Love

On August 10, 1959, O’Hara wrote in “Joe’s Jacket” of returning to New York after a weekend in Southampton:

returning by car the forceful histories of myself and Vincent loom

like the city hour after hour closer and closer to the future

The Vincent who was his fellow passenger was a 20-year-old dancer whom O’Hara had met only four nights earlier. That he was already projecting a destiny for the two of them as grand as the approaching skyline of Manhattan was an indication of the eagerness and poetic inspiration that he brought to bear almost instantly on this much-longed-for romance.

Actually O’Hara had been aware of the handsome young dancer for some time. Vincent Warren had performed for two years in the company of the Metropolitan Opera and worked as well with the respected underground modern dance choreographer James Waring at the Henry Street Playhouse, Living Theatre, and Judson Church. Warren knew Edwin Denby and was sometimes invited to evenings at Gold and Fizdale’s. His youth and all-American demeanor as well as his accomplishments as a dancer made him a desirable addition to their world. He had some close brushes with O’Hara, too. Both joking and bragging, Joe LeSueur had written to O’Hara in Paris the previous January, “The Berg-Schoenberg-Stravinsky program was lovely. . . . I took Vincent Warren and went to bed with him later since I didn’t let him pay me for the ticket.” Warren recalls borrowing cab fare from O’Hara once after a party. But not until Thursday, August 6, had the recognition occurred that O’Hara later remembered in a letter to Warren as the night “we ‘met’ on the floor at John Button’s.” (As the first in their circle to own a television set, Button often had parties that revolved around watching old movies or specials.)

Warren swiftly became O’Hara’s new muse. Over the next twenty-one months O’Hara wrote a cycle of about fifty poems assiduously taking the pulse of their affair, poems that were often surprising even to him in their openness and clarity. As he wrote, taking stock, in “Avenue A” in January 1960:

everything is too comprehensible

these are my delicate and caressing poems

I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past

so many!

but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl

to my equally naked heart

Writing to John Ashbery, who was at work on some new experimental “poèmes concrètes,” O’Hara archly complained, “I might have known as I sink into the mush of love you would be foraging ahead into the 21st century.” Writing “Statement for Paterson Society” in March 1961, he commented on the change as well: “it used to be that I could only write when I was miserable; now I can only write when I’m happy. Where will it all end?” Unlike Larry Rivers who inspired poems of expressionist pain and dazzling surface, or Jane Freilicher and Grace Hartigan who inspired poems of almost weightless fondness and affection, Vincent Warren was the first muse to inspire O’Hara to openly gay love poems. This put his poetry in the line of Whitman, Cavafy, and Genet and led to his being cast after his death in the role of an early poet of liberation by the gay political movement of the 1970s.

Vincent Warren was not exactly O’Hara’s type. Their involvement was as much a departure personally as poetically. Indeed he was young and attractive. That he had light chestnut brown hair was overlooked by O’Hara who willfully described him in “Personism” as “a blond,” a reference based partly on Warren’s having bleached his hair that summer. But Warren certainly did not fit within the genre of straight male painters to whom O’Hara had been addicted. Nor was he black or Jewish or particularly macho. “Vincent was beautiful-looking,” says Rivers. “He was really gorgeous. I’ve always been attracted to men who look like women. Vincent was like that. He had terrific features.” He also had a high-pitched voice, and, as O’Hara once complained, “he talks so fast.” O’Hara, however, romanticized Warren the dancer. “To me tights weren’t glamorous,” says Warren, “but to Frank they might have been.” The two shared a rabid interest in old movies and ballet and they would sit up for hours at the kitchen table loquaciously debating the ins and outs of various performers past and present. O’Hara’s big-brotherly nature responded to Warren’s sweet, open temperament. He found the relationship in many ways healing. Its fatal flaw was that O’Hara was thirty-three and Warren was twenty and unable to respond fully to O’Hara’s overtures. The gap in age, as well as Warren’s need to travel continuously with various dance companies, set up a new version of the intractable distance that had produced the combination of romance and frustration in so many of O’Hara’s previous affairs.

“The whole tragedy about Frank and me, and it’s obvious in the poems, is that he loved me and I didn’t know how to love at that age,” says Warren. “It scared me how he loved me. He gave the poems to me and I could never know what to say. They were obviously very beautiful. Even then you could see how beautiful they were to read. But it scared me because I knew I didn’t love him as much as that.”

The weekend that launched their affair began the day after they met. O’Hara had scheduled a bon voyage lunch with the painter Norman Bluhm, who was flying to Paris that night. LeSueur was coming to the lunch, too, and he and O’Hara were later to board a train to Kenneth Koch’s for a weekend in the Hamptons. LeSueur called at noon to suggest that O’Hara write one of his off-the-cuff occasional poems for Bluhm. O’Hara complained, “Are you crazy? We’re meeting him in less than an hour and I’ve got piles of work to do.” During the phone call LeSueur begged off their weekend plans. As O’Hara gossiped in the occasional poem he did write ten minutes later and presented to Bluhm at lunch, titled “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul”:

and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth’s

although he is coming to lunch with Norman

I suspect he is making a distinction

well, who isn’t

O’Hara telephoned Warren at the last minute to invite him to Koch’s in LeSueur’s place, and Warren happily accepted.

O’Hara recorded the details and undercurrents of the weekend in “Joe’s Jacket,” beginning with their train trip on the Cannonball with Jasper Johns: “Entraining to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent.” This Friday afternoon train trip to the Hamptons in the late fifties was as social as any gallery opening. Johns and his friend Robert Rauschenberg were often among the familiar artworld faces on the waiting platform—having established themselves the year before as rising stars of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Steven Rivers recalls one of the weekends during the season when Johns and Rauschenberg had stopped by the Rivers house in Southampton while O’Hara was visiting to bury their pet monkey: “Jasper had this marmoset and it died and was buried under a tree in Larry’s backyard. I’ll never forget Bob and Jasper crying. I was very upset. I think Frank thought that was very funny. He had a very sick sense of humor sometimes.” Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s models for their bonding were similar friendships from the previous generation, especially that of Merce Cunningham and John Cage—pairings as responsible for cross-germination in the arts as any aesthetic philosophy.

On this particular weekend, however, Rauschenberg was absent. As O’Hara and Johns settled into talking, while scenery perceived by the poet as “a penetrable landscape lit from above” raced past, Warren had his first taste of the high-flying jokes and pronouncements to which he would be a quiet bystander during much of his time with the catalytic poet. When they got together, O’Hara characteristically tended to draw Johns out about his painting, to flatter and delve. Johns was going beyond his flag and target paintings to make canvases playing with colors and their stenciled names for his show the following February. “There was this weird thing of Frank’s interest in and understanding of other artists that seemed to put no obligation on his own work, neither threatened, nor helped, but was in a sense disassociated from his work,” recalls Johns. “I doubt that it was. But there was that sense, perhaps sadly. I had no sense that he needed anything from me about his work but that his interest in me was about my work. In the very way he behaved you wouldn’t have had much time to have thought that he felt anything else. The focus was always someplace else.”

At the station O’Hara and Warren were met by Kenneth Koch, who drove them back to Southampton:

at the station a crowd of drunken fishermen on a picnic Kenneth

is hard to find but we find, through all the singing, Kenneth smiling

it is off to Janice’s bluefish and the incessant talk of affection

The bluefish found its way as well into O’Hara’s polite thank-you note written the following Tuesday: “Vincent and I had a terrific time from the opening bluefish to the closing bourbon.”

On Saturday night “an enormous party mesmerizing comers in the disgathering light” was given at the Porters’ sprawling white Southampton home, the invitation to which listed the names of fellow hosts Joe Hazan, Jane Freilicher, Jane Wilson, and John Gruen. “Now does it really take that many people to have a party?” O’Hara asked wryly in a letter to Joan Mitchell. “It sounds rather like the entrance to Fairlawn Cemetery which our glorious Jean Harlow is buried in.” As Kenneth Koch recalls, “That weekend Frank told me why he drank so much. He said he drank so he wouldn’t be nervous.” When he included his response in “Joe’s Jacket,” the variations on the theme were multiplied:

I drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won’t stare away

I drink to kill the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it

I drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm

can appear and win its flickering little victory over noise

I drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment

and then I am going home, purged of everything except anxiety and self-distrust.

O’Hara’s answer was echoed by Patsy Southgate who claims, “I’ve always agreed with Joe that the reason he drank so much was out of boredom. I think that his mind and body worked at a far faster rate than most people’s. Part of the effect of the alcohol was to slow him down to a more normal metabolism.” Missing in these accounts, of course, was a more mundane recognition of the persistence of alcoholism in the O’Hara family and of the sort of deadly game of Russian roulette being played long distance by him and his mother.

When Patsy Southgate came across O’Hara with Vincent Warren at the party she was furious. “That really pissed me off,” recalls Southgate. “Frank was dumping Joe and I was furious. Frank explained to me that he wasn’t dumping Joe. But that he was madly in love.” O’Hara’s friendship with LeSueur was so ambiguous that even their closest friends were never entirely sure of its true nature. Since they lived together and were usually in tandem at parties, most people simply assumed they were lovers. Even though they were not, LeSueur might well have begun to feel some tentative fear of being pushed aside. Warren’s entrance certainly threw his reliable weekend plans with O’Hara into jeopardy. “Another little trouble in paradise may be brewing, since from a very sweet poem he wrote for me last weekend and subsequent developments it seems he wasn’t only pleased by Patsy’s remark at that party, he agreed with her!” O’Hara wrote the next Wednesday to Schuyler, who was sharing the Hamptons house with Koch. “Not having caught onto this subtle manifestation, I said, ‘Well, maybe you should go to Patsy and Mike’s and I should go to Kenneth and Jimmy’s.’ His reply: ‘All right, go there and take Vincent with you.’”

A victim of insomnia, O’Hara was fascinated and touched by Warren’s ability to sleep, many of his poems to him containing restful images of an oblivious Vincent, as in “Poem” (That’s not a cross look it’s a sign of life): “my insatiable thinking towards you / as you lie asleep completely plotzed and / gracious as a hillock.” “Joe’s Jacket” gives a sense of O’Hara’s sleepless Saturday night as a guest in the country deprived of the usual diversion of bars and all-night parties. (The Koch summer house was not as dipsomaniacal as that of Goldberg or Rivers.)

my bed has an ugly calm

I reach to the D. H. Lawrence on the floor and read “The Ship Of Death”

I lie back again and begin slowly to drift and then to sink

a somnolent envy of inertia makes me rise naked and go to the window

The following afternoon Koch read to O’Hara and Warren from a libretto he was working on:

and we are soon in the Paris of Kenneth’s libretto, I did not drift

away I did not die.

As Koch recalls, “The nicest thing about this house was there was a peach orchard. We sat out there and I read him and Vincent my opera Angelica, which Frank liked very much. He very much approved of people doing long and ambitious works. He would take it very seriously.” Always trying to stir up affection and interest between his friends—especially between his boyfriends and his friends—O’Hara tended to describe their feelings for each other in distorted, or at least magnified, ways. Thanking Koch for the weekend, O’Hara mentioned Warren’s great interest in the libretto—the reading of which Warren claims to have completely forgotten. Again, “I saw Vincent last night,” wrote O’Hara two days later, “and he liked the libretto so much I wouldn’t be surprised if he took up singing along with the other things he apparently is taking up. What energy!” O’Hara included LeSueur as well in the supposed excitement: “Joe is wistful about not hearing you read the ‘Angelicus Redivivus’ and hopes that you will have gathered strength by the time he sees you since he wants to hear it in your voice.”

“Joe’s Jacket,” as its title confusingly implies, was not simply an account of a honeymoon weekend with a new boyfriend. O’Hara needed to figure out how this new romance was going to fit into the puzzle of his life. LeSueur and Southgate were already expressing the anger and upset often generated by the entrance of a new player onto an established social scene, and O’Hara did not wish to threaten the valuable comfort and support he enjoyed from LeSueur. These were the qualities with which he imbued LeSueur’s seersucker jacket, borrowed to wear to work on the Monday morning of his return:

I borrow Joe’s seersucker jacket though he is still asleep I start out

when I last borrowed it I was leaving there it was on my Spanish plaza back

and hid my shoulders from San Marco’s pigeons was jostled on the Kurfürstendamm

and sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental

it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on

many occasions as a symbol does when the heart is full and risks no speech

Whether LeSueur or O’Hara could be satisfied with an arrangement that tried to balance—and divide—romantic fervor and domestic comfort remained to be tested.

O’Hara wrote “Joe’s Jacket” on Monday, and by Tuesday evening he had written “You Are Gorgeous and I’m Coming.” The poem is an acrostic in which the first letter of each line spells out Vincent Warren’s name, the V resulting in its first line, “Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El.” (“I never saw the Third Avenue El,” says Warren. “By the time I got to New York it was a public memory.”) Warren expressed a worry almost immediately that O’Hara’s poems would somehow be read by his mother in Florida and expose to her the secret of his homosexuality. His somewhat far-fetched paranoia only goaded O’Hara to further tricks and poetic camouflages. Because of what he described in “Saint” as Warren’s “familial anxieties,” O’Hara used his middle name, Paul, in titles such as “Those Who Are Dreaming, A Play About St. Paul” or “St. Paul and All That.” His impulse in deleting the P in “V (F) W,” claimed O’Hara in a letter to Warren, was “so it won’t embarrass your mother.” As Warren was born in Jacksonville, Florida, O’Hara made a flurry of references to the state: he used the title “Leafing Through Florida”; he recalled impossibly the time “when my grandmother came back from Florida” in “Poem” (O sole mio, hot diggety, nix ‘I wather think I can’); he included the “Jacksonville / Chamber of Commerce” in “September 14, 1959 (Moon).” Teasing Warren about his discretion became that season’s poetic challenge for O’Hara. It was a game only slightly tinged by his anxiety that by not carving their names in poetry, an impermanence that he already feared would be given greater sway. As he wrote to Ned Rorem in October, “When I am unhappy I am terribly anxious to get happy and when I am happy I am terribly anxious that I don’t lose it.”

Within weeks of their meeting, Warren became privy to some of O’Hara’s intenser confrontations. He found them a bit over his head. “Frank could be acerbic,” recalls Warren. “I remember once in a taxi cab that Frank made Joe cry. Frank said some hard, direct things that made Joe face himself and Joe needed that. Frank could cut to the heart of the matter with people. But it was scary sometimes too. I think I was probably the only one who could get away with being Pollyanna in the middle of all that. I wouldn’t fight. We never had any fights, never had any confrontations. He was very permissive to me. He was in love with me, obviously.” To try to quell Warren’s shock at witnessing some of these in vino veritas dramas in the first two weeks of their relationship, O’Hara wrote for him “Poem” (Hate is only one of many responses) on August 24:

Hate is only one of many responses

true, hurt and hate go hand in hand

but why be afraid of hate, it is only there

think of filth, is it really awesome

neither is hate

don’t be shy of unkindness, either

it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct

like an arrow that feels something

Originally titled “For Another’s Fear,” the poem was not about a fight with Warren but rather about his upset, similar to a child’s at witnessing a fight between parents. “I remember Frank talking once about the kinds of sexual relations one has just out of vanity and the kind one has because someone really cares for somebody,” says Kenneth Koch. “I was very naive. I was very interested to hear somebody as young as I was talking about these things. I was very surprised by how wise he could be. It was the kind of smartness you can see in a poem like ‘Hate is one of many responses.’”

Three days later, on August 27, in the middle of what the poet Bill Berkson has described as the “annus mirabilis of his poetry,” O’Hara had lunch with the young black poet LeRoi Jones (who changed his name in the late sixties to the more radical Amiri Baraka). O’Hara’s relationship with Jones was always a matter of conjecture to those around them and O’Hara did little to allay the confusion. “I remember it was very funny when Frank told me he met LeRoi,” says Kenneth Koch. “He said he’d met this marvelous young poet who was black and good-looking and very interesting. ‘And not only that,’ he said, ‘he’s gay.’ Like I was supposed to be jealous of this. Like Frank would get more of him than I would. I don’t know whether LeRoi yielded to Frank’s almost irresistible charms or not. Nor do I care. So I assumed that LeRoi was gay for a while, but that’s before I got to know him. I don’t know whether Frank was serious or not. Maybe he was just optimistic.”

At the time of their lunch, Jones had been married for a year to Hettie Roberta Cohen, a young white Jewish woman who was advertising and business manager of the Partisan Review. She had been instrumental in having Jones’s fierce rebuttal of Norman Podhoretz’s “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” published in Partisan Review the summer before. Together they were now publishing Yugen, which ran for eight issues before ceasing publication in December 1962. As one of the first journals in the city to devote itself to “new” poetry—soon followed by Floating Bear, Kulchur, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and C—Yugen published a mix of Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School poets. (It had published O’Hara’s “To Hell with It,” “Music,” and “Ode on Causality” earlier that year.) Jones had also started his own Totem Press, which published Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, and he teamed up in 1960 with the owner of the Eighth Street Bookshop, Ted Wilentz, to publish a pamphlet version of O’Hara’s Second Avenue with a cover by Larry Rivers, as well as Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror, Gary Snyder’s Myths and Texts, and Jones’s own Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. No phenomenon separated the sixties more distinctly from the fifties among poets than the appearance seemingly overnight of this paper river of magazines, broadsides, mimeos, and poetry chapbooks.

“Looking at Frank O’Hara was like looking at James Baldwin,” remembers Baraka. “If you don’t know they’re gay, you can’t see. That’s not a little parasol to be tossed away. That’s them. Frank would come in a place and toss his coat on the floor like Greta Garbo. I think Frank would get campier the more he got drunk. Same thing with Jimmy. He’d get extremely photogenic. What most people feared about both of them was their tongue. When they caught hold of people they would catch hold of them good. But I think Frank and I had an unspoken agreement not to jump on each other. We tended to be allies. It was a political jungle Downtown. Even as an artsy world, it was still very political, and very much he-said and she-said, and rumors of this and rumors of that, and a coup in the East and a coup in the West. But we were very supportive of each other.”

Their lunch that afternoon took place at Moriarty’s, a glorified workingman’s bar and grill on Sixth Avenue famous for its corned beef and cold beer. Their conversation, which turned on various literary topics, was set down paratactically by O’Hara in “Personal Poem,” written when he returned to his desk that afternoon:

we don’t like Lionel Trilling

we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like

Henry James so much we like Herman Melville

we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in

San Francisco

They also toyed with thinking up a movement. “We went to lunch and said, ‘Let’s think of a movement,’” says Baraka. “ ‘What movement?’ ‘Personism.’ It was Frank’s movement. He thought it up. What was good for me was that it meant that you could say exactly what was on your mind and you could say it in a kind of conversational tone rather than some haughty public tone for public consumption.” As O’Hara recalled the genesis of Personism in his mock-manifesto, “It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.” The poem, written of course to Warren, “between two persons instead of two pages,” was “Personal Poem,” which ends in a major key:

I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is

thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi

and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go

back to work happy at the thought possibly so

O’Hara didn’t write the manifesto that went with the movement until the following Thursday, September 3. The instigation was Don Allen, who was putting together his New American Poetry anthology for Grove. O’Hara had been his primary unofficial consultant, advising on trends as well as lobbying for the inclusion of personal favorites such as Edward Field and Barbara Guest. Allen had asked for a statement on poetics from all of his contributors, and O’Hara as usual was being dilatory. With Allen on his way across town that evening to pick up the statement, though, O’Hara poured himself a bourbon and water and decided to type out the manifesto, which he had been thinking about ever since lunch with Jones. LeSueur, noticing him preparing finally to get down to work, asked if he wanted him to turn down the radio. “No, turn it up,” O’Hara replied. “They’re playing Rachmaninoff’s Third next.” “But you might end up writing another poem to Rachmaninoff,” LeSueur joked. “If only I could be so lucky,” O’Hara shot back. When the concerto was finished in less than an hour O’Hara showed what he had written to LeSueur. “Do you think it’s too silly?” he asked. LeSueur’s only complaint was the title: “Personalism: A Manifesto.” “Personalism is the name of a dopey philosophy in Southern California,” he explained. “Oh, then I’ll call it ‘Personism,’” O’Hara quickly replied. “That’s better anyway.” Allen, however, felt that the aesthetics of “Personism” applied to O’Hara’s love poems but not to the odes. He asked him to try again. So LeRoi Jones published both the manifesto and “Personal Poem”—works in which he had been so intimately involved—in Yugen. For Allen, O’Hara wrote a less anecdotal, though equally insouciant, statement: “I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I haven’t.”

With his attention taken up by love, O’Hara seemed to have more energy than ever for the realpolitik of poetry and painting. His job was becoming busier every day. He now had a devoted assistant from a Roman family, Renée Neu, sitting crowded with him in his office every day helping to ease the work load and protect him from overly intrusive or jealous colleagues. Their tiny office, with its two large desks, one window facing an airshaft, shelves lined with books and museum catalogues, and an ornate mirror, showed up in O’Hara’s “L’Amour avait passé par la,” written there on August 19:

Yes

like the still center of a book on Joan Miró

blue red green and white

a slightly over-gold edition of Hart Crane

and the huge mirror behind me blinking, paint-flecked

they have painted the ceiling of my heart

and put in a new light fixture

One of O’Hara’s current projects—assisting James Thrall Soby in putting together a show for Rome and Milan, “Twentieth-Century Italian Art in American Collections”—slipped into the poem as well:

it is the great period of Italian art when everyone imitates Picasso

afraid to mean anything.

In and out of this office all day long, O’Hara stirred up a frenzy of activity, both personal and professional, indecipherable to onlookers. Only Renée Neu was fully apprised of all the goings-on. “He would come in quite late in the mornings,” recalls Neu. “He would call me for a moment from home around ten o’clock and tell me what happened the evening before. When he finally came in it was a madhouse. We never had a moment’s peace. Philip Johnson would call asking what was that bit of poetry he had written. The Registrar would check if there was any young poet or artist who needed an available job. Larry Rivers or Norman Bluhm would drop in and start chatting for hours. When he was working he concentrated very much. But at the same time he didn’t give the impression of working hard. Anything could be taken very casually. It was almost like a pose.” O’Hara spent so much time on his phone at the Museum that he complained of what he called “black ear” in “Macaroni.” “I once called him at the museum and the operator said, ‘Good God!,’” recalled James Schuyler, “but she put me through.”

In September O’Hara’s monograph Jackson Pollock appeared as one of six books published by George Braziller in its Great American Artists Series. (A book on de Kooning by Thomas Hess was also included in the series.) Emboldened by the response to his essay on Doctor Zhivago, O’Hara opened his essay on Pollock with an epigram from Pasternak’s autobiography, I Remember, in which Pasternak grandly described Scriabin as “not only a composer, but an occasion for perpetual congratulations, a personified festival and triumph of Russian culture.” Pulling out all stops, O’Hara launched into his own essay—“And so is Jackson Pollock such an occasion for American culture.” His essay was both a poetic paean to Pollock’s work and an iconoclastic, though classically scholarly treatment of the mythological content of such early 1940s paintings as Guardians of the Secret and The She-Wolf. According to Sanford Friedman, a friend of Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, “Lee loved his book. She felt that his was the book of a poet rather than an art critic. He said things in there about The Deep that she felt absolutely hit the mark.” This winning over of Pollock’s widow helped greatly seven years later when O’Hara began to work on a major retrospective of Pollock. The tenor of the remarks on the later works that she so appreciated was most pronounced in his seductive appraisal of The Deep as “a scornful, technical masterpiece, like the Olympia of Manet. And it is one of the most provocative images of our time, an abyss of glamor encroached upon by a flood of innocence.”

The critics hardly agreed with Lee Krasner. Typical of the roasting O’Hara’s poetic prose received from the press was Aline Saarinen’s review in the New York Times Book Review on September 27: “Frank O’Hara is adulating, emphatic and unrestrained, perhaps as is inevitable with a poet! . . . His praise is so extravagant it loses its effectiveness. But, somehow, something of the fervor, the dedication, the lyricism, the serious purpose and the undeniable quality of Pollock’s art come through this purple, poetic prose.” George Heard Hamilton in Art Journal found O’Hara’s prose “just a bit intense.” Hilton Kramer in Arts called O’Hara a “pseudo-Apollinaire” and accused him of “phony poetics.” Like Virgil Thomson, Kramer was suspicious of the axis linking O’Hara the “poetaster” with the power of the Museum of Modern Art: “I think future historians will find it significant that the ‘poetic’ school of criticism, particularly as it concerns Abstract Expressionist painting, came forward at precisely the same moment that collectors and museums began buying the pictures.” The attack was inevitable, as many saw a conflict of interest in O’Hara’s many positions.

With Helen Frankenthaler, married the year before to the painter Robert Motherwell after the break-up of her relationship with Clement Greenberg, O’Hara used the reviews as an excuse for his lateness in finishing a catalogue essay for her upcoming exhibition in January at the Jewish Museum. “I feel ashamed that it took so long,” he wrote to her on December 16, “but the criticism of the Pollock thing (which didn’t bother me when it occurred—even Lincoln Kirstein puts it down / I will introduce him and Hilton), and which was mitigated by your, Bob’s and Grace’s kindness, suddenly left me very self-conscious and with absolutely no brio about my ideas about your work since I thought my admiration might just bring about the same situation.” Mostly, though, O’Hara’s response was tinged with the shrugging humor and contempt he displayed as armor against criticism directed either at him or his friends. He had relayed the news to Ashbery at the end of November that his book was panned as “ ‘hopeless’ or something by Hilton Kramer which is nice since he is so loathsome in every way that I would hate to suffer under his approval. The text is pretty feverish and I don’t know why it came out the way it did, but it did so what could I do about it having no character and even less of a sense of responsibility?”

This wrist-slapping from the critical establishment certainly did not slow down O’Hara’s involvement with artists. The winter of 1960 was a busy time for his circle of second-generation New York School painters, many of whose careers were now in full force. Shows were hung and dismantled of Freilicher, Goldberg, Bluhm, Frankenthaler, and Katz. The Tibor de Nagy Gallery mounted what Art News described as “a kind of homage” to O’Hara, showing Hartigan’s Oranges and Rivers’s and O’Hara’s Stones plus portraits of O’Hara by both. “Do you think I should show every year or every other year?” he wrote humorously of the event to Joan Mitchell. There was also a benefit sale of paintings for Nell Blaine who had been struck by polio recently on Mykonos. Among the fifty artists contributing to the show at the Poindexter Gallery where Hal Fondren was working as a dealer were Elaine de Kooning, Mitchell, Hofmann, Reinhardt, Guston, Motherwell, Hartigan, Rivers, Frankenthaler, de Niro, and Pollock.

O’Hara showed up at as many of these events as possible with Vincent Warren. A lot of their time was spent as well on other sorts of dates. That fall and winter they saw many movies (Riptide, Les Enfants du Paradis, Desire with Marlene Dietrich, the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup), operas (Turandot, Cosi fan tutte, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene), musical performances (Orff’s Carmina Burana, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex), and plays (The Three Sisters, Krapp’s Last Tape). They often watched movies together at the Museum of Modern Art, Warren stopping by to meet O’Hara in the lobby after work, or at the Huff Society, a club for old-movie buffs that rented out office buildings and lofts for private screenings, or on John Button’s black-and-white television screen. (A showing of a 1923 Rin Tin Tin movie titled Where the North Begins at the Huff Society had inspired John Ashbery’s 1955 play The Compromise—a retelling of the plot with the dog eliminated.) O’Hara’s and Warren’s conversation could be consumed with rehashing the plots of old movies they had seen together or making references to current, if slightly obscure, B-movie actors. For instance, O’Hara liked to compare his boyfriend to Jeffrey Hunter, a rugged, boyishly handsome actor in action movies such as A Kiss Before Dying and Count Five and Die who surprised everyone by playing a beatific Jesus in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings in 1961. “He and Vincent used to sit every night and watch old films on television in the sixties,” recalls the dancer and choreographer Dan Wagoner. “Frank would go on and on for hours about whether someone was good in a movie or why they weren’t. They would argue over who played a certain part and who didn’t.” Typical of this over-the-top enthusiasm was O’Hara’s note to Warren, “I hate to tell you that Queen Christina is on TV this thurs—how can I bear it without you? xxx F.”

Their favorite activity together, though, was attending the New York City Ballet, which they did two or three nights a week. During the 1960 season they attended the company premieres of Night Shadow, Theme and Variations, Tchaikovsky Pas de deux, and The Figure in the Carpet. At that time the New York City Ballet wasn’t selling out every night. As a student dancer, Warren sneaked in at intermission and invariably found a seat. But O’Hara was usually able to spring for tickets—orchestra seats costing about five dollars. Or Edwin Denby, who shared O’Hara’s fondness for Warren, would treat them both. If they weren’t with Denby, they tended to go with John Button whose rapid-fire takes on the ballets were honed by years of practice. Much of the jabbering took place at intermission on the way to or from the hotel bar across the street. Of Agon, premiered in 1957 and amplifying the growing Balanchine-Stravinsky repertoire to which the fall’s Momentum Pro Gesualdo would be the next addition, Button had announced, “It’s as great as Guernica!” “The subject of Agon is pride,” O’Hara had rejoined of the abstract ballet set to twelve-tone music. Marcel Duchamp remarked to Edwin Denby on its opening night that he felt the way he had after the opening of Le Sacre. Denby recorded his own opinion in a review in Evergreen: “The ‘basic gesture’ of Agon has a frank, fast thrust like the action of Olympic athletes, and it also has a loose-fingered goofy reach like the grace of our local teenagers.”

Luckily, in such heady discussions of dance—he and O’Hara saw Agon performed by Diana Adams and Allegra Kent—Warren was not out of his depth. Perhaps no element was more solid in his relationship with O’Hara than their late-night debates on the ballet, since Warren had the advantage of insider’s knowledge. They certainly did not always agree. Warren tended to be more dubious than O’Hara about the technical skill of certain of the dancers. “The corps de ballet was not as strong or as together as in later years,” recalls Warren of his opinion of the company in 1960. “I remember applauding while consciously saying in my mind that this was for Balanchine, not for the corps de ballet; this is for the conception not the execution. But Patricia Wilde was a fantastically brilliant fast dancer. Frank loved Maria Tallchief though I never understood why. It’s important to remember too that dancers’ bodies changed in this period. Tanaquil LeClercq was extremely long and thin at a time when dancers were short and compact. She was exaggerated in her thinness. She was ahead of her time in the sense that she had an elongated line and a sharpness to her that was different than the dancers of her period. Seeing that Balanchine liked her, other dancers started to look like her.” O’Hara evoked LeClercq’s elongated line in his “Ode to Tanaquil LeClercq” written that June, in which he called her “narrow like a lost forest of childhood stolen from gypsies” and “the superb arc of a question.” A week earlier he had written “Glazunoviana, or Memorial Day” in which the lines “Maria Tallchief returns to the City Center / in a full-length The Seasons” alluded to the libretto he told Warren he had written at the request of Lincoln Kirstein, the General Director of the New York City Ballet. “He chose The Seasons,” Warren remembered, “and wrote a wildly romantic story about a nymph (to be danced by LeClercq) and faun (Nicholas Magallanes) to be done in modern dress—it doesn’t sound very Balanchinesque. It was refused not because of the story, but because ‘Mr. B.’ didn’t like The Seasons—though years later he did a marvelous Glazunov ballet, so maybe it was the story.”

Warren was as ambitious, busy, and unavailable as most of his student dancer friends. As Larry Rivers recalls, “Vincent was a dancer, and dancers always seem to me to not be there. He would be in a room, but he was only going to be there for a few minutes because he had to go dance, or practice, or exercise, or sleep. He was like an athlete. It was always like, ‘Oh, I’ll see you.’ He’d walk in one second and very rarely spend the whole evening.” This rhythm generally worked, though, for O’Hara. More exposure might have been difficult for someone as complicated in his needs for so many different people as O’Hara. As he wrote of his general satisfaction to Ashbery on December 30, “I am still madly in love and we are both very happy and wildly unhappy now and then when we fight and it is all SO MOVING, probably more than anything else ever in either of our lives (this makes me feel like Hart Crane writing to Waldo Frank, if you don’t mind the position I’m putting you in) and is full of the concomitant uneasiness about What May Suddenly Happen, etc., though Vincent is less neurotic than I am in that respect until I communicate some uneasiness at which he becomes even more upset than I am and we make up (knock on wood). He really is the greatest, as you may have gathered from my poems. One sweet and odd thing about our relationship is that I get jealous of some dancer or actor I think he may be attracted to physically whereas he gets jealous of some poet or painter he thinks I might find more fascinating than him. Which is unlikely to say the least.” An example of the smoothing of ruffled feathers common in their first few months of intimacy was O’Hara’s “Poem” of January 7 beginning

That’s not a cross look it’s a sign of life

but I’m glad you care how I look at you

this morning

The first interruption in their romance, which had been so workably smooth for seven months, was the trip O’Hara took to Spain on Museum business in March 1960. He was excited to return to Madrid—the site of his first European stop two years earlier. As John Ashbery was meeting him there to travel to various cities in Spain, he was especially eager. “More of seeing you than Spain,” he charmingly wrote him. But lurking was the fear of upsetting the love he was convinced he had but was uncertain he would be able to maintain. “Oh I do hope nothing happens while I’m gone to change certain affections,” he wrote skittishly to Ashbery on March 8.

On the morning of March 23 O’Hara was the recipient of a goodbye kiss from Warren behind a panel near the Calder mobile at Idlewild before he boarded his Iberia Air Lines plane. “That’s what it always needed, a little history!” O’Hara wrote Warren of the mobile in longhand from the airplane.

Arriving in Madrid at 4:30 a.m., he made his way to the Hotel Wellington where he received a wake-up call at 9:00 from Oscar Salvador, the translator with whom he had had an affair on his last trip. O’Hara had much business to accomplish in Madrid in ten days. His assignment was to put together a show, “New Spanish Painting and Sculpture,” scheduled to open at the Museum of Modern Art in four months and circulate afterward throughout the United States. Among the painters in Madrid whose studios he needed to visit, or whom he met for coffee, drinks, lunch, dinner, or thimbles full of red wine with sausages or skewered lamb at stand-up workers’ bars were Canogar, Rivera, Farreras, Millares, and the sculptor Chirino, all of whom worked in a style of abstraction that was seemingly becoming universal. At the time, the thirty-four-year-old Millares was the only painter in Madrid to have won a following outside Spain, for his works of burlap dipped into white paint that he then bunched and tore up, smeared and daubed with black and called “homunculi.” Compared to their American counterparts, the Spanish painters tended to more somber palettes, of tawny and rusty tones, grays, and blacks. Different cities, though, had different painters, even different dialects of style, so that O’Hara needed to make a tour. The supposed rift between a School of Madrid and a School of Barcelona was addressed dismissively by him in his introduction to the show’s catalogue: “Whether or not there is a factional hiatus in actuality, reminiscent as it is of the rumored divergence between our own New York School and l’École du Pacifique (a hiatus which, like the Spanish one, was formulated in Parisian critical circles), is a question which seems irrelevant here.” His itinerary after Madrid was that laid out in “Having a Coke With You,” written to Warren on April 21, four days after O’Hara’s return to New York:

HAVING A COKE WITH YOU

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

O’Hara needed to take care of personal business in Madrid as well. His wish to be reunited with his translator, Oscar Salvador, had come true. Unfortunately O’Hara’s situation had changed. He now had Vincent Warren in his life and was at pains not to jeopardize their romance, though he did report the nature of his rendezvous with Salvador in his letters home. The first night, O’Hara was at pains to explain, they parted “1/2 way between Oscar’s house and my hotel.” The next night, though, they had their “inevitable talk,” which left Salvador bereft and O’Hara queasy until he discovered that Salvador, too, had a boyfriend as well as a “trail of broken hearts around Madrid”—many of whom eyed O’Hara hostilely in various gay bars they visited together. “Now that is very odd because I haven’t seen him since 1958, though we have written letters from time to time,” a conveniently level-headed O’Hara wrote to Warren. “I can be faithful or whatever you want to call it (I don’t necessarily mean sexually, except that you continue to prefer the one you love, not that I can’t be sexually faithful), but it would have to be based on something more than 10 days 2 years ago.” (The affair had actually lasted five days.)

The fun in O’Hara’s Spanish trip this time was mostly provided by John Ashbery who arrived in Madrid on the evening of March 25. In his letters O’Hara put all the romantic expectancy that had animated his letters from Europe on his last trip into the figure of Ashbery. Perhaps in reality, but certainly in his letters to Warren, Ashbery became the very type of what O’Hara called “a highly excitable vacationist. I wonder if he really spends as much time in the Prado while I’m working as he says he does.” One evening he and Ashbery clattered down the steps of the cavelike El Tres, a “queer bar” in Madrid, as familiarly as if it were the Old Place in New York, O’Hara making out in the near dark the “usual slightly sinister male couples you see at ‘polite’ gay bars.” O’Hara distanced himself from his fellow homosexuals now and then with digs. “The funny thing that occurred to me is probably why I like Madrid so much as a city,” O’Hara wrote to Warren later on the hotel typewriter. “It is just like New York in that one has the same kind of relationships here. (Unlike Paris or Rome.) That is, the queens always hate me and the heterosexual painters seem to like me. So naturally I prefer them socially.”

O’Hara enjoyed a side trip to Toledo, a city he compared to “a great cubist painting—it’s completely wrapped in the Tagus River and there’s a drive you can take on the surrounding mountains so you can see the whole city from every vantage point.” He overcame his anger against Catholicism enough to be amazed by the Cathedral, with its El Greco paintings of Christ and the Twelve Apostles, “all of whom look somewhat like his own self-portrait.” However, in the love poem he wrote to Warren after his return to Madrid, “Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think,” he reverted to his feeling that love vanquishes all religious art:

and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver

like glasses like an old lady’s hair

it’s well known that God and I don’t get along together

it’s just a view of the brass works to me, I don’t care about the Moors

seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

On Sunday, April 3, O’Hara and Ashbery took a train to Barcelona where a letter from Warren was waiting at the Hotel Colón. “The first thing that greeted my eyes was an enormous fountain all lit up (it was 11 pm) and the next was the Catedral which is also lit up and looks fabulous at night since it’s lit from within too so you can see the stained glass windows,” he wrote back immediately. “But I wasn’t really buying any of this (as I hope they said in The Best of Everything), it was really your letter that seemed wonderful.” He and Ashbery were treated the following afternoon to a three-hour tour by the painter Tharrats—described by O’Hara in his catalogue essay as “a headlong expressionist, astral, destructive of order”—of Gaudí’s Parque Güell, which O’Hara found “the ultimate triumph of gingerbread.” He kept appointments, too, with Tapies and Cuixart: Cuixart, who made Gaudíesque shapes on his canvases from thick metal paint, was with him when he threw up in the gutter in front of his house. Thirty-six-year-old Anton Tapies, perhaps the most internationally known of the Spanish painters, had abandoned the University of Barcelona law school to take up painting in 1946, heaping his canvases with paint that he then gouged, cut, and scraped. For the show, O’Hara chose his Three Stains on Grey Space—three swirls of thick paint anchored at the bottom of a gray canvas.

On April 10 he and Ashbery boarded a “Shanghai-Express Type train,” which arrived the next day in San Sebastián, where O’Hara met with the sculptor Chillida whose iron-and-steel works resembled David Smith’s recent Raven series of 1955–57. They then traveled to Biarritz, which Ashbery wanted to research because Raymond Roussel’s family had owned a summer house there and the scenery occurred in some of his work. This last leg of the Spanish tour was recorded by O’Hara in “A Little Travel Diary” written in Paris on April 14:

storms break over

San Sebastian, 40 foot waves drench us pleasantly and we see

a dead dog bloated as a fraise lolling beside the quai

and slowly pulling out to sea

to Irún and Biarritz

we go, sapped of anxiety, and there for the first time

since arriving in Barcelona I can freely shit

At the end of the poem, written on the day of their arrival by plane in Paris, O’Hara introduced for the first time into his poetry, and so into the maze of his inner life, the young poet Bill Berkson:

see the back

of the head of Bill Berkson, aux Deux Magots, (awk!) it gleams

like the moon through the smoke

It was a pivotal entrance.

O’Hara had already met Berkson in New York, where the young poet had been introduced to him by Kenneth Koch. Berkson was twenty years old and strikingly handsome in a Kennedy way that made him seem even more handsome in the early sixties. The son of Seymour Berkson, a famous Hearst newspaperman and publisher of the Journal-American, who had recently died, and Eleanor Lambert, a fashion publicist whose provenance was Manhattan’s uptown café society, Berkson communicated an unusual mixture of patrician reserve, bohemian curiosity, intelligence, politeness, and brash rudeness. Having left Brown University in early January 1959, he considered registering for John Cage’s composition course at the New School but instead chose Koch’s spring term poetry workshop, where he was seized by his instructor’s enthusiasm for modern poets from Whitman, Stevens, Apollinaire, Stein, Auden, and Williams straight through to O’Hara and Ashbery, whom Koch adventurously taught in the same breath. As Koch recalls of his first impressions of Berkson, “He had an aristocratic bearing, perfect manners, very cultivated, acting as if he knew and had read everything, which of course wasn’t true. . . . He seemed to be at least as mature as I was and I was in my mid-thirties. He used to have coffee with me after class every day. I liked him a lot. I liked the way he wrote also. He wrote poems that had an effortless, funny, unself-conscious depiction of upper-class life which I liked since I didn’t have that in my life. Everything was very rich and smooth and fragrant.”

Koch, who had a talent for teaching an alternative tradition of modern poetry that consisted mostly of his and O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s favorites, soon became a “funnel for young poets” through his workshops at the New School, Wagner College, and Columbia. He was still young enough to welcome these neophytes quite readily and hospitably into the living room of his and Janice’s Perry Street apartment in the Village. In 1959 the appearance of someone as fresh and interested in the “new” poetry as Bill Berkson was still a novelty. So Koch gave him entrée into a literary world. One night Koch invited him to supper along with Paul Carroll and Norman Mailer. Berkson brought along a poem he had written called “A Poem for Frank O’Hara,” which he had actually written before he met the poet. Carroll asked him on the spot if he cared to publish the poem in his new small magazine, Big Table—an off-campus, and so uncensored, offspring of the beleaguered Chicago Review. A sidelight of the evening was Mailer’s trying, at least from Berkson’s point of view, to goad him into a fight. Berkson recalls that Mailer insisted that by his looks he must be a big-time college athlete. The next night Mailer made headlines by stabbing his wife.

A more fruitful introduction on Koch’s part had been O’Hara. Koch had invited Berkson in the spring of 1959 to a party at Joe Hazan and Jane Freilicher’s, apprising him beforehand that O’Hara would be there. Berkson claims that Koch then warned him, “He’ll become a germ in your life.” Berkson and O’Hara did meet and spent most of the evening leaning on the mantel of a fireplace. “Frank and Bill didn’t like each other,” remembers Koch. “They were both very opinionated. Just because Bill was nineteen years old didn’t mean that he didn’t have very strong opinions about everything. I don’t know what it was about, whether it was about Countee Cullen or Elsa Maxwell or Shakespeare. Probably, though, it was something literary. They really didn’t get along. Frank could be very strict about his opinions when he was drinking.” By the fall, however, Berkson and O’Hara were on friendly enough footing for Berkson to be invited to stop by the apartment on East Ninth Street where they sat in the butterfly chairs and O’Hara showed him some of his new poems to Vincent Warren. “I don’t think being in love is very good for your poetry,” Berkson responded snottily. It was the sort of response that irritated O’Hara’s friends but that he registered as “cute.”

Berkson and O’Hara ran into each other occasionally but their friendship did not really take off until their meeting in Paris that spring. Conditions were almost ideal in the capital of European art. Cars honked up and down the Boulevard Saint-Germain where Berkson sat alone dressed in jeans and a fatigue jacket in the Deux Magots, one of many customers spilling out onto the slightly chilly sidewalks lined with chestnut trees, which, in April, still had not yet budded. O’Hara and Ashbery showed up en route to the Hôtel de l’Université a few blocks away. As Berkson was avowedly straight, O’Hara felt free to flirt with him in a friendly way without endangering his prior engagement with Warren. So when Berkson explained that he was staying in a small hotel with no bath, O’Hara invited him to take a bath in his room. That was the occasion of “Embarrassing Bill,” the first of O’Hara’s many poems to be written to, with, or about Berkson:

how pleasant it is to think of Bill in there, half-submerged, listening

and when he comes to the door to get some more cologne he is just like a pane of glass

in a modernistic church, sort of elevated and lofty and substantial

well, if that isn’t your idea of god, what is?

The poem ended with the sarcastically motherly admonition, “now, Bill, use your own towel.” O’Hara was already falling into the admiring, spoiling, obliquely flirting, and blatantly flattering mode that would constitute much of their complicated friendship. It was the attitude that caused friends to accuse him of puffing up Berkson.

O’Hara did not fall under Berkson’s sway immediately. It was not in his interests to do so, as he was absorbed personally and poetically with Warren. Yet even before their chance meeting in Paris Warren was feeling some jealousy and irritation at the presence of Berkson. As he had written to O’Hara on April 7, “I saw B.B. at the Concert. . . . He isn’t in Paris yet—it’s funny to think that he’ll be with you before I will. Take care of yourself and don’t fool around too much (not at all!).” O’Hara had written to Warren on March 29, “when I get back on Easter Sunday evening I would far rather see you than a lot of people. . . . the thought of other people watching me when I see you again for the first time makes me nervous even now.” By the time he actually returned, though, complications had arisen on both sides. Maxine Groffsky, who had become Larry Rivers’s girlfriend two summers before when she was a waitress at the Five Spot in the Hamptons, had planned a party with Warren in honor of O’Hara’s return. O’Hara had decided to return on Pan Am flight 115 with Bill Berkson. At the airport Kenneth Koch coincidentally arrived from an Easter vacation in Haiti. As O’Hara wrote of the crowded reunion to Ashbery, “When we were going through customs at Idlewild there was Vincent waving down at us and beside him Kenneth and Janice and Katherine who had just gotten back from their Easter in Haiti. It was very strange. I was very tired.” “After the trip we saw a lot of him,” says Warren, who was crestfallen to see Berkson get off the plane with O’Hara.

At first O’Hara experienced a resurgence of the innocent, adoring sort of love for Warren he had enjoyed before he left. He seemed finally to have found something even higher on his scale of value than painting. Upon his return O’Hara was mostly concerned with the “Twentieth-Century Italian Art in American Collections” show opening on April 30 in Milan. It was a vast undertaking that included a significant collection of Futurist paintings as well as Marino Marini’s large equestrian statues of 1947 and 1949, but O’Hara was able to put his work in the proper perspective with life, as is evident in “Having a Coke with You”:

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

The excitement of being back in New York with Warren wore off within the week as O’Hara began to feel quite unwell. Though he had been plagued by diarrhea, nausea, and fatigue in Spain, he had viewed his symptoms as the classic side-effects of tourism and change of diet. When he continued to feel run down in New York, he decided to see David Protech, a society doctor on Fifth Avenue, who diagnosed him as having syphilis. Warren then went to the same doctor and was similarly diagnosed. Together they underwent a treatment of massive doses of penicillin. Most of the rest of their relationship was clouded by returns to Dr. Protech for shots or follow-up blood tests at intervals of a few months. While no blame was ever voiced, O’Hara began to have doubts about this great passion. For him, this was the first snake in the garden. “I’m sure that I’m the one who got the syphilis and gave it to Frank,” says Warren. “At the beginning of the relationship especially, even though he was passionately in love with me, I was carrying on a little bit. When the syphilis came up, neither of us took responsibility. It was just there. But I think that made some distrust happen on Frank’s part.”

In a cab on Wednesday afternoon, April 27, after being informed of his condition, O’Hara wrote “Song”—a disappointed response to the news. He was more disappointed by the possible failure of love than by having contracted a venereal disease:

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves

must lovers of Eros end up with Venus

muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you

how I hate disease, it’s like worrying

that comes true

and it simply must not be able to happen

in a world where you are possible

my love

nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

A week later, on May 5, he wrote “An Airplane Whistle (After Heine)”—its title a reference to an airplane whistle given him by Vincent Warren from a Cracker Jack box. The poem was another response to the ominousness of the depression he was feeling:

The rose, the lily and the dove got withered

in your sunlight or in the soot, maybe, of New York

and ceased to be lovable as odd sounds are lovable

say blowing on a little airplane’s slot

which is the color of the back of your knee

a particular sound, fine, light and slightly hoarse

O’Hara took a break from writing love poems to Warren for a few months and became absorbed in what was to become a busy period in his dual careers. An important boost to his poetry was the appearance in April of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 from Evergreen Books. Described by Allen Ginsberg as “a great blow for poetic liberty,” the anthology brought before a much larger public the post-World War II antiacademic poets whose work until then was mostly available only in little magazines, broadsheets, pamphlets, limited editions, circulating manuscripts, or poetry readings in coffee shops, bars, or church basements, where it was heard by growing audiences. Donald Allen made the strong—and controversial—decision to classify the forty-four poets by groups: New York School, Beat Generation, San Francisco Renaissance, and Black Mountain. “Through their work many are closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting, today recognized throughout the world to be America’s greatest achievements in contemporary culture,” wrote Allen in his introduction to the volume, whose title echoed that of “The New American Painting” show on which O’Hara had worked. “This anthology makes the same claim for the new American poetry, now becoming the dominant movement in the second phase of our twentieth-century literature and already exerting strong influence abroad.”

Allen made O’Hara a star of the volume, giving him what Ginsberg describes as a “large dominance within it.” Allen was one of the few editors who knew how many poems O’Hara was actually writing and filing away without trying to publish. So he chose to include fifteen poems of O’Hara’s—more than any other poet’s—including the largescale “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births).” When Allen wavered on including the lengthy ode, O’Hara complained, “But it’s my greatest poem!” Because of the Allen anthology, teenage poets all around the country, who would eventually gravitate to New York and to O’Hara, were given their first tantalizing, if sometimes baffling, exposure. Typical was David Shapiro, who at the Greenwood Swimming Pool in New Jersey hid the volume from a thirteen-year-old girl because of the lines from “Ode to Michael Goldberg” “YIPPEE! I’m glad I’m alive / ‘I’m glad you’re alive / too, baby, because I want to fuck you.’” According to Ron Padgett, who read O’Hara’s poetry as a teenager in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “There was a certain high pitch in some of those poems that scared me, a certain kind of diction and intensity that I hadn’t seen before.”

Whatever pleasure O’Hara might have felt from the publication of his poetry was lost in the hectic schedule of the Museum, which was particularly demanding and Byzantine that season. Laboring to mount his “New Spanish Painting and Sculpture” show by the beginning of July—its novelty already dulled by the Guggenheim’s Spanish show, which had opened on June 6—O’Hara had to deal as well with the stress of political intrigue. The fate of the International Program, and of his boss Porter McCray, had come into question a year before at a special meeting at the summer estate of William Burden, the president of the Museum, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Burden had invited Blanchette and David Rockefeller, the members of the Coordinating Committee, and the group that came to be known as the “Young Turks,” to spend a long weekend. The Young Turks were led by Arthur Drexler and included Elizabeth Shaw, head of Public Information, Richard Griffith of the Film Library, and Emily Woodruff Stone, in charge of Membership and “special events.” At that meeting Drexler, the head of the Department of Architecture, accused McCray of “empire building”—that McCray’s field of study at Yale had been architecture as well had always created tension between them. In what became known in the oral history of the Museum as “The Revolt of the Young Turks,” McCray threatened to resign—a move he did not follow through on for two years, which left his office in a state of perpetual anxiety. Drexler’s resentment of McCray was shared by many curators throughout the Museum. “I think they were awfully jealous,” Eliza Parkinson, who became president of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, has said of the attacks on McCray, “because the International Council had become very important and it entailed a lot of travel and they all wanted to travel. He represented the Museum and there were all these parties that they’d hear about. But the fact was that he was setting up a little museum within the Museum.”

As McCray was O’Hara’s champion, the jockeying for power affected his own equilibrium. To make sure that O’Hara was not swept out as well because of his own resignation, McCray worked to have him promoted. This politicking was successful enough that O’Hara’s title was changed as of July 5, 1960, to Assistant Curator in the International Program for Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions. “Alfred on two occasions asked that Frank be removed,” claims McCray. “I pleaded his case in both instances and had Frank sustained against insinuations that he was bad for the institution. When I left the Museum I made a particular point that his position had been sufficiently entrenched. He had his position and title before I left. That was to try to fix him in a staff position. It was also intended as a sort of velvet glove restraint on Alfred. Beyond a certain point your position is more or less entrenched unless something violent happens.”

Such infighting dogged O’Hara every step of the way in the Museum. In his higher position he now had a new set of enemies, some of whom were simply viscerally uncomfortable with his homosexuality or his seemingly flip style or his intimate ties with Downtown artists. Rumors spread about the risqué poems that were being printed and the nude portraits of him being shown at the Tibor. Peter Selz, the German-born Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, became a particularly serious enemy. “There was a lot of hostility on the part of Selz,” recalls Waldo Rasmussen, who took over McCray’s job after his departure finally in July 1961. “He would have liked Frank to go. I remember one time he voiced his concern about him in a meeting I was in. The Director, René d’Harnoncourt, was present. Selz was complaining about Frank’s lack of qualifications. I made a crack about Frank being the Apollinaire of our times, which he didn’t think was very funny.”

While maintaining a seemingly oblivious demeanor O’Hara was actually quite adept at the ins and outs of these power games. He was Machiavellian enough to have survived and risen quickly up the ladder. “He became quite engagé in the cogs and all the maneuvering and manipulation and excitement of Museum matters,” says Helen Frankenthaler, who often heard about his struggles at lunch at Del Pezzo’s, a midtown restaurant that offered steak au pommes frites with red wine and a green salad for ninety-nine cents. To some extent, she said, “He was as involved with the Museum as he was with his friendships.” He and his colleague Waldo Rasmussen were competitive and had engaged in a few fights over the exhibition of certain artists. “Frank was ambitious, and he could be a tough customer in an argument,” Rasmussen has written. “His tongue could be sharp and, after a few drinks, more than that. He loved a fight, he loved drama, he enjoyed being a star, and all of these traits could be a trial minutes after they had been an entertainment. He wasn’t exactly the model museum employee nor the trustees’ dream.”

With the artworld becoming a hot spot for both the media and savvy investors, everyone’s projects in the Museum were becoming an occasion for debate and controversy. Luckily O’Hara enjoyed storms. Even his Spanish show, which opened for the press on July 20, proved to be difficult terrain. Fascist Generalissimo Franco was in power in Spain, and many critics distrusted any work that could be exported from that country. As Natalie Edgar wrote in Art News: “All in all, the new Spanish movement is a local propaganda asset because it seems to demonstrate the liberality of the regime. As a result it has the benevolent support of the government.” (When “The New American Painting” show had traveled to Spain, Motherwell had threatened to pull out until persuaded otherwise by McCray.) The Spanish paintings did lack some of the confrontational danger of the American Abstract Expressionist canvases. “At the time the work looked fresh and vigorous,” Rasmussen has written, “if perhaps a little ‘handsome’ by comparison with its American counterparts.” For the first time O’Hara was faced with the dilemma of writing enthusiastically about art toward which he was actually ambivalent. Learning to write with a forked tongue was not a happy experience for him. “Frank said something to me that was very untypical of him about the Spanish artists,” says Grace Hartigan. “He said, ‘It’s very hard for me to deal with sensibilities that are lesser than my own.’”

The weekend after the opening of the Spanish show—and a week after enthusiastically watching Eleanor Roosevelt second the nomination of Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic National Convention on Button’s TV—an extremely exhausted O’Hara took off for a long weekend to visit Vincent Warren, who was appearing in summer stock in Cohasset forty miles from Cape Cod. (“I never watched one before and had no idea that some of those senators were as Al Capp as they really are,” he had written to Warren, disappointed at Stevenson’s defeat.) The play was The Pajama Game, in which Warren excelled in the “Steam Heat” number. After a month of separation, they rekindled their romance in a secluded cove where they sunned on large rocks rising up out of the cold clear water. “And the rocks place is really great,” he wrote to Warren on his return to the city on July 26. “I think it must be sort of like Greece, if one knew what Greece is like, and we spent the afternoon like Greek lovers who had been sent to different battles and had just gotten back together.” Two days later he remembered the rocks in “Cohasset”:

the huge rocks

are like twin beds

and the cove tide

is a rug slipping

out from under us

The trip satisfied O’Hara somewhat for a few weeks. But the uncertainty of Warren’s comings and goings occasionally tormented him; he could not help but question the fractured nature of his love life, though he seemed unable to change the pattern. As he wrote on August 10 in “Ballad,” one of his more depressed poems about Warren: “why is it that I am always separated from the one I love it is because of / some final thing.” O’Hara wrote the poem a few days after he had written to Warren, “I have been very depressed this week because I have found everyone so boring compared to you, and there’s nothing I can do about that, but it makes me feel guilty towards them.” The situation was relieved near the end of August when O’Hara returned to Cohasset for a few days, the two of them traveled on to New London for the last performance of the Connecticut College Dance Festival, featuring Merce Cunningham’s new ballet Crises. Warren then returned with O’Hara to New York where he spent the fall supering for the Royal Ballet production of Swan Lake and the New York City Ballet production of Firebird, in which he carried a banner. In “Flag Day,” written for Warren’s twenty-second birthday on August 31, O’Hara pleasantly welcomed him back by realizing “you shared the first year of your manhood with me.”

O’Hara was relieved to have Warren back. But somehow the perfect circle of body and soul he had described the previous November in “Poem ‘À la recherche d’ Gertrude Stein’” (originally ‘À la recherche d’ Gertrude Stein et d’ Vincent Warren’) no longer seemed capable of circumscribing them:

when I am in your presence I feel life is strong

and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine

and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me

sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured

by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs

spread out making an eternal circle together

Whether Warren was in the city or away, he obviously was intent on keeping an independent distance. When the subject of living together arose, he insisted that he wanted to keep his own apartment. Mostly, though, such subjects were not discussed. Warren was too young. O’Hara tended to store his private thoughts in his poems and so flash them to Warren indirectly. “The poems always said much more than he said,” claims Warren. “He never talked that way to me, but he said it in the poetry. That was moving, but frightening. I didn’t withdraw completely, but in the end it really did scare me. I could never match the emotion in his poetry. I think you’d have to be a thirty-five-year-old man in love with a twenty-year-old person to do it. I wasn’t ready for that.” Warren would express his doubts and reservations by shying away during certain weeks from sleeping with O’Hara—a maneuver O’Hara reacted to with grief. That one such period of unavailability occurred almost immediately upon Warren’s return to New York in September was a rude message to O’Hara. “I suppose I should have realized it, but for the last few weeks my pillow has been rather a sodden mass,” he wrote to Ashbery on September 30. “It really gave me a shock, and has even caused me to work quite hard; anything not to think. I would like to move to another city. It is very funny to be around somebody who is terribly fond of one, but doesn’t want to romp. It makes me feel like Edwin Denby.”

At the same time that O’Hara’s affair with Warren was unraveling, his intense friendship with Grace Hartigan was ending. Hartigan had never been easy. She had become even more difficult recently as she disapproved of his moves toward Patsy Southgate and Mike Goldberg as friends and toward Vincent Warren as a lover. Perhaps she sensed O’Hara beginning to drift away from her as he had once drifted toward her from Freilicher. At a party she gave to which O’Hara brought Warren, Hartigan had drawn Joe LeSueur aside and complained, “I like the idea of Frank having sex and everything, but does he have to bring his boyfriends around?” Freilicher, too, had apparently been annoyed when Vincent Warren, dressed as Marlene Dietrich in wig, makeup, and trench coat, appeared at her Halloween party to join O’Hara after leaving a friend’s costume party. “Frank was relaxed,” remembers Warren. “I think I did shock Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan. They weren’t having a costume party. Frank wanted me to come, though. I think Frank was like pushing me down their throats. I had to try to brazen it out. But John Button was like ‘Wow.’ He was looking at the makeup. I thought that was good that somebody appreciated good work.” According to Hartigan, her complaint about Warren was simply his unavailability to O’Hara. “Frank always gave his heart,” says Hartigan. “The men he fell in love with were always cooler than he was. We couldn’t understand, because Frank was so adorable and lovable and wonderful.”

Hartigan did not break up with O’Hara because of Warren. She had met Dr. Winston Price, a medical scientist at Johns Hopkins. As Larry Rivers described him in Drawings and Digressions, he was “a scientist who was going to discover a cure for the common cold.” Hartigan decided to move to Baltimore to marry him. In the context of her psychoanalysis, she also decided that she would never have a fulfilling marriage unless she also broke off all relations with O’Hara and John Bernard Myers. “I was going to a shrink,” recalls Hartigan. “What I had is known as ‘neurotic.’ I had lovers and I was in love with homosexual men. Two. John Myers and Frank. They were the ones I talked to every day, they were the ones who knew me better than anyone in the world. They were the ones I told everything to, who understood me. My lovers I slept with. I met Winston Price, who existed for me on all levels. He was a brilliant man, a collector, a scientist, witty, a great man, and I wanted to have a total marriage. My shrink said, ‘You cannot have a total marriage and be in love with a homosexual man.’ So I cut it.” Hartigan’s method was to write a “Dear John” letter to O’Hara informing him of her decision.

O’Hara was furious. From that day forward he made only mean, catty remarks about Hartigan. He liked to regale friends with stories about how she supposedly used to pick up men on the streets for sex while she was painting to get rid of excess emotion and then return immediately to work. He reviewed her 1963 show in Kulchur magazine badly, accusing her of “repetitiousness of feeling” and “vulgarity of spirit.” “She wrote those letters in a very dramatic fashion,” says Freilicher of Hartigan’s letters to O’Hara and Myers. “It was a big ego trip. She broke with them formally.” According to Schuyler, “Frank would never ever forgive that.” A few years later Hartigan called up saying that she was in New York and badly wanted to stop by. As he sat waiting for her, O’Hara was fuming. Then he noticed a small painting she had once given him. “Oh no she doesn’t,” he said. He took the picture off the wall and stuck it in a closet. Nothing was resolved at their awkward meeting that afternoon.

While Hartigan was exaggerated and radical in her split, she was merely acting out in broad strokes the gradual drift of many of O’Hara’s friends from his early days in New York. As old friends married, raised families, or settled into jobs and careers, they tended to be less available for the bohemian life. O’Hara was turning to new, younger friends. “Anyone who got married sort of left,” says Hartigan. “Kenneth Koch married Janice and they had their kind of life going. The people who hung around were people who had loose marriages like Phil Guston and Musa where he could stay and close the Cedar bar or go to a coffee shop or on to his studio and talk until dawn. But once someone had a family life, then they weren’t part of it.”

The next departure followed on January 15 when Vincent Warren left New York for two months to dance with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal. At the time of his December audition for the stint O’Hara had wishfully written in “Variations on Saturday,” “I’m staying with you / fuck Canada.” A barometer of O’Hara’s mood toward Warren was the palm tree in Warren’s fifth-floor walk-up around the corner on Avenue A, which O’Hara would water while Warren was away. During a rough spot while Warren was in Cohasset O’Hara had written in “Ballad”:

you will hate certain intimacies which to me were just getting to know

you

and at the same time

you know that I don’t want to know you

because the palm stands in the window disgusted

by being transplanted, she feels that she’s been outraged and she has

by well-wisher me, she well wishes that I leave her alone and my self alone

but tampering

where does it come from? childhood?

O’Hara took this last farewell in stride, his temporary acceptance evident in his humor about the emblematic palm tree in a letter to Warren two days after his departure: “You’ll be relieved to know that I not only watered your favorite palm, but I also washed off its fronds under the faucet and it now looks very healthy and ‘in period’ beside the lamp. If I keep at it I could make that room into a set for Salammbô with this start.”

On January 20, 1960, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in stylish top hat and morning coat as thirty-fifth president of the United States. Reading a commemorative poem for the Harvard graduate from a podium on the East Front of the Capitol, Cambridge poet Robert Frost, his white hair blowing in the wind, proclaimed in stately lines of iambic pentameter—the rhythm so exploded in Allen’s recent anthology—“A golden age of poetry and power / Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.” (Kenneth Koch’s parody of Frost, “Mending Sump,” was one of the more critically commented-upon poems in the anthology.)

Kennedy’s inauguration on that cold, clear January day marked the beginning of an awakening political interest in O’Hara and his group that had been largely dormant in them during the fifties. Kennedy was an Irish-Catholic Navy veteran Harvard graduate from Massachusetts, and his ascendancy to power meant greater access to the White House by a constituency to which O’Hara had ties. “Frank was a very political animal,” says his brother, Philip, who in 1959 began visiting the city to have lunch with him. “He campaigned for John Lindsay. He was devastated when Jack Kennedy died. We used to talk politics a lot in New York.” Throughout the sixties O’Hara was very opinionated about current issues such as civil rights, the Congo, Vietnam.

The politics of his group, though, was more often that of parody and bemused humor. Typical was Kenneth Koch’s play The Election, which was put on at the Living Theatre each night of election week, following Jack Gelber’s hugely successful underground play The Connection, about drug addicts waiting for dope. In Koch’s parody of The Connection, the candidates Nixon and Kennedy, acting stoned as if on heroin, wait around for the vote. Larry Rivers played Lyndon Johnson, Bill Berkson John F. Kennedy, Arnold Weinstein Richard Nixon. O’Hara, impatient with rehearsals and acting, did not participate in either The Election or Koch’s later art play The Tinguely Machine Mystery at the Jewish Museum in 1965. (His disinterest in acting was as strong as his disinterest in playing games. At a party at the poet Kenward Elmslie’s a game of charades was played with Gian Carlo Menotti and Leonard Bernstein as team captains, but O’Hara preferred to sit out on the sidelines drinking and talking.) A particular fascination in the new politics, though, for O’Hara and his friends—as for most of America—was the thirty-one-year-old first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy. She appeared just a few weeks after the inauguration in his poem “Who Is William Walton?” inspired by news of the first lady’s visit to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery:

he isn’t the English composer

and I’m quite aware that everybody

doesn’t have to know who everybody

else is

but why did he take Mrs Kennedy

to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery worthy

as it is of her attention

Walton was actually an artist and close friend of the Kennedys who worked as an adviser to Mrs. Kennedy on the redecoration of the White House.

If Kennedy’s inauguration marked the commencement of the public sixties in America, the ascendancy of Bill Berkson—the John F. Kennedy of the stage of the Living Theatre—marked the onset of O’Hara’s personal sixties. For the rest of the year, Vincent Warren’s comings and goings could be charted in O’Hara’s poetry by the shift between the “open style” of his love poems to Warren and the “closed style” of his experimental poems of parody, reportage, dialogue, and ventriloquism to, or in collaboration with, Bill Berkson. For a while O’Hara had vacillated on Berkson. “Is it true . . . that you don’t like Golden Bill—if so, you’d better rush over here because Joe hates him and Vincent tolerates him out of a spirit of one-upmanship,” he wrote to Ashbery on February 1. “You could have such fun with them. I on the other hand still like him very much.” At other times, though, his assessment of “Golden Bill” was less positive, especially when he was appeasing Warren. “It’s a shame you’re not here to enjoy the decline of my affection for Bill Berkson, with whom I had lunch today and who acted very stuffy and boring,” O’Hara wrote to Warren during the same period. “As a matter of fact he was acting quite a bit like Kenneth when he’s in a bad mood, though a little less pointed.” Eventually, though, as Warren’s place in his life became less and less dependable, O’Hara began to depend on Berkson as a companion.

This development, as O’Hara indicated to Ashbery, was extremely irritating to Warren and LeSueur. “I think all of us thought that Bill was latching onto a poetic star, and we were all upset when they started writing collaborations,” claims Warren. “It was like Bill was using Frank’s reputation.” At the time Berkson, who had done translations of Cendrars and Aretino and won the Dylan Thomas Memorial Poetry Award at the New School in 1959, had not yet moved into his apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. Warren, while only a year older than Berkson—his birthday on August 31 only a day after Berkson’s—developed a resentment against Berkson as “still a kid” early on. “I remember visiting his apartment where his mother lived and being impressed because she had a costume designed by Adrienne for Greta Garbo on the wall,” says Warren. “Then I realized that Bill was still like a teenager in a funny way. He showed us his bathroom where he used to go and steam himself. He’d close the door and turn the bathroom into a steamroom. All the paint was flaking. Here we were on Fifth Avenue and this kid was ruining his mother’s bathroom to make a steambath. . . . Frank and Bill necked in the back of a car, according to Edwin Denby. Edwin loved telling me that story. There was an attraction there. Here was another typical American boy, more upper-class than me, but another of Frank’s images I guess.” Berkson has no memory of the backseat incident.

For LeSueur, who had soon grown fond of having Warren around the apartment, Berkson was an interruption of a different caliber. As Mike Goldberg put it, “One had the feeling with Vincent that he was just another pretty face. He was in the background. You didn’t feel that with Bill. He was a presence. It was hard to find out who the hell Bill was, though, for the simple reason that he was concentrating on Frank so much.” It was this single-minded concentration that drove LeSueur to distraction. “Frank was nuts about Bill Berkson,” says LeSueur. “I remember him telling me about him before I even met him. Then I met him, and he was indeed attractive but he was insufferable. He would come to visit. They would be having a conversation and Bill Berkson would never look at me. If I ever said anything Frank would maybe look at me. But mainly they just looked at each other. They cut me out completely. Bill wasn’t nice to me at all.”

If others felt excluded by their friendship, O’Hara benefited from the companionship. Their pleasure in each other’s company was mutual. Their sexual attraction was not. It was the deciding imbalance. “It seems to me in retrospect like being best friends in the eighth grade,” says Berkson. “You know how intense that can be? Complicated by a lot of rhetoric and expression, person-to-person it was like being in love.” To outsiders they displayed many of the telltale signs of being in love. “I once saw Frank and Bill Berkson together on a Sunday noon as if they’d been sleeping together and had just woken up,” recalls Ned Rorem. “They were walking down Greenwich Avenue. One would race ahead to point out something in a shop window. The other would catch up and they would gesture excitedly. Then the other would get ahead for a while. I didn’t cross over to say ‘hello’ to them. I didn’t want to disturb the moment. They were like Daphnis and Chloë together.” According to Larry Rivers, “Bill liked him better than any woman he knew. Maybe not that way. But he really liked him.” Many were the afternoons when friends on the beach in the Hamptons would watch O’Hara and Berkson walking arm in arm or frolicking nude in the waves. (Once when O’Hara had forgotten to bring his swimsuit he appeared on the beach in a colorful pair of women’s panties.)

O’Hara was Berkson’s mentor as well. This was a role into which he stepped quite comfortably as he entered his late thirties—not only with Berkson but with most of the young poets and painters who began to seek him out. He was as perceptive a lay psychoanalyst as he was a guide to all the arts. “He really came into his own as a sort of confidant-confessor,” LeSueur has written. “Except Frank, unlike an analyst or priest, did most of the talking. He was a born talker to begin with, and he especially liked giving advice, which often came down to nothing more than encouragement: ‘you can do it, all you have to do is make up your mind; you’ve got lots of talent, so what’s stopping you?’ etc. etc. But it wasn’t what he said that counted; it was his authority and passion, along with his marvelous understanding of a friend’s needs, that made the difference.” He gave Berkson plenty of advice. “I was involved with somebody in the early sixties and I used to talk with him about this tragic love affair that I had,” says Berkson. “It wasn’t tragic, it was sort of pathetic. And he was very against it because he said, ‘This person’s going to draw you into café society and that could be ruinous.’” Berkson’s casual affairs with Uptown society girls and beauties were numerous enough for Truman Capote to describe him to an interviewer as having “cut a wide swathe” in sixties New York. (He was thinking particularly of Bianca Jagger, whom Berkson met in Acapulco in 1967, a year after O’Hara died.) So O’Hara had plenty of good material to work with. Typical of his sizing up of Berkson was his mention in a letter to Warren that Berkson had “told me some anecdotes about the girls he goes out with and he doesn’t really seem interested in them except for the obvious reasons, and even then sort of amused rather than charmed.” “Bill Berkson once told me that Frank and he became such good friends, and he was sort of swamped by Frank’s charm, and it was sort of like being wooed,” says Schuyler of O’Hara’s ability—and tendency—to dissect character. “Then one night walking across Tompkins Square Park Frank started to take him apart one piece at a time, telling him everything that was wrong with him. It wasn’t always alcohol. Something had happened that had piqued him. Then POW!”

As stimulating for both of them was O’Hara’s rather coy and unofficial slipping on of the mantle of the older poet. He was a born teacher who preferred to do his teaching informally. Extremely anti-authoritarian, he offered his tips and observations in the guise of a friend or lover. Unlike Kenneth Koch, O’Hara was uncomfortable in the formal role of teacher. He shone less brilliantly during his one semester teaching a poetry workshop at the New School in 1963 to such future second-generation New School poets as Tony Towle, Gerard Malanga, Joe Ceravolo, and Jim Brodey, than he did talking casually with young poets at the Cedar Bar or at his apartment. Berkson was stamped by the education he received daily from O’Hara. “Silly, as Auden once reminded an audience, has a root sense in soulfulness,” says Berkson. “We talked very seriously, soulfully, about many things. I’m sure my part was often ponderous, inchoate, but I listened hard to what he said about poetry, about all the arts, about people, about living.” O’Hara always seemed to have James Joyce’s Collected Poems lying around his apartment ready to be opened. He owned D. H. Lawrence’s poetry in the three-volume set and referred to “Ship of Death” constantly, as well as to another old favorite, Auden’s The Orators. His bookshelves were crammed with diverse volumes, which Berkson liked to take down and look at, especially the two volumes of Anatomy of Melancholy, Sinclair’s Divine Comedy with facing original and prose translations, Fantomas by Pierre Souvestre, and the poetry of John Wheelwright.

As Berkson telegraphed the experience in his biographical note in An Anthology of New York Poets, published in 1970 and dedicated to O’Hara: “General ‘cultural’ education through friendship with Frank O’Hara: the Stravinski-Balanchine Agon (and Edwin Denby’s essay on it), Satie (we created four-hand annoyances at various apartments, once played for Henze in Rome). Feldman, Turandot, a certain Prokofiev toccata. Virgil Thomson (I had heard a recording of Four Saints at Harry Smith’s, Providence, 1957), movies . . . we read Wyatt together, recited Racine, skipped through galleries.”

The first poem written after Warren’s departure from New York was “For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson” with an epigraph from D. H. Lawrence, a favorite poet of both O’Hara and Berkson. A month’s silence had been a sign of O’Hara’s confusion about direction in his tightly entwined art and love. The writing of the poem on February 14, Valentine’s Day, was a stab at a solution. O’Hara had begun—and would continue through the sixties—to look for another Vincent Warren to give breath and life to his poetry. Berkson gave him energy, and an immediate audience, but not the warmth of plausibly returned romantic affection. The coy trick of titling the poem for the holiday of Chinese New Year’s rather than Valentine’s Day was symptomatic. The poem, which begins “Behind New York there’s a face,” was filled with lines about hiding and peeking such as “so / what if I did look up your trunks and see it.” Its tone was sharp and sophisticated rather than tender. “There are signals to me in poems that I didn’t read as signals until later,” says Berkson, for whom much of the drama of O’Hara’s emotional life was as unfathomable as it had been for Warren. “There’s incredible rage in ‘For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson.’ How much of it is directed at me or how much the ‘you’ in there is me I’m not sure. But some of it is I’m sure.”

Working a new job as an editorial associate on Art News Annual, Berkson was a steady escort of O’Hara’s at many art openings of burning interest to both of them that winter. A high point was Michael Goldberg’s show at the Martha Jackson Gallery, where the painter seemed finally to deliver on the promise O’Hara had been touting for several years. Reviewing his “black paintings,” a critic in Art News claimed, “Goldberg is one of the most talented and knowledgeable young artists on the New York scene. These pictures are his most monumental and distinctive to date.” For O’Hara the show was “absolutely major.” Writing to Ashbery he ascribed to the paintings “the context of a grandeur, authority and seriousness which gave me that impressive and pleasurable sensation of wondering if I really knew Mike at all. I don’t think anyone else saw this emerging during the summer either, except in one called Anthology of Greek Tragedy, so he must have been keeping a lot hidden in his deeps. They were somber, harsh and damning in a beautiful way, like the thickness of Hamlet, which otherwise seems so lyrically formal. What am I talking about? It’s a good thing I don’t work for the Tribune.” (Following O’Hara’s lead, Ashbery had begun writing art criticism and had eventually become an art critic for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune.)

O’Hara was becoming more involved as well with the work of Alex Katz, whose show opened at the Stable in February. As with Rivers, O’Hara involved himself multiply with Katz as critic, model, and artistic director. Boyish, with a tall forehead, thick black hair and a broad, stammering New York accent, Katz was an admirer of Pollock who worked representationally, eventually becoming famous for his cool portraits and flat standing sculptures. Reviewing his first show of Cézanne-inspired landscapes at RoKo Gallery in 1954, O’Hara had accused him of “an almost Oriental calm.” In 1958, though, after marrying Ada del Moro, Katz became more involved in portraiture, his works taking on the racier quality of heightened gossip, similar to O’Hara’s poems. (While Katz’s work seemed to some like early Popism, his choice of friends such as Edwin Denby rather than mass culture icons such as movie stars for subjects kept him within the New York School party.) In 1959 Katz developed a new technique of cutting a figure from the canvas and pasting it to plywood, leading to his directly painted cut-outs. One of the first of these was a five-foot-high Frank O’Hara. In 1961 he did a painting of O’Hara and Berkson together in uniforms as Sailor and Marine. O’Hara bought Blackie, a mad scene of a few images of a successively smaller figure climbing into a wall, from Katz’s 1958 show. Katz also lent O’Hara Ada on the Beach and gave him a sunset painting—all of which hung on O’Hara’s wall. Such gifts began to be seen as bribes by some detractors, of course, but O’Hara’s enthusiasm was hardly contrived. He pushed Katz from the early quiet of interiors and landscape to more extroverted figures. “The great thing this year I think is Alex Katz,” he wrote to Ashbery on February 1. “His show last year was outstanding but included some rather atypical or perhaps I should say typical interiors relating to the Matisse of the Goldfish, but with figure things that were startling and original.”

“I think he was mostly involved with me as an artist, not as a person really,” says Katz of O’Hara’s strong pushing of his point of view with him in the early sixties. “I remember one night it was really late and he started telling me what I should be doing and what I shouldn’t be doing. I really got kind of pissed off and was about to throw him out of the house. He went right up to the edge, and stayed on that edge, and never went over it. I realized Frank figured out what he was going to say very carefully and got enough nerve to do it when he was drunk. . . . He thought I was going to turn into a Morandi-type painter with those pretty little paintings, and that’s what he really objected to. I figured what he said was right. . . . Frank told everyone what to do in his work and in everything else. He was really an out, aggressive guy. Allen Ginsberg is a little like Frank. But Allen is in a very small area. He’s just in poetry. Frank was in painting, dancing, everything he could get his hands on. He affected artists in other fields.” O’Hara prodded Katz toward the large scale of The Smile, his 1963 cinematic close-up painting in the permanent collection of the Whitney.

After Berkson, the next young poet with whom O’Hara was involved that season was Diane di Prima, who had started, with LeRoi Jones, The Floating Bear magazine, its name taken from a passage in Winnie the Pooh. Di Prima had entered O’Hara’s life through Freddy Herko, a dancer who was Vincent Warren’s roommate. Warren and Herko had both appeared in James Waring’s Dances Before the Wall, which O’Hara had seen in 1958 at the Henry Street Playhouse and memorialized in 1959, after he met Warren, in a poem by the same name, spoofing the dance world:

suddenly everybody gets excited and starts

running around the Henry St. Playhouse which is

odd I don’t care whose foot it is and Midi

Garth goes tearing down the aisle towards Fred

Herko while Sybil Shearer swoons in the balcony

which is like a box when she’s in it and Paul

Taylor tells Bob Rauschenberg it’s on fire

and Bob Rauschenberg says what’s on fire and

by that time it is all over but the plangent

memory of a rainy evening in lower Manhattan

A red-haired Beat poet in her mid-twenties hailing from a family of first-generation Italians in Brooklyn, di Prima became one of O’Hara’s early protégées. As she wrote in “For Frank O’Hara, An Elegy”:

you my big brother brought me up

brought me to openings, admired my dumpy style

bought me so many lunches! how often I vowed

to buy you lunch when I got a little richer

mornings I’d bring onion bread to 9th St. for Sunday brunch

our walks in Tompkins Square, St. Brigit’s looming aside

Di Prima’s first extended exposure to O’Hara had been in August 1960, when she worked as stage manager for the production of his Awake in Spain at the Living Theatre’s Monday Night Series. “He was backstage a lot and was kind of babysitter for my daughter, who was two,” recalls di Prima, “while I was the stage manager for this play, which had about forty or fifty characters in it and a million props.” Faced with such extravagance, its director, James Waring (the choreographer with whom Warren had been briefly involved), decided to use seven actors sitting at a table reading from the script while changing hats for different parts. “I hope Jimmy doesn’t make it too serious,” O’Hara had written to Warren. “There are only three serious speeches, one by Marilyn Monroe, one by the Crown Prince Frank and one by Thomas Hardy which is the closing line.” (Hardy’s supposedly serious closing line was “O dynasties, incessantly tumbling.”) Included in the play as well was a line that de Kooning told O’Hara Arshile Gorky had said to him once as they were leaving a Kay Francis movie: “It’s terrible under Kay Francis’s armpits.” (O’Hara liked Gorky’s weird aperçu enough to include it also in “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday & About Arshile Gorky.”) “I love the way Frank used rhyme in Awake in Spain,” says Koch. “He did it in a very original way. He used obvious forced rhymes. He made a beautiful thing out of that. There are speeches in which the rhymes are as awkward and forced as they could be.” O’Hara was no less conventional in his suggestions for a background music tape, on which he wanted to include Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Capriccio Ensemble, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, and Debussy’s Iberia.

Di Prima became closer to O’Hara as her involvement with LeRoi Jones intensified. She had worked with Jones and his wife pasting up and editing Yugen, Jones’s magazine, which had appeared erratically since 1958, publishing Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Creeley, and Olson, as well as introducing such poets as Peter Orlovsky (his first published poem appeared in Yugen 3) and Rochelle Owens. Di Prima then began The Floating Bear when she and Jones became romantically involved—which led to di Prima’s bearing Jones’s child, Dominique, in 1962. The Floating Bear, which published O’Hara’s “Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think,” “Song” (Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?), “Cohasset,” and “Beer for Breakfast” in the second issue in February 1961, and “For the Chinese New Year & Bill Berkson” in the fifteenth issue in November, was more of a newsletter than a magazine, as it was run off by Jones and di Prima quickly on a mimeograph machine with di Prima doing all the stenciling. “It was like writing a letter to a bunch of friends,” she has said of the experimental newsletter, which was never sold but was supported by contributions and frequently ran work by Olson, Creeley, Burroughs, Jones, and O’Hara. Because of her intimate involvement with Jones, di Prima was also privy to signs of the light flirting that went on at the time. According to di Prima, “When Roi and I were in the thick of our affair I said to him, ‘Let’s run away together to Mexico.’ He said, ‘You’re the second person who asked me to do that this week.’ I said, ‘Who was the other one?’ He said, ‘Frank.’”

Di Prima adjusted easily to the casualness and disorder of the publication process with O’Hara. It was as if this personal poet, who used poems as physical anchors to the world and his friends, was not entirely easy about giving them up. His critical ambivalence about his work did not help either. Writing to Ashbery in February in praise of his “acoherent” poem “Europe,” which collaged found passages from such unlikely sources as Esquire magazine and a British children’s book titled Beryl of the Biplane, and which had recently been published in Big Table, O’Hara claimed, “I’ve only been doing very few poems and they are pretty much blabbing along chicly while sitting on WC Williams’ cracker barrel with my legs crossed.” This attitude could be balanced, or contradicted, by an equally blaring self-confidence. One evening in 1961 he remarked to LeSueur of the work of a poet who was winning lots of academic prizes, “It’ll slip into oblivion without my help.” He then immediately began praising several poets whom he had recently read and admired. “But what about your work?” LeSueur asked. “What about it?” O’Hara replied blankly, as if he had not understood the question. “I mean,” LeSueur said, “how do you think it stacks up against their stuff?” O’Hara declared simply, “There’s nobody writing better poetry than I am.”

“When I tried to get manuscripts for The Floating Bear from him I would go up to his place and he’d let me look through everything including the dirty laundry,” says di Prima. “He’d finish poems and put them anyplace. His typewriter was always on his kitchen table. He was always in the middle of a piece. But as pieces got done they just wandered anywhere. The towel drawer was a very good place because I guess towels were flat. I would just take whatever I wanted. Often he didn’t have another copy. That didn’t seem to be an issue or a point. When John Wieners lived on his couch for a long time, John wound up leaving a whole manuscript behind, which Frank gave to me and I later gave to an editor of a magazine who professed that he was going to publish it as a book but never did.” O’Hara applied Personism by abandoning big literary magazines and publishing poems only in small magazines by editors who solicited them face-to-face.

On March 10 Vincent Warren finally returned to New York for what would be his last extended stay. Writing to him in Montreal on the Monday before his arrival, O’Hara concluded—after railing against a mutual friend who was getting on his nerves—“You are the closest person to me in the world so I tend to rant on to you about all my insecurities. I hope it’s not too boring and despicable. The only thing I’ve ever done that shows my virtue or sensibility is loving you only and completely.” Off to such an enthusiastic start, O’Hara dedicated himself to making life with Warren as good as he hoped it could be, beginning with meeting him at 11:30 on a Friday night at Idlewild. Three days later O’Hara slipped happily back into his “I do this I do that” mode by writing “Vincent and I Inaugurate a Movie Theatre” about a trip to the Charles Movie Theatre on Avenue B a block east of Warren’s apartment to see Alice Adams—a black-and-white 1930s film with Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray, about a social-climbing small-town girl who falls in love. In the smoke-filled balcony O’Hara spotted Ginsberg and Orlovsky who were preparing to depart soon for India:

Now that the Charles Theatre has opened

it looks like we’re going to have some wonderful times

Allen and Peter, why are you going away

our country’s black and white past spread out

before us is no time to spread over India

O’Hara mailed the poem to Paris to Ginsberg and Orlovsky, who had stopped by and left a good-bye note for him and Warren before leaving. He called it “a little souvenir of a night when I saw you but you didn’t see me—I was too hungry to wait for you to get out of the movie.”

A bit of a didactic jab, however, was in evidence throughout the poem, despite its light and friendly tone; O’Hara was impatient with Ginsberg’s flirtation with Oriental cultures and especially religion. To O’Hara, it smacked of posturing and violated his own sense of New York as Mecca. As he had written to Barbara Guest in December 1959, “Allen is getting to look so Christ-like with his beard growing and his hair in back very long and his black silk suit. . . . He is as sweet as ever and as worldly, but it seems a little ominous of any Fun and Frolic to be found in that quarter (a remark which bears out Paul Goodman’s estimation of me as shallow and superficial, sans doute).” Ginsberg was aware of O’Hara’s attitude and of the issues that divided them. “In that way I think there was a slight limitation of his scope,” says Ginsberg of O’Hara’s slyness about his Hindic interest, “because his canon still was American-European. He did accept a slight extension of that in the French Surrealist poets and a great extension in Mayakovsky.” Certainly Ginsberg’s travels were outstripping O’Hara’s, as was his reaching out for non-Western poetic inspiration. Ginsberg spent the period from March 1961 to July 1963 traveling to France, Morocco, Greece, Israel, India, Vietnam, and India.

From March through May O’Hara wrote the last of the poems in the cycle of poems to Warren—sixteen of which were collected in Love Poems (Tentative Title), published by Tibor de Nagy Press in 1965. The basic feeling of the poems of that spring was sadness and regret, forecasting the inevitable collapse of the affair. As O’Hara wrote in “Vincent, (2)” on April 17:

this morning a blimp is blocking 53rd Street

as inexplicable and final as a sigh

when you are about to say why you did sigh

but it is already done and we will never

be happy together again never sure

Such melancholy occasionally lifted. For a few months in the spring, Warren worked building bookcases for O’Hara, to earn some extra cash. O’Hara loved having him around. He wrote him poems with dance themes such as “Mary Desti’s Ass” on April 15, referring to the author of a catty book about Isadora Duncan. (Introducing the poem at his S.U.N.Y., Buffalo, Reading in 1964 O’Hara said, “I thought that was very funny to say The True Life of Isadora Duncan and talk about yourself all the time.”) On April 18 he wrote “At Kamin’s Dance Bookshop,” referring to a bookshop frequented by Warren on Fifty-third Street near the Museum. On May 6 he wrote the erotic hymn to fellatio, “Poem” (Twin spheres full of fur and noise):

Twin spheres full of fur and noise

rolling up my belly beddening on my chest

and then my mouth is full of suns

that softness seems so anterior to that hardness

that mouth that is used to talking too much

speaks at last of the tenderness of Ancient China

In many of O’Hara’s poems of that period, though, Warren was missing. “Early on Sunday,” written on May 1, gives a picture of O’Hara alone in bed in his apartment on a morning that might normally have been shared:

how sad the lower East side is on Sunday morning in May

eating yellow eggs

eating St. Bridget’s benediction

washing the world down with rye and Coca-Cola and the news

Joe stumbles home

pots and pans crash to the floor

everyone’s happy again

LeSueur remained as the dependable, even taken-for-granted, figure of “Joe’s Jacket,” written at the beginning of O’Hara’s romance with Warren a year and a half earlier.

The final break-up poem was written by O’Hara on May 20, a few months before it was totally clear that circumstances would keep them from hardly ever being in the same city at the same time again. In “St. Paul and All That” O’Hara uses his alias for Warren for the last time. (The use of a saint’s name was partly O’Hara’s dig at Roman Catholicism, which he considered synonymous with the repression of homosexuality.) The poem begins:

Totally abashed and smiling

I walk in

sit down and

face the frigidaire

“When Vincent left him he wrote this poem about staring at a refrigerator door,” says Hartigan. “That was the coldness of Vincent.” Hartigan’s interpretation, however, was skewed by her own mixed feelings about O’Hara’s boyfriends. Most simply the appliance was O’Hara’s vanishing point when he sat down at the kitchen table to type. Emotionally, its coldness was an objective correlative for the devastation O’Hara felt as the man he believed embodied his possibility for love and happiness slipped away. The coldness was not Vincent’s, but Vincent’s absence. Warren, for him, like poetry itself, had always been associated with the sun. So the poem was crepuscular:

the sun doesn’t necessarily set, sometimes it just disappears

when you’re not here someone walks in and says

“hey,

there’s no dancer in that bed”

O the Polish summers! those drafts!

those black and white teeth!

you never come when you say you’ll come but on the other hand you do come

O’Hara did not know when Warren departed on May 27 for three months of summer stock in Santa Fe that “St. Paul and All That” would be so final. It was the first time, however, that he had not seen Warren off.

Both O’Hara and Berkson tried to shift gears while Warren was in town. They saw less of each other. “Early on, before the deluge, I was probably the first bone of contention,” says Berkson of his uneasy presence in their relationship toward the end. “Frank sometimes said, ‘Vincent is very upset that we’re spending so much time together.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to mess this up.’” After Warren’s departure, however, O’Hara, who abhorred a vacuum, drew Berkson back in. He began, in the poetry, with “Drifts of a Thing That Bill Berkson Noticed,” written on June 19. They then began to collaborate. “In 1961 Frank and I were walking along First Avenue and noticed the funny steeples of St. Bridget’s Church on Tompkins Square Park in the distance—one steeple curved limply. We were delighted by the sight, and later that day I went home and wrote a poem in outright imitation of Frank called ‘Hymn to Saint Bridget,’ which became the first St. Bridget poem. . . . Most were written at Frank’s place, some at Larry’s in Southampton, taking turns at the typewriter.” They then started a series of exchanges of poems disguised as office memos called “F.Y.I.” poems after the title of the in-house organ of Newsweek, where Berkson had worked as a summer intern in 1956 and 1957, and the “Fobb correspondence,” poems written between two imaginary Fobb brothers named Fidelio (Berkson) and Angelicus (O’Hara). “They’re really like the two of us talking,” says Berkson of the poems.

O’Hara mailed some of the collaborations to Ashbery, who had begun a magazine in Paris with the writer Harry Matthews titled Locus Solus after the novel of that title by Raymond Roussel. “Bill and I have become pretty inseparable,” he wrote to Ashbery on July 10. “We are almost finished with a book together, which we plan to send for your perusal. Kenneth has seen some of the collaborations already (1 or 2) and didn’t like them—but since his criticism of them was that we seem to like each other too much in them, I don’t think you will necessarily have the same reaction. Then too of course perhaps they are terrible. We are going to call it something like THE MEMORANDA OF ANGELICUS FOBB, INCLUDING SUNDRY HYMNS TO ST. BRIDGET AND MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. Do you think this is a nice idea? The St. Bridget’s poems and a few others are actual collaborations line for line or passage for passage, but the Fobb (our initials) poems are mostly a bunch of ‘answer’ poems (like ‘Collected Poems’ and ‘Collected Proses’). It’s been loads of fun doing them, and I hadn’t written anything for so long it was quite a relief when we accidentally started and they turned into a whole series. I suppose they really began in the Hôtel de l’Université that time.” In a letter to Warren that same week a mentally intoxicated O’Hara wrote, “Bill and I are almost finished with a book of poetry and prose which we modestly figure will be the mid-20th-century equivalent of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. We did a lot out at Larry’s the weekend of the 4th of July.” Of the batch, Ashbery chose to print only O’Hara’s “F.M.I.” and Berkson’s “F.Y.I. 6/25/61 (The Picnic Hour)” in the Winter 1962 Locus Solus.

Having written O’Hara only two letters in twelve weeks, Warren finally called from Santa Fe on August 25 to say that he would be back in New York on August 31 but that he would then be leaving for Montreal for several more months of dancing, perhaps permanently. Inevitable as the news was, O’Hara was shaken. Like the syphilis he wrote about in “Song” (I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab), Warren’s decision to move to Canada was a fear that had become a reality. O’Hara conveyed the information from this phone call in a letter to Warren’s friend Peter Boneham, who had danced with him in Cohasset. O’Hara was obviously upset about having revealed his insecurities to Warren: “C’est la vie, and being a writer I tell everyone everything. It’s the Norman Mailer in me, UUUUUUUUUUUGH. But how do you avoid it? I sometimes think that all writers were children who vomited when they got nervous. I guess there are certain feelings that only occur in music, you can’t say them. It’s probably very bad for a poet to feel that way. I mean it makes him a bad poet. Well, who’s living for that anyway? Don’t ask me what one is living for, on the other hand. . . . I think I’m probably very unhappy but I’d rather be the last to know, how do you like that?”

The two waning lovers made the best of their few weeks together. With Edwin Denby they attended the Kirov Ballet’s Giselle danced by Kholpakova. With Joe LeSueur they went to see Samuel Beckett’s new play, Happy Days, which caused O’Hara to cry in the second act and to which he returned two more times, thinking of it as “an Irish Götterdämmerung.” But mostly the confusion of Warren’s comings and goings had become too much for O’Hara to face directly, either on the page or off. They had both already moved on, so that their time together until O’Hara shared a farewell breakfast with Warren at the bus terminal on the morning of September 25—could only be described as vaguely uncomfortable.

“Vincent has been here for several weeks, but Saturday he leaves for Montreal and another several months of dancing there,” O’Hara wrote to Ashbery on September 20 of the predicament he had laid out in “St. Paul and All That” four months earlier. “It is very confusing, this sort of life, but what can one do?”