Freilicher was also present at this pivotal party. O’Hara had been introduced to Freilicher by Ashbery during his previous trip to the city when the three had gone out to supper at the Five Oaks, a restaurant in the Village. This was the trip that had included a jaunt up to Times Square to view a King Kong spinoff called Mighty Joe Young after which, while they were strolling beneath the Bond’s sign with its waterfall seemingly dropping eighteen stories, Freilicher had successfully captured the attention of both poets by wittily remarking, “I’m going to go to the Bond’s sign on my honeymoon.” But it was during O’Hara’s 1950 Christmas visit that his friendship with Freilicher was sealed.

A pretty twenty-six-year-old painter, with dark hair and a misleadingly serious and preoccupied demeanor, Freilicher had a campy wit and a brainy zest for literature in the vein of Ivy Compton-Burnett that made her a natural focus of O’Hara’s enthusiasm. She had been born Jane Niederhoffer in Brooklyn, New York, and eloped after high school with Jack Freilicher, a jazz pianist, though their marriage was later annulled. It was through her first husband, who was then playing with Larry Rivers’s band, that Freilicher had met Rivers in 1945. The meeting had led to his interest in painting, and to an on-again off-again romance between the two that continued rockily into the early fifties. Freilicher and Rivers together had absorbed many of the stronger and often contradictory artistic influences of the late forties—including the Bonnard show and Hans Hofmann’s classes—as she painted slightly Expressionist landscapes with figures in which certain patches were left filled with arbitrary geometrical patterns. “It seems against her will because she professes to admire the Apollonian calm of Matisse,” Ashbery had written to O’Hara of some of her more wildly Expressionist recent canvases. Living in a little apartment on West Tenth Street, Freilicher made money by teaching art history in a grammar school, a task for which she was eligible because of her B.A. in art from Brooklyn College and M.A. in art education from Columbia Teachers College where she had taken a course with the art historian Meyer Shapiro. (Shapiro, one of the few academics with a connection to Downtown artists, had chosen that year to mount, along with Clement Greenberg, a show of rising painters, called “Talent 50,” which included such artists as Larry Rivers, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Alfred Leslie.)

“He became your friend in about six seconds,” recalls Freilicher of her friendship with O’Hara. “It was a bond such as I never had with anyone else. It was instant intimacy.” They quickly developed a rapid banter, feeding each other’s penchant for references to Hollywood films and ability to deliver bons mots. O’Hara flattered Freilicher with the sort of theatrical love and admiration he displayed in his intense infatuations with certain key women throughout his life. “It was very flattering to have somebody who would sit and look at you in wonderment,” says Freilicher. “Every word that you said he would think was sort of a profound utterance. And he meant it.” O’Hara, for example, endlessly praised the line of Freilicher’s shoulder to her and others, danced the Lindy with her at parties, and, beginning with “Interior (With Jane),” written in Ann Arbor in February, turned out a number of poems dedicated to her. She was to become the muse of his poetry in 1951 and for some time after, as Bunny Lang had been the chief muse of his poems of 1950.

O’Hara’s Christmas visit to New York had permanently changed his sense of his life. He now had little doubt where he would head after completing his M.A. He had also significantly altered the lives of those he had so quickly befriended and was now leaving behind, especially Rivers and Freilicher, with whom, because of their ambivalent feelings for one another and his confusing passion for both of them at once, he had entered into a complicated three-way affair. O’Hara, in a very brief time, had managed to reshuffle the cards in the social life of this still small circle.

“All my friends, so it seemed to me, liked him better than they did me,” recalls Ashbery wistfully of the effect of O’Hara’s whirlwind visit. “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.”

For the duration of O’Hara’s stay at the University of Michigan he attempted with some success to be in three places at once: Ann Arbor, Cambridge, and New York. Consequently his poems over the following nine months are filled with different means of public conveyance. In “Boston” he describes flying in March into the airport, “the blinding grin / of clouds, the altitude’s deafening sigh,” to meet friends he imagines running “fast on fences / towards me!” In “Lines Across the United States,” written sitting on a night train from New York to Ann Arbor while the “wheels slice quickly,” he registers some of the side effects of his frenetic pace: “I’ve done too much / I’ve loved too little / And I’m tired of running.” In “Ann Arbor Variations” he records as well a foray on “the express train to / Detroit’s damp bars,” bars that he had described in “February” as suffused with “blue light.” Such restless documentary images are filled out in the poems of the period with more fantastic voyages, such as the one he takes in “A Terrestrial Cuckoo” with Jane Freilicher down the Essequibo “in our canoe of war-surplus gondola parts.” O’Hara was obviously less content now to sit in Ann Arbor than he had been the previous September.

Classes resumed on January 8, and in his second semester O’Hara continued his writing seminar and Shakespeare course, and took Aristotle, a course in which he had even less success than Plato, for which he had received a B-minus. (O’Hara received an A for all three semesters of writing and an A-minus for both semesters of Shakespeare.) For a boy educated by Xaverian Brothers, O’Hara showed remarkably little aptitude for interpreting the Church’s favorite philosopher. The failing grade he received almost prevented him from graduating until he managed to persuade a professor to upgrade him to C-minus. “Today I was perusing Aristotle after finding out how far behind I am in a class this morning,” he wrote to Freilicher in March. “I found the following Ronaldish sentence, sho, lil lambbbb o’ mime: ‘For obviously they do not think these to be open questions; no one, at least, if when he is in Libya he has fancied one night that he is in Athens, starts for the concert hall.—’ To this my heart could only murmur, that’s what you think. . . .”

The brightest event in O’Hara’s life that winter—a severe Midwestern winter that caused him to feel “the going into winter and the never coming out” of “An Audenesque Poem”—took place not in Ann Arbor but in Cambridge. This was the production at the newly formed Poets Theatre of his just-completed Try! Try!, a parody of a Noh play in verse for three players. Interest in the Japanese form among American poets had been fanned by Ezra Pound’s extensive 1916 translations of Noh plays with commentary by Ernest Fenellosa. O’Hara’s version was a rhythmic mix of triplets, couplets, quatrains, blank verse stanzas, and poetic prose stage directions, all used to tell an arch tale of a love affair between Violet and John interrupted by the annoying reappearance of Violet’s husband, Jack, home from World War II after encountering “a sniper in a tree / on the edge of the Pacific’s / exciting waters.” A send-up of such popular Hollywood postwar melodramas as The Best Years of Our Lives, Try! Try! shifts from the high Surrealist poetry of speeches such as Violet’s “Since you left I’ve had / to sell the flute and the / bathtub” to the flat deflations of John’s “For god’s sake, Jack! this / is no way to talk.” In Try! Try! O’Hara replaced his usual off-kilter family triangle, the primal scene of The 4th of July, with a French movie complication in which three adults are romantically entangled, a harbinger of future complications in O’Hara’s own life.

Confined to Ann Arbor by a demanding curriculum, O’Hara was unable to attend this first production of the Poets Theatre—a Yeatsian project he had often dreamed about at his table at Cronin’s but which was not turned into a rolling enterprise until the exhaustive work of fund-raising and managing was undertaken in the fall of 1950 by Lyon Phelps. Phelps, a manic and driven acquaintance of O’Hara’s, was an eager poet for whom the actual writing of a poem was a mythological event. Describing the group’s aspirations to stage contemporary verse plays rather than more popular naturalistic prose dramas, Phelps had zealously suggested in a recent interview with the Crimson that “this Poets Theatre could be the nucleus of a permanent adjunct to the American stage.” On the evening of February 26 Try! Try! shared the tiny stage in the basement of Christ Church Parish House with three other productions: Everyman, a masque by John Ashbery with incidental piano and flute music composed by O’Hara; The Apparition by Richard Eberhart starring Donald Hall; and Three Words in No Time by Lyon Phelps performed by Brattle actors Thayer David and Jerome Kilty. O’Hara’s play, directed by Bunny Lang, self-reflexively featured the director as Violet, John Ashbery as John, and Jack Rogers, a friend of Lang’s, as Jack. In his absence, O’Hara mailed his actors a supportive poem titled “An Epilogue: to the Players of Try! Try!” in which he clarified to Lang that “you are my Bunny and other / people’s Violet.”

The basement theatre, seating over two hundred, was packed that first night with a charged and sympathetic audience standing four deep in the rear, including Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, Renato Poggioli, Robert Bly, John Malcolm Brinnin, Richard Wilbur, and much of the rest of Harvard’s literary community. In the first row were the most excited of O’Hara’s friends, including George Montgomery, his Rolleiflex ready for snapping pictures. The whole production was crackling with animation as the curtain rose—after two measures of an Offenbach waltz—on Edward Gorey’s stage set, which was starkly confined to an ironing board illuminated by a circle of light, a window painted on a shade hanging at the back with a February calendar and a spider sketched on its panes, and a wind-up Victrola. Dressed in her rattiest white sneakers and a faded red and white apron, Violet delivered her opening speech—altered by her a bit from the script—which she phonetically reproduced for O’Hara in a letter as “My name is Vi-o-let. / It’s not a name I ever WANTED / It’s not a name that any beauty / ever / HAD.” Ashbery, as he delivered his lines, tossed the used pages of his script onto the stage one by one. His job included placing, at a critical moment, the Victrola’s needle down on a record of John Cage’s “Amores I–II.” When Jack took off his olive drab jacket and cap he hung them on Violet’s hands stretched over the ironing board where she had frozen at his entrance like a wooden marionette with her arms out in odd positions. At the play’s conclusion, the audience, which had been erupting in shrieks throughout, responded enthusiastically, calling for an extra curtain call. “The play earned the most appreciative reception of the evening,” reported Daniel Ellsberg in his positive review in the Crimson. The only blot on the event was Thornton Wilder who, having been requested by Phelps to pass the hat after Try! Try! to help defray $39 in production costs, used the opportunity to berate the audience—especially those gigglers in the front row seated beneath his raised fist—for a “bad performance” in not recognizing the seriousness of the work they had just witnessed. “Thornton Wilder went off his head that night,” recalls Molly Howe, the director of Eberhart’s Apparition. “He started talking as if it were a sacred occasion, a holy night. While the play was actually very funny.” As Richard Wilbur recalls, “Archie MacLeish, who was seated next to me and had given a number of guffaws, muttered to me, ‘I think Thornton’s gone a little off his trolley.’” More in keeping with the general spirit of the audience were comments passed among them as they shuffled out for intermission, only slightly put off by Wilder’s anger. “Frank’s play has the makings of Epic Theatre!” gushed one audience member. “But it’s The Cocktail Party as a Noh!” another replied. Anxious for a repeat performance, Lang wrote to him immediately, “Please write more plays. MUST you write a novel? I don’t think you should.”

O’Hara lacked such exhilarating events in Ann Arbor. He had discussed Try! Try! the day of the performance in his writing seminar but the reaction wasn’t satisfying. He did, however, attend a screening of Cocteau’s Orphée at the Hill Auditorium on March 9 and made the most of the event, starved as he was for some sense of the avant-garde. Cocteau’s 1950 art film, which recast Orpheus (Jean Marais) as a French café poet and the classical Fates as a motorcycle gang, had just completed a long run in New York. “Cocteau was the artistic experience of that time,” says Freilicher. After viewing the film, O’Hara stood on a table in a rowdy college hangout as Kenny Lane was about to depart. Hands on hips, legs spread wide apart, he shouted the last line of the film as it had been vampishly delivered by Death (Maria Casares) to Orpheus’s poetic rival, Jacques Cégeste (François Perier): “Adieu, Cégeste!” Friends at Ann Arbor were so well informed of O’Hara’s passion for the film’s rare combination of poetry and cinema that they filled his room afterward with leftover posters so that it looked, according to O’Hara, “like a forest.” He mailed one to Freilicher, writing on its drawing of Jean Marais and Maria Casares, “you and I à la recherche du temps perdu.”

The month of March was taken up for O’Hara with preparing his manuscript for the Hopwood award. The 4th of July, unfortunately, did not seem to be shaping up well. “In addition to woes of a general physical blahness I am almost flat broke temporarily, and also pushing headlong towards the finish of that god damned novel,” he wrote in a depressed letter to Freilicher. “I want it done by April 1 and how can I get all my willful creatures to agree on this deadline without pushing their ill-temper too severely is beyond me. You notice how long it took Dostoevsky to arrange this—and I’m just little weak-writer me, without a muscle in my head! I have taken to treating them all with abandon, and hope they will like whatever happens to them the way I would if Ronald Firbank had treated me this way.” O’Hara soon abandoned the novel, a form he would never again attempt, and any idea of applying for a Hopwood in prose.

The manuscript he eventually submitted in April was called “A Byzantine Place” and consisted of fifty poems in addition to Try! Try! As the entries were to be judged anonymously, he chose as his pseudonym Pablo Pasternak, a strong hybrid of a Spanish painter and a Russian poet. He dispensed with his original plan to divide the manuscript into serious poems, light poems, and plays, finding, as he wrote to Freilicher, that “The serious poems are all irrelevant to any concern but my own for myself, and the light poems are the most truthful, so there you are.” The poetry judges invited in 1951 by Cowden were Peter Viereck, whose Strike Through the Mask was to be published by Scribner’s in the spring; Louis Untermeyer, poet, critic, and anthologist; and Karl Shapiro, the editor of Poetry magazine. Their job was to rank and comment on the seven manuscripts submitted. Viereck tied O’Hara for first place, praising his “lyrical talent” and “fantastic metaphor” but warning of his “risk of ruining it through showy cleverness and preciosity.” Untermeyer ranked O’Hara third, praising his poems as “intensely interesting” technically although he was bothered by their “disintegrating” quality: “There are pieces, splinters and memories of Cummings, Auden, W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, and others, but only occasional glimpses of the ‘onlie true begetter.’” O’Hara’s strongest supporter was Shapiro who ranked him first and wrote, “The collection of this poet is far and away the best. This man is unquestionably a poet, even in his failures. . . . In spite of his parodistic leanings, he seems to be on his own; his affectations and frequently youthful lapses into games are perhaps too dangerous for him, but he seems to have courage and a full awareness of what he is doing. And he is prolific and versatile.” When the rankings were completed, O’Hara won the Avery Hopwood Major Award in Poetry and was awarded its honorarium that year of eight hundred dollars.

By the time O’Hara had gathered together the poems for “A Byzantine Place” his poetic direction was set. He was no longer trying on different voices and styles merely to learn the craft of poetry, a process described by Ashbery in his introduction to O’Hara’s Collected Poems as “trying on various pairs of brass knuckles until he finds the one which fits comfortably.” His personal puzzle was somehow to combine the dissociations of language practiced by his favorite post-Symbolist French poets with the free verse and local voice of the American poets descended from Walt Whitman, the poet whom William Carlos Williams claimed had “broken the dominance of the iambic pentameter in English prosody.” O’Hara was trying to bring the live wires of these two traditions together. While Untermeyer, as an academic poet of the 1940s, would naturally have noticed the borrowings in O’Hara’s manuscript from the English and American poets, there were at least as many echoes and parodies of the French—Rimbaud in “A Prose Poem,” Mallarmé in “Yet Another Fan,” Apollinaire in “A Calligram.” His models were definitely not the elegantly crafted and intellectually supple poems currently being written to much acclaim on American campuses by such sons of T. S. Eliot as Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, and Richard Wilbur—the sorts of poems Kenneth Koch would dismiss as those “of the baleful influence” in his 1955 manifesto of a poem, “Fresh Air.” By exhibiting a taste for French poetry, and for such nonliterary models as Schoenberg’s “Serenade” or the early paintings of Mondrian—with a natural temperamental inclination toward openness and spontaneity and away from serious meaning—O’Hara was largely ignoring the Berryman-Lowell-Shapiro generation. What remained for him was to infuse his poems during the fifties even more fully with the voice that seemed most personally and colloquially his own. This was the intimate voice already audible in his Hopwood manuscript in “Poem” (Although I am a half hour):

I put on my black shirt

and my sneakers, whistle

Glazunoff and try to

pick up the dirty room.

The awarding of the 1951 Hopwoods was marked by a few special events. Mark Van Doren arrived on campus at the end of May to deliver the Hopwood Lecture on “The Possible Importance of Poetry.” That same week Herbert Weinstock of Alfred A. Knopf visited Ann Arbor looking for fiction manuscripts. “Weinstock is looking over both Hopwood and non-Hopwood manuscripts and is particularly interested in novels,” the Michigan Daily reported. “Although he personally likes poetry and short stories, he explained that they just do not sell.” This assessment was not lost on a disgruntled, though not unamused, O’Hara, who relayed the news to Freilicher: “No publication goes with the Hopwood award, alas, and both Alfred Knopf and Herbert Weinstock of the same ‘firm’ told me it was next to impossible to publish poetry in our time. I think of this with absolute delight when I think how embarrassing my letters will be for my relatives when I have to dig my poems out of them if I ever do get published. Anyway you could fit the people I write for into your john, all at the same time without raising an eyebrow.”

To complete the requirements for his degree, O’Hara needed to spend the summer term in Ann Arbor taking Writing for Grads, Modern English Grammar, and Chaucer, a fragment of which was embedded in “Ann Arbor Variations”:

The spherical radiance,

the Old English

look, the sum of our being, “hath perced

to the roote.”

“I am writing a paper on Chaucer whom I now love with a burning devotion,” he wrote to Freilicher. For those sweltering few months—the high temperatures causing cases of heat exhaustion and sunstroke on campus—he moved to a small apartment in Alpine House at 1022 Forest Street. It was the summer of “Ann Arbor Variations,” of “The fainting into skies / from a diving board.” His room was outfitted with a compact kitchen, closet, commode, chair, and a single Hollywood bed, which inspired him to ask his shocked landlady, “What’s so Hollywood about a single bed?” It was to this apartment that O’Hara invited Freilicher. He assured her, given his landlady’s prudery about men and women being alone unchaperoned in her rooms, that “she doesn’t live in this apt house but in another several blocks away so you could sit on the grass outside until she was out of the way if you didn’t want to be brazen.” O’Hara continued to press Freilicher to visit him for a summer of painting, with a hint of a plea in his voice, “It would be out of NY and although it is not very attractive here in any way there are lots of trees, flowers and squirrels, an arboretum with a river running through, and some incredibly ugly midwestern gothic which you might be able to make into a bouquet.”

To his delight Freilicher finally accepted his invitation. She arrived at the beginning of July in Ann Arbor, a town she recalls as having looked, with its lawned houses and lots of trees, “a little like South Hampton.” Freilicher painted various “Rubens-like landscapes,” as O’Hara described them in a postcard to Rivers, including an expressionistic blur of two figures embracing in front of a television set, which he insisted on buying with sixty dollars of his Hopwood money, and a charcoal sketch he extravagantly retitled Portrait of Frank O’Hara Thinking about the Genius of Arnold Schoenberg. (The death of the twelve-tone composer on July 13, 1951, inspired O’Hara to write “The Tomb of Arnold Schoenberg” later in the year.) He and Freilicher drank beers at the Union, where O’Hara was surrounded by a few of the university’s more precious and literary students and hangers-on. “He was the beloved romantic figure for all of these people,” recalls Freilicher.

The highlight of that summer was a trip to Chicago where they stayed overnight on separate floors of the YMCA. Freilicher, who stayed up late reading The Naked and the Dead, had the extremely unpleasant experience of hearing a man make a suicide jump from his window. O’Hara recalled the trip in July 1956, in “In Memory of my Feelings”:

Five years ago, enamored of fire-escapes, I went to Chicago,

an eventful trip: the fountains! the Art Institute, the Y

for both sexes, absent Christianity.

At 7, before Jane

was up, the copper lake stirred against the sides

of a Norwegian freighter

During the day they visited the Art Institute where they were particularly struck by Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, the inspiration for O’Hara’s “On Looking at La Grande Jatte, the Czar Wept Anew,” written that July and accepted for publication by Delmore Schwartz in Partisan Review the following March. This painting was to reenter O’Hara’s life in 1958 when he was working at the Museum of Modern Art. He claimed to have personally helped rescue the canvas, on loan for an exhibition of “Seurat Drawings and Paintings,” from the museum fire.

O’Hara had been very happy during Freilicher’s visit, only to feel an enormous loss after her departure (“I have been so lonely since you left that I haven’t even made any oatmeal,” he wrote her). This served to confirm her ascendance to the pedestal as O’Hara’s current muse. He already had poetic designs on her, evident from the letter in June in which he had enclosed “A Sonnet for Jane Freilicher.” “Here ’tis;” he announced, “my very first that bears the name and escapes the wastebasket.” Soon afterward a series of poems appeared, written during and upon the heels of her visit, bearing her name either in the title (“Jane Awake”) or in scattered references (“The Arboretum,” “A Terrestrial Cuckoo,” and “A Mexican Guitar”). In “Cuckoo,” O’Hara confronts the tricky issue of the decrease in poems to Bunny Lang and the increase of those to Freilicher. His betrayal would be quite blatant over the next two years as he wrote about fifteen “Jane” poems, including “Jane at Twelve,” “Jane Bathing,” and “Chez Jane.” The shift made Freilicher feel a bit queasy, especially as Bunny Lang had begun to come down to New York after O’Hara’s arrival, and the two women had grown friendly enough to exchange winter overcoats for one season. While discretion precluded their ever discussing the matter, Bunny Lang’s constant assertion during the early fifties back in Cambridge that “New York has brutalized Frank!” might well have been a reaction to her feeling spurned in print by the poet she had called her “Object Attachment” and “Dethroned Sibling” while he was in Ann Arbor. But Freilicher need not have worried, as she would soon discover that she was hardly at the end of the line of O’Hara’s poetic infatuations.

One of the stronger influences on O’Hara’s thinking at the end of the summer was the writing of Paul Goodman, three of whose books he had purchased in New York: The Dead of Spring, The Facts of Life, and Stop Light. Goodman, a therapist who favored Gestalt psychology, became well known in the sixties as the author of Growing Up Absurd. Goodman’s poetry was often overlooked, but O’Hara was drawn to his plain speech, his tendency to write occasional poems, and his love of New York City. The city’s taxis, El trains, hustlers, and Hudson River often appear in his poems, as do the proper names of friends—“Mrs. Kraus,” “Troy,” “Dr. Davidson”—as well as his own name, Paul, in such self-dating poems as “Ballad of the Great Books, 1935” or “1934: A Train Wreck at Sixty-Sixth Street.” This was the summer in which O’Hara, besides writing his “Jane” poems, was beginning to use familiar references more. In “A Party Full of Friends” he brings in “dizzy Violet,” “Jane, her eyeballs like the crystal of a seer,” Larry who “paced the floor,” Hal, John who “yawked onto the ottoman,” and Lyon, and the poem ends, “Someone’s going / to stay until the cows / come home. Or my name isn’t / Frank O’Hara.” Encouraging O’Hara to try to publish “A Party Full of Friends” Ashbery argued, contradicting some of his other comments on the matter, “the fact that no one would know who the people are would add rather than decrease charm.”

O’Hara did not particularly need encouragement in writing about his friends. But Goodman, in an article titled “Advance-Guard Writing, 1900–1950” in The Kenyon Review of Summer 1951, argued that the wisest move for the avant-garde in the present “shell-shocked” society was to reestablish a community of friends through art. “In literary terms this means: to write for them about them personally,” as Goodman put it. “But such personal writing about the audience itself can occur only in a small community of acquaintances. . . . As soon as the intimate community does exist—whether geographically or not is relevant but not essential—and the artist writes about it for its members, 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.’” A perfect example of such occasional poetry was O’Hara’s 1957 epithalamion, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s,” a form, according to Goodman, that “heightened the everyday.”

“The only pleasant thing that’s happened to me since you 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!” O’Hara exulted in a letter to Freilicher. “It is really lucid about what’s bothering us both besides sex, and it is so heartening to know that someone understands these things. . . . he is really the only one we have to look to now that Gide is dead, and just knowing that he is in the same city may give me the power to hurt myself into poetry.” While O’Hara’s contact with Goodman once he moved to the city was less a revelation than an example of the disappointment that sometimes follows upon meeting a cultural hero in person, his sense of the essay’s message, or its voicing of what he already felt, animated O’Hara over the next decade and a half. In addition to his friendships with Ashbery, Rivers, and Freilicher O’Hara soon developed friendships with many other artists in all fields. Aside from his increasingly apparent need for many friends, there was always the sense, too, of zealously undertaking some crucial avant-garde mission. He never spelled out the essence of that mission as fully as Goodman had in this essay he so admired in the Kenyon Review.

Although O’Hara later became too busy, and too disillusioned with established poetry magazines, to submit unsolicited poems, he was still interested enough during his last term in Ann Arbor to contact poetry editors. “The Three-Penny Opera,” along with Ellsberg’s review of Try! Try!, appeared that summer in Kerker Quinn’s well-respected Accent published at the University of Illinois. He received word in August that Karl Shapiro, his champion on the Hopwoods, had accepted “Ann Arbor Variations” for publication in December in Poetry, as “A POEM!” as O’Hara put it, but The New Yorker sent a penciled rejection note during the same season for a poem he had mailed to Howard Moss, a former winner of the Hopwood, who was unfortunately away on vacation.

By the last week in August O’Hara had completed his coursework and was ready to move to Manhattan. Larry Rivers, who had invited him to a twenty-eighth birthday party O’Hara was “feverish” to attend, had suggested that they share an apartment. Freilicher, though, advised against such an arrangement. “I do think it would make a smorgasbord out of all of your personal relationships and become extremely confusing to everybody,” she counseled, referring perhaps most specifically to what such a ménage might make out of her own life. O’Hara finally decided to take up the offer of his former Eliot House roommate Hal Fondren, now living in a tenement apartment on East Forty-ninth Street, who had graciously written, “I will surely be glad to have you stay as long as you like.” His apartment, Fondren had luringly pointed out, was “only a hop-skip from the B.P.,” referring to the Blue Parrot, a popular gay bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

O’Hara’s friends in New York eagerly awaited his arrival. They sensed, as did he, that there was to be nothing casual about his presence in their midst. As Ashbery wrote later in an essay on Jane Freilicher: “The one thing lacking in our privileged little world (privileged because it was a kind of balcony overlooking the interestingly chaotic events happening in the bigger worlds outside) was the arrival of Frank O’Hara to kind of cobble everything together and tell us what we and they were doing. This happened in 1951.”