Second Avenue

To celebrate O’Hara’s much anticipated arrival in New York, on a hot day during the last week of August 1951, Hal Fondren, John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, and O’Hara piled into a car and headed uptown on a mock tourist junket. Although the tour was designed for his edification, it was O’Hara who was at the wheel. They drove up Eighth Avenue from the Village, passing by the main post office and Pennsylvania Station, complementary McKim, Mead & White buildings designed in 1910 so that the post office’s two-block row of tall Corinthian columns was mutely mirrored by the stubbier row of Doric columns of the railway station across the street. His friends breezily captioned Penn Station as “a Baths of Caracalla.” At Thirty-fourth and Eighth Fondren, paraphrasing an ad of the time, pointed to the Hotel New Yorker and announced, “On the left is the famous Hotel New Yorker, which has eight thousand rooms, each with an inside view.”

Enormously pleased with themselves, the group decided to push on as far as Palisades Amusement Park on the cliffs of New Jersey, a destination that allowed them to take O’Hara across the elegant and stately sweep of the George Washington Bridge. They spent the rest of the day and night on rides, including the merry-go-round, Ferris wheel, and roller coaster. “I feel so at home,” O’Hara quipped sarcastically to Fondren. “These buildings remind me of the University of Michigan.”

Of course that night O’Hara was far from nostalgic about Michigan. His interest lay with the skyline beckoning from across the Hudson River, a skyline he would one day describe as “ozone stalagmites / deposits of light.” O’Hara could hardly realize, as he drove the group back across the George Washington Bridge, that the car contained those friends from his immediate past who were to have the greatest impact on his immediate future in New York. Hal Fondren, his Harvard roommate and a gourmet cook, exerted a steadying and domestic influence on O’Hara, something the poet always needed from others but rarely provided for himself. “Hal was sort of like his aunt,” explains Larry Osgood. John Ashbery, whom O’Hara fancied playing Tu Fu to his Po Chü-i, would eventually be grouped with O’Hara, Koch, Schuyler, and Barbara Guest under the label The New York School poets. Jane Freilicher was their moll; her name, after O’Hara’s lead, began to appear in many of their poems. “We did a lot of driving around in the course of our friendship,” says Freilicher, putting their ride that day into a context. Indeed it was as if once O’Hara got into his friends’ car that day, he never stopped moving again—away from Grafton and toward his own version of bohemia.

The raucous mood of the small band was hardly a barometer of the times, which had largely come under the influence of McCarthyism. In the early 1950s the zeitgeist was more grim than ebullient. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were found guilty of treason as Russian spies and sentenced to death; Korea marked the beginning of U.S. involvement in difficult Asian wars; an endemic conformity in the nation was analyzed by David Riesman in his acclaimed sociological study The Lonely Crowd.

“I couldn’t write anything from about the summer of 1950 to the end of 1951,” admits Ashbery. “It was a terribly depressing period both in the world and in my life. I had no income or prospects. The Korean War was on and I was afraid I might be drafted. There were anti-homosexual campaigns. I was called up for the draft and I pleaded that as a reason not to be drafted. Of course this was recorded and I was afraid that we’d all be sent to concentration camps if McCarthy had his own way. It was a very dangerous and scary period.”

Their consolation was Downtown—the busy grid of coldwater lofts, storefront galleries, and artists’ clubs and cafeterias along an axis of Second Avenue and Tenth Street—where, unknown even to most New Yorkers, the so-called “heroic age” of the new abstract American painting was cresting and a second generation of New York painters was already waiting for recognition. The only remotely famous figure among them was Jackson Pollock, who had been photographed by Life magazine in 1949 moodily smoking a cigarette next to his eighteen-foot-long canvas Number 9 (which was priced at that time at $1,800). The rest of the group’s personal heroes were still working largely in the dark—Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline. The suicide of Arshile Gorky in 1948 proved that such marginal struggling had a high price. But artistic suffering in the interest of beauty and truth was part of the romantic ethos of the times. As de Kooning later warned O’Hara after they became friends: “If fame ever comes your way, give it the back of your hand.” These painters felt that New York City, especially with the influx of European painters during World War II, had replaced Paris as the art capital of the world. Their belief was that expressed by O’Hara in “A Terrestrial Cuckoo”: “New York is everywhere like Paris!”

“Everyone felt this kind of energy,” recalls Freilicher. “The new art of younger people was being done here. French art seemed extraneous, except Picasso was going great guns, but then he was from another period. The action was here. One knew all these people. It was a kind of community.”

The younger painters were particularly enamored with New York. The titles of their canvases often gave away their infatuation with the light and silhouettes of the urban landscape. During the fifties Freilicher painted Early New York Evening; Rivers, Second Avenue with THE; Hartigan, Grand Street Brides; Kaprow, George Washington Bridge (with Cars); Kline, Third Avenue. De Kooning even joked that he thought of the fiercely totemic Woman of his 1950–52 series as “living” on Fourteenth Street. O’Hara matched the spirit of his new artist friends by trying to create a poetic city of New York. Other poets had certainly written about Manhattan—Whitman, Crane, Lorca, Auden. But over the next fifteen years O’Hara composed a fragmented epic of the city, focusing particularly on the humor and chaos of the growing metropolis and using his experiences as a trail through an ever-changing urban labyrinth rather on the scale of Joyce’s Dublin or William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. From the moment he arrived, the twenty-five-year-old poet began absorbing the images, smells, and sounds that appeared in his work—newspaper headlines, subway bathrooms, yellow construction helmets, taxi honkings, funeral home signs, painters’ lofts, instant coffee, negronis, abandoned storefronts, lunchroom tables, smoke-filled bars, liquor stores, and tobacconists. “A scent of garbage, patchouli and carbon monoxide drifts across it,” wrote Ashbery in his introduction to O’Hara’s Collected Poems, of the authentic urban flavor of the poetry O’Hara was to begin writing.

While O’Hara’s plunge into the life of his downtown painter friends was sudden, the move was not out of character. As a boy, O’Hara had been inspired enough by his father’s piano playing to want to become a concert pianist. But when he arrived at Harvard, the Music Department seemed relatively conservative and stodgy. His most interesting friends were reading Firbank and Compton-Burnett, and O’Hara switched to literature. In New York, however, the acquaintances who most fascinated him were in the artworld, not at the Partisan Review. He began writing poems influenced by the aesthetic experiments of the painters and frequenting painters’ bars such as the Cedar. As O’Hara’s poems were always influenced by the company he was keeping, so was the direction of his life.

After the Palisades drive, O’Hara returned with Fondren to the apartment they were to share at 326 East Forty-ninth Street between First and Second avenues. The East Side of midtown, with its rows of cheap tenement houses and rents well in line with the thirty-one dollars a month split between O’Hara and Fondren, was a neighborhood that was then attracting plenty of other young arrivals to the city. O’Hara and Fondren lived on the sixth floor of a walk-up filled mostly with Italian trucking families, and they were subjected daily to shouting matches quite different in tenor from the exchanges they had overheard in the hallways of Eliot House. There were two landings between each floor, and they often felt as if they lived on the eighteenth, rather than the sixth, floor. “This was not the kind of apartment you would have stayed in if you could have found anything better,” says Fondren. “Walking up the steps at five o’clock in the morning to try to get some sleep before you had to go to work was really an ordeal. Both of us would come in blind.”

Their coldwater flat had a good-sized living room, one large corner bedroom occupied by Fondren, and two smaller rooms, one of which O’Hara used as his bedroom. The sink in the apartment’s big kitchen doubled as a bathroom basin; the bathroom itself had only a soiled, grayish bathtub and toilet. The place was furnished with fairly “pedestrian-looking” furniture, including two beds, an armchair, and a dinette set left behind by the German count from whom Fondren was subletting. According to Fondren, “It looked like a German slum.” In an attempt to counteract the look of the apartment, O’Hara set up his cheap record player in the living room to play his limited collection of three or four albums—including works by Poulenc and Milhaud as well as Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony—and an antiquated little radio, which he kept tuned to one of two classical radio stations, WQXR or WNYC.

On bright days, however, the apartment was flooded with so much sunlight that sleeping was impossible. A decent amount of blue sky, flocks of gray pigeons on the next-door roof, the River House uptown, and, most impressively, the United Nations building under construction a block away on the East River were all a part of the dramatic view. O’Hara commemorated the newly finished aquamarine slab of the United Nations Secretariat in several poems; in “Shelter” he writes of “the UN Building’s / enigmatic mirror” and in “Nocturne” he identifies with the architectural prism conceived by Le Corbusier:

A tiny airliner drops its

specks over the UN building.

My eyes like millions of

glass squares, merely reflect.

Unfortunately for Fondren, who was very tidy, O’Hara had lapsed from the orderliness instilled by his mother, who had helped keep his upstairs bedroom in Grafton neat and clean. At Harvard the two undergraduates had had an industrious cleaning lady to whom they were so grateful they had presented her with all of their Fall River furniture upon graduation. Now, oblivious to dirt and chaos, O’Hara focused his attention on his Royal portable typewriter or whomever he was speaking with on the phone. “It was sort of a disaster scene, and it seemed to come very naturally to Frank who never did very much about it,” complains Fondren. The sink, filled with dirty dishes, was often crawling with cockroaches, but O’Hara was able to dismiss, or glamorize, the bugs: “The cockroach and the ginkgo tree are the oldest things on earth!” he shrugged. William Weaver, a friend of O’Hara who lived nearby on East Fifty-first Street and who went on to become a well-known translator of Italian, nicknamed the apartment Squalid Manor.

In those first few months in New York O’Hara did not seem particularly worried by practical matters. He was living on the last few dollars of his Hopwood and he had yet to find work. But then most of his friends were either working at odd jobs—like Fondren who was unhappily employed at a paper company on Park Avenue—or they were unemployed, like Ashbery who eventually found a job in October in the publicity department of Oxford University Press. There seemed to be vast amounts of free time for wandering to museums, bookstores, the ballet, movie theatres, restaurants, and bars. O’Hara was capable of cooking quite a good pot-au-feu but preferred neighborhood restaurants to cooking. His favorites, in the East Forties and Fifties on Lexington and Third avenues, were Original Joe’s, an Italian restaurant that served ziti and manicotti; the Russian Bear, which had terrific Slavic meatballs; and a nearby Chinese restaurant that featured family dinners with many choices from Column A and Column B. “Whichever restaurant we agreed on, John Ashbery invariably disagreed and said, ‘Oh the last time I went there I got ptomaine,’” recalls Weaver of the slyly humorous games Ashbery played with his friends. “Usually it ended up being John’s choice, and then when we got there he would always complain about it and say, ‘How did we come to this awful place?’”

Cruising was a big part of all their lives, as much an excuse for drinking whiskey and exchanging witty remarks as for picking up partners for sex. O’Hara’s new neighborhood was bursting with gay bars, all named for different birds, that together were known as “the Bird Circuit.” They included the Blue Parrot on Fifty-third Street between Third Avenue and Lexington (about which Rivers had warned O’Hara in a letter to Ann Arbor, “The cops are making arrests at the Blue P every night these days”), the Golden Pheasant on Forty-eighth Street, and the nearby Swan—all in the neighborhood of the Third Avenue El. The East Side bars tended to be dressy, and their customers were conservatively dressed in bow ties, blazers, or fluffy sweaters. The “bird bars” usually started coming to life between eleven-thirty and midnight when the plays let out. Often the men in the bar could be found shoulder to shoulder, singing tunes from such Broadway musicals as South Pacific or Kiss Me, Kate in unison with the jukebox.

Plainclothes policemen were stationed in the bars, however, and could usually be spotted in their black-tie shoes nursing a single drink the entire night. The Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel was a popular gay meeting spot until the mid-fifties when the management became nervous about the clientele. The appearance after an Easter Parade of Walter Florel, a well-known milliner, with his pink-dyed poodles, persuaded the owners to ban men unescorted by ladies at the bar. The same was true at P. J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue.

O’Hara preferred the bars downtown on Eighth Street. “A Harvard friend who had preceded us by one year taught us the ropes,” says Fondren. “He said, ‘There’s a special train. After you’ve done the Third Avenue bars, you take it at Fifty-third and Third and it goes right to West Eighth Street. And then you have all of Eighth Street.’” O’Hara and Fondren often followed their friend’s map, riding the E train to Eighth Street to have dinner at the Alice Foote MacDougal Restaurant, one of a chain of tearoom-like restaurants, which served food until 9:00 p.m. Afterwards, they pushed on to Mary’s, a lively blue-neon-lit gay bar. “Mary’s was very much a make-out bar,” says the poet James Schuyler. The composer Ned Rorem wrote in his New York Diary in 1958: “Mary’s Bar on Eighth Street. It is already eleven summers ago that John Myers and Frank Etherton worked there, whining the tunes Paul Goodman and I composed for them: Bawling Blues. Jail-Bait Blues. Near Closing Time. Occasionally, for comic relief, Eugene Istomin would play Ondine on the tuneless piano and the drunks would actually stop talking. . . . John Myers was trying to make it into a Boeuf sur le Toit, Cocteau hangout, which it wasn’t.” Along the same street were Main Street, the Eighth Street Bar, and the Old Colony. “Main Street was sort of uptight, pretty,” recalls Edward Albee. By 1952 Albee and his lover Will Flanagan were hanging out at the popular bar of the Old Colony, so absorbed in each other’s conversation that they came to be nicknamed “the Grimm Sisters” by some of their friends.

While O’Hara enjoyed the ritual of seduction by talking at the rail of a gay bar, his true interests lay elsewhere. His taste for men whom he thought were straight, especially straight black men, often led him outside the perimeter of the established gay bars. Soon after his arrival in the city he set up a pattern of episodic promiscuity that characterized his sexual life over the next five years, and these episodes fed his conversation and poetry as much as, if not more than, his sexuality. While he chose to break this pattern around 1957, for about five years he was prone to the kind of assignations he wrote about in November in “After Wyatt,” a Petrarchan sonnet originally titled “Blowing Somebody,” which begins, “The night paints inhaling smoke and semen.” He often told the tale of the security guard he used to make out with regularly in his guard house after midnight at the United Nations, a tale he hinted at in “October”:

this lavender sky

beside the UN Building

where I am so little

and have dallied with love.

He once invited in the overweight black postman, whom he and Fondren had nicknamed Aunt Jemima, for sexual favors in thanks for climbing six flights of stairs. One evening when he was quite smashed he missed his E train stop and wound up in a change booth in Queens performing fellatio on a black token clerk.

His poems at this time winked at these adventures. In “Grand Central,” “He unzipped the messenger’s trousers / and relieved him of his missile” and “Homosexuality” tallied the merits of cruising different subway latrines:

14th Street is drunken and credulous,

53rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good

love a park and the inept a railway station.

He enjoyed the shock value of these escapades when he confessed them drunkenly in public, especially in mixed company. “I used to get bug-eyed at Frank’s sex adventure stories,” recalls the poet Kenward Elmslie of O’Hara in the Hamptons in the summer of 1952. “He’d tell these stories in front of Janice, Kenneth Koch’s wife, and other women and straights, spelling out everything so it wasn’t just shocking, it was hilarious.”

One November evening O’Hara’s Harvard friend Freddy English threw a cocktail party on East Sixty-seventh Street at which O’Hara, Fondren, Freilicher, and a crush of other friends were present. At midnight they all headed off to eat something at Regent’s Row, a “piss-elegant” gay restaurant nearby. One friend floated off to the Blue Parrot where he picked up two surly young men, classic examples of “rough trade.” Freilicher went home, but a small band returned, including the two pickups. A few hours later, as heavy drinking continued in the living room, O’Hara’s screams were heard from the bedroom. English rushed in to find one of the young men on top of O’Hara, pounding him. He yanked him off. The assailant prevented English from using the phone, so he crawled out the window into the bedroom of two women next door to call the police, who had already been alerted by others in the building upon hearing the loud shrieks. The two young men fled, and English rushed O’Hara to Bellevue where a bloody gash in the side of his head was stitched. The incident, or one similar, is behind the lines in “October”:

My glasses

are broken on the coffee table.

And at night a truce

with Iran or Korea seems certain

while I am beaten to death

by a thug in a back bedroom.

O’Hara discovered a giddy liberation in acting out and regaling others with less dangerous incidents, especially after keeping quiet during all his years in parochial school and the Navy. “It’s wonderful to admire oneself / with complete candor,” he wrote in “Homosexuality.” The shadowy parks, subway stations, and ship docks of the city were a libidinal landscape for the young poet, their furtiveness part of a mischievous midsummer night’s game. O’Hara felt he could exorcise some of the secrets of his past with the group of artists and intellectuals who were his friends. He could safely shock them with stories of falling asleep drunk in a construction site. As his audience was willfully liberal, he did not suffer from the grimmer repression experienced by many homosexuals in small towns across America during the conservative Eisenhower years.

Yet O’Hara, with his attraction to straight men and what was called “rough trade,” was setting himself up for disappointments and frustration in love. His peregrinations late at night were part of a romantic bad-boy identification with the stalkings of Melmoth the Wanderer, that villainous Gothic fugitive from God’s light. O’Hara combined sexual and Catholic imagery in his renegade poems of the early fifties. In one of his Hopwood poems, “The Young Christ,” the narrator, Jesus, declares, “I must be a pansy” and cries, “I’ll thrust my skull between king’s purple thighs / a burning child, adoring and my Father’s pyre.” In another Hopwood poem, “A Proud Poem,” O’Hara, who once told Harold Brodkey that “Hellfire must be fun,” writes, “black my heart is,” “no god turns me / inside out,” and “I’ll go down / grinning into clever flames.” One of his favorite castings of himself, ever since his interest in Sacher-Masoch’s The Serpent in Paradise in college, was as a snake. His weaving together of sexuality and apostasy resulted in a curious blend of exhibitionistic liberation and more hidden pessimism.

The center of O’Hara’s more public social life was conveniently located near his apartment. This was the Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 219 East Fifty-third Street, about five doors up from the Third Avenue El station. The gallery was in a converted coldwater flat on the stoop level a few steps up from the street and advertised itself with a sign beneath which an old man usually stood selling chips off a block of ice. In an attempt to give an air of some sort of chic to the rather poverty-stricken and desperate gallery, a young Milanese architect named Robert Mango—in exchange for being allowed to mount a show of photographs—had stripped the long narrow showroom’s white walls of molding, painted its ceiling blue, hung a web of black wire to which he attached spotlights, and covered the floor in black linoleum. Although it had only opened the previous November, the upstart gallery had already been identified as the home of the group of younger painters known as the Second Generation—the successors to the First Generation of Pollock, de Kooning, Gorky, Kline, Motherwell, Rothko. The gallery’s exhibitions in 1951 and 1952 included Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Robert Goodnough.

The impresario behind the gallery was the irrepressible, and sometimes equally irresponsible, John Bernard Myers. Myers was a former managing editor of View, Charles Henri Ford’s avant-garde magazine in which many of the French Surrealists, such as Tanguy and Breton, who moved to America in the 1940s, had published. Since the magazine’s closing in 1949 Myers had been moving from one artistic project to the next, ever enthusiastic about meeting interesting artists and introducing them to one another. He had organized a marionette theatre for a while with the help of his partner, Tibor de Nagy, a Hungarian refugee from a feudal family, whom he had persuaded to back his project because of the great popularity of “Howdy Doody,” the children’s puppet show on television. Some of his artworld friends, including Pollock, Greenberg, and de Kooning, then encouraged Myers and de Nagy to start a gallery to show some of the painters of the next generation, just as the galleries of Peggy Guggenheim, Charles Egan, Sidney Janis, Betty Parsons, and Sam Kootz had shown the previous generation. While his eye for painting was criticized by some of the painters in his own stable, Myers’s knowledge of who was who was impeccable. It was this sixth sense, as well as his flamboyance and pushy energy, that made his gallery a landmark in the fifties artworld, if not always a solid business enterprise. “John Myers was always a hollow tree,” says the poet James Merrill. “You could get in touch with anyone through him, or hear about what people were up to.”

O’Hara had visited Myers’s gallery on a trip from Ann Arbor, but the first opening he attended after his arrival in 1951 was Larry Rivers’s October exhibition, which kicked off the gallery’s fall season. No show could have pleased O’Hara more, including as it did The Burial, Rivers’s Expressionist painting of his grandmother’s funeral, praised by Art News in its review as “heroic” and remembered later by O’Hara: “His early painting, ‘The Burial,’ is really, in a less arrogant manner than Hemingway’s, ‘getting into the ring’ with Courbet (‘A Burial at Ornans’).” Other paintings in the show reflected the influence of the Chaim Soutine retrospective held the previous year at the Museum of Modern Art.

O’Hara was already a presence around Rivers and around Myers’s gallery, where he would often show up dressed, as Freilicher described him, in “his dark fuzzy shetland sweater, no shirt, chino pants & tennis shoes—Ivy League but rather exotic & chic in the N.Y. artworld in those days.” Myers’s first impression of him, as of many of his favorites, is colored by rather outrageous and literary imagery. “The long neck, the high cheek bones, the bridged nose and flaring nostrils reminded me of an over-bred polo pony,” Myers later wrote in a memoir. “Or did he bring to mind Robert de Saint-Loup, that reddish-golden aristocrat leaping over the tabletops in Proust’s novel?” Always a saver of souls, Myers immediately made O’Hara’s precarious joblessness his business. He found him work to carry him through until December, typing up a libretto written by John LaTouche for his musical, The Golden Apple, an Americanized retelling of some Homeric tales, which was to be published by Random House. (LaTouche had recently been blacklisted in Red Channels, a list of names of supposed Communist sympathizers printed by American Business Consultants.) Myers had a crush on LaTouche, so persuading him to hire one of Myers’s protégés furthered Myers’s designs as well.

The great crush for Myers, however, was Larry Rivers, whom he had first arranged to meet at Louis’, through the suggestion of Clement Greenberg. Louis’ was an early bohemian haven on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, and Myers was sitting, as Rivers has remembered him, in a “hanky-panky cross-legged position at the bar, with a sort of Oscar Wilde smile on his face.” No matter how large Myers’s stable of artists became, Rivers was from then on always its showpiece. When buyers came to see an artist’s exhibition, Myers often hustled them into the back room to look at a new canvas by Rivers. As Rivers had written to O’Hara in August, “John M. has been so nice to me as to make me think he loves me (something he repeats ohvah and ohvah agahyne).” Myers expressed this infatuation by calling Rivers three or four times a day, telling him whom he had lined up to buy his work or which magazine he had persuaded to write an article. Rivers basked in the attention, using the opportunity to exchange sexual favors to hustle his own career advancement as well as to indulge in the thrill of breaking the homosexual taboo. “John Myers was quite a number,” admits Rivers. “He loved me and I actually made it with him quite a bit. It’s as if I were some kind of woman who is with some man she’s not attracted to, but she knows that after about five seconds it’s going to all be over. So why make a fuss? The whole life was about men and sweethearts and homosexuality and the meaning of it, if one could really get an idea. It’s amazing that that was that much the subject matter of my life at a certain point. I felt as if I were some stranger looking in on it. Because obviously I had the other experience.” Myers’s obsessive passion for Rivers meant that he and O’Hara had a topic for frivolous banter, though there was also rivalry, and Myers’s jealousies were famously vindictive. Some of the gallery wits observed that Myers could only have been played by George Sanders, the English actor who had become famous the previous year for portraying a venomous drama critic in All About Eve.

At a party held at Myers’s apartment on East Ninth Street after Rivers’s opening, during which Willem de Kooning and Nell Blaine stood arguing about whether it was deleterious for an artist to do commercial work, O’Hara walked up to introduce himself to the poet James Schuyler. Schuyler, who had been born in Chicago in 1923, had spent several years in Italy as well as a summer at Auden’s house on Ischia typing up most of the poems in Auden’s Nones, a fact not lost on O’Hara, as Nones was one of Bunny Lang’s favorite books. Schuyler was already aware of O’Hara’s poetry since his own stories had been published in the same issue of Accent as O’Hara’s “The Three-Penny Opera.” The day Schuyler received his issue Myers called him up to compliment him while Schuyler raved about O’Hara’s poem. “Why my dear, he’s here in the room!” replied Myers, of the poet visiting on break from Ann Arbor. The evening of the party O’Hara began their conversation almost in midsentence by debating with Schuyler Janet Flanner’s article that week in The New Yorker, which had disclosed the scandal of Gide’s wife burning all his letters to her. “I never liked Gide,” O’Hara announced, “but I didn’t realize he was a complete shit.” “This was rich stuff, and we talked a long time; or rather, as was often the case, he talked and I listened,” Schuyler later recalled in a memoir in Art News. “His conversation was self-propelling and one idea, or anecdote, or bon mot was fuel to his own fire, inspiring him verbally to blaze ahead, that curious voice rising and falling, full of invisible italics, the strong pianist’s hands gesturing with the invariable cigarette.” Schuyler, who was included with O’Hara as a member of what John Bernard Myers decided to call the New York School of Poetry in an article in Nomad magazine ten years later, was struck enough by his first meeting to begin writing imitative poems.

O’Hara was quickly beginning to make his presence felt all over town, at least in those spots frequented by the poets and painters for whom the Tibor de Nagy was an Uptown outpost. One of their prime gathering places was the San Remo at the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker streets in the middle of an Italian section of Greenwich Village. A weathered bar with white-and-black tiled floors, a pressed tin ceiling, wooden booths, great big urinals, hanging chandeliers, and a clamorous backroom restaurant, the San Remo was owned by Joe Santini, born across the street at 190 Bleecker, and presided over by a bartender with a club to whack patrons if they misbehaved. Hence the line in O’Hara’s “For Janice and Kenneth to Voyage”: “The penalty of the Big Town / is the Big Stick.” Although Thursdays were purported to be gay night at the San Remo, the bar, a fictional version of which looms in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, was simply a mixed, talky bar to which all genres of poets, writers, intellectuals, and bohemians were drawn. It was a sort of café, its existence depending, like that of so many Parisian cafés, on the discomfort of the tiny apartments in which many of its patrons were living. Among those who could regularly be found drinking its fifteen-cent beers, or martinis, were Tennessee Williams, John Cage, Paul Goodman, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Miles Davis, Merce Cunningham, and James Agee. More a hangout for writers than painters, the San Remo was the site of O’Hara’s meeting with Paul Goodman, one that proved disappointing to the irreverent O’Hara, who discovered that Goodman insisted on holding court and on being surrounded by young writers as disciples. Goodman in turn was a bit dismissive of O’Hara’s seeming absence of seriousness. He found his pluck irritating, as well as his fondness for Prokofiev. “Paul Goodman would be smoking his pipe and there’d be a few of his disciples,” recalls Kenneth Koch. “I remember he asked John Ashbery what he did and John said, ‘I’m a poet,’ and Paul said, ‘You can’t be just a poet.’ I never stopped thinking about that, mainly because it didn’t make any sense.” Such exchanges were fast and furious in the dim, crowded bar, which was rapidly becoming a curiosity to some of the sullen neighborhood hoods lounging on their stoops, as well as to out-of-towners. “Even then there was a certain touristic fringe who would stare in the window and point at us,” recalls James Merrill.

O’Hara found himself more often at the Cedar, the artists’ tavern on University Place and Eighth Street. The Cedar was more straight and macho than gay, more art-oriented than literary, but O’Hara enjoyed playing poet to the painters, and he had always been drawn to straight men. Although he was only in his middle twenties, he was able to talk about art with such eminences as de Kooning and Kline, who treated him with respect and interest. This was the pleasure he had missed with Goodman. As O’Hara later wrote in “Larry Rivers: A Memoir”: “In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip. So far as I know nobody painted in the San Remo while they listened to the writers argue. An interesting sidelight to these social activities was that for most of us non-academic, and indeed non-literary poets in the sense of the American scene at the time, the painters were the only generous audience for our poetry. . . . The literary establishment cared about as much for our work as the Frick cared for Pollock and DeKooning.”

O’Hara treated the Cedar as if it were his college hangout, Cronin’s, often arriving with a fresh poem in his back pocket, jotting down overheard phrases he liked the sound of while squeezed into a noisy booth. Freilicher recalls saying something about “ducal days,” kidding around one evening at the Cedar, which O’Hara then used as the title for a poem he scribbled down on a napkin. When de Kooning remarked in a late-night blur, “maybe they’re wounds, but maybe they are rubies,” the comment found its way, unexplained, into “Ode to Willem de Kooning.” The Cedar, a landmark of his New York poems, appears throughout the fifties as a convenient spot to meet an increasing list of friends—Mike Goldberg in “Poem” (I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy.): “I meet Mike for a beer in the Cedar as / the wind flops up the Place, pushing the leaves / against the streetlights”; Gregory Corso in “The ‘Unfinished’”: “Gregory is back in New York and we are still missing / each other in the Cedar”; Grace Hartigan in “L’Amour avait passé par la”: “to get to the Cedar to meet Grace / I must tighten my moccasins.” As a poet of the New York School of Poetry, O’Hara also lived aesthetically under the umbrella of the Cedar painters, who had coined the phrase “New York School” to cover their own painting as a sort of joke-cum-power-play on the “École de Paris.”

The Cedar, which Rivers described as a “verbal news shop,” was nondescript, with flaking green plaster walls bare except for a few Hogarth prints, glaring white ceiling lamps dangling overhead, a long bar in the front and a honeycomb of brass-studded leatherette booths in the rear. Looming from its back wall was a round industrial clock whose hands sometimes turned backward like a prop in a Cocteau movie. The bar was kept purposely drab, colorless, and ordinary by its faithful artist patrons who persuaded the owners not to renovate and pressured them to ban all jukeboxes and TV sets. (An exception was a television rented for the World Series.) Here they felt free to indulge in what Rivers has described as the “ich-schmerz” existentialist jargon of the times, filled with talk about “risk” and “living on the edge,” the cultivation of which was greatly nurtured by a long string of shots of straight alcohol. “The drinking in those days was a killer,” says Helen Frankenthaler, who was reportedly involved in having a sign posted, “No Beatniks,” when she snitched on Jack Kerouac for urinating in a sink outside the men’s room. “The amount of liquor consumed in the artworld between 1950 and 1960 seemed like a flood.”

At the Cedar, O’Hara stepped into a world to which he was perfectly suited. The excessiveness of the period matched his own penchant for excesses, for trying to shake the mundane in favor of daily, or nightly, liberations. It was a time in which everyone, in public at least, seemed to be drinking too much, smoking too much, staying up too late talking. Certainly during the day the painters were spending many hard hours experimenting with paint and light, trying to “make it new.” Certainly O’Hara spent many hours hunting and pecking at his typewriter. There were also countless quiet days involved with talking on the phone, seeing friends, going to the movies, or simply staying home reading. But as a public personality, O’Hara’s nervy energy, infectious excitement, love of drinking, and total dedication to a life lived for art’s sake made him increasingly a mascot of an era in which wild parties seemed as creatively indispensable as they were fun. Judgments about alcoholism or acting-out came later, after the party was over.

Among the regulars whom O’Hara found himself packed in with over the coming years in what had become simply known as “the bar” were David Smith, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Isamu Noguchi, Barnett Newman, Norman Bluhm, Howard Kanovitz, Aristodemis Kaldis, Michael Goldberg, Herman Cherry, Jack Tworkov, John Cage, Edwin Denby, John Gruen, Morton Feldman, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg (who complained that “At the Cedar, everybody looked unattractive”), Alfred Leslie, Arnold Weinstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Irving Sandler, and Milton Resnick; among the few women in the classic “men’s bar” were Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, Barbara Guest, Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Matter, and Ruth Kligman. “The attitude of the tough guys in the Cedar Bar toward Frank was they sort of wanted to have it both ways,” recalls Kenneth Koch. “I said something about Frank to one of them and he said, ‘What do I care about those Nances?’ But everybody was perfectly willing to profit from Frank’s electrifying enthusiasm and perception.”

The atmosphere of the Cedar was very much that of a saloon, its Wild West rowdiness only increased by the presence of Jackson Pollock, who usually appeared on Tuesday nights after coming in from the Hamptons for his weekly psychiatric session. Pollock tried to overcome his extreme shyness by drinking inordinate amounts of whiskey, which then allowed him to release his Cody, Wyoming, cowboy persona. Pollock’s two-fisted swagger set the bar’s somewhat paradoxical tone, filled as it was mostly with macho men who were in truth hypersensitive artists who sometimes had trouble relating to the women in the bar with their black stockings, black eyeliner, and very long hair. “Most of those guys you couldn’t even sit and have a cup of coffee with because they could barely socialize with anyone, men or women,” recalls Al Leslie.

The din of the Cedar regularly hit a high note with Pollock’s explosions of fist-fighting or shouting. Once when he and Kline had a brawl he tore the door off the men’s room and smashed a few chairs. Pollock thrived on such angry confrontations. To a black man he said, “How do you like your skin color?” To a lady painter, “You may be a great lay, but you can’t paint worth a damn.” He made licking motions with his tongue at John Myers whom he leeringly asked, “Sucked any good cock lately?” To Larry Rivers, who was then in a phase of using heroin, he pantomimed shooting-up. On at least one occasion he called O’Hara a “fag” to his face and was enough of a menace that O’Hara fled the Cedar one night when he heard that Pollock was on a drunken rampage. But this unpleasantness was always forgiven in the name of genius and art. As O’Hara later wrote, “If Jackson Pollock tore the door off the men’s room in the Cedar it was something he just did and was interesting, not an annoyance. You couldn’t see into it anyway, and besides there was then a sense of genius. Or what Kline used to call ‘the dream.’”

The Cedar seen through the eyes of its regulars made up a historic Dutch Masters sort of grouping of Downtown painters. O’Hara’s favorite was Willem de Kooning, the blond housepainter from Rotterdam who he decided was the world’s greatest painter after Picasso and Miró. When Rivers introduced them, O’Hara claimed he became almost sick with fear. (According to O’Hara, the single most important event in Rivers’s own artistic career was when de Kooning praised his painting for being “like pressing your face in wet grass.”) De Kooning in turn was taken with O’Hara’s confidence and free-floating poetic conversation. “I liked him immediately, he was so bright,” de Kooning later recalled. “Right away he was at the center of things, and he did not bulldoze. It was his manner and his way. There was a good-omen feeling about him.” Evidently free of Pollock’s homophobia, de Kooning often greeted O’Hara at the Cedar with a big juicy kiss.

Franz Kline, another great presence of the bar, used to arrive early at 5:00 p.m. and often closed the place ten hours later. Famous for his monologues—a rendition of which survives in O’Hara’s 1958 piece “Franz Kline Talking”—Kline moved from discussing dissections of Géricault’s horses to imitations of Mae West and W. C. Fields to the trading of baseball statistics. Given to equally grand gestures in life as on his canvases, one night at “last call” Kline ordered sixteen scotch and sodas for himself and de Kooning’s wife, Elaine. This caused much consternation until O’Hara and Joan Mitchell entered unexpectedly from a party and sat down to absorb some of the burden by drinking four scotches each. (Mitchell and Willem de Kooning used to poke fun at Kline for the broad swatches of his black-and-white paintings, such as Wotan, by pointing to tape on the windows of a newly built house and saying, “Oh look, there’s a Franz Kline.”)

The Cedar was O’Hara’s entrée not simply into the contemporary artworld but into a livelier history of art as well. As the interests of his friends became his own, he began to work his way back to find their common references in the canvases of the past. His curiosity was aroused in a way that it had never been in the art history lectures at Harvard. “It is interesting to think of 1950–52, and the styles of a whole group of young artists whom I knew rather intimately,” he wrote in “Larry Rivers: A Memoir” in 1965.

It was a liberal education on top of an academic one. Larry was chiefly involved with Bonnard and Renoir at first, later Manet and Soutine; Joan Mitchell—Duchamp; Mike Goldberg—Cézanne-Villon-de Kooning; Helen Frankenthaler—Pollock-Miro; Al Leslie—Motherwell; DeNiro—Matisse; Nell Blaine—Helion; Hartigan—Pollock-Guston; Harry Jackson—a lot of Matisse with a little German Expressionism; Jane Freilicher—a more subtle combination of Soutine with some Monticelli and Moreau appearing through the paint. The impact of THE NEW AMERICAN PAINTING on this group was being avoided rather self-consciously rather than exploited. If you live in the studio next to Brancusi, you try to think about Poussin. If you drink with Kline you tend to do your black-and-whites in pencil on paper. The artists I knew at that time knew perfectly well who was Great and they weren’t going to begin to imitate their works, only their spirit. When someone did a fake Clyfford Still or Rothko, it was talked about for weeks. They hadn’t read Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for nothing.

O’Hara educated himself during the day in the artists’ studios. “He used to just love to be around the studio and he would come and help me stretch my canvases, which was like a great privilege to him,” says Freilicher. His presence led to his appearance in more and more artists’ works, beginning with Freilicher’s portrait of O’Hara done from memory in 1951. He is standing in the doorway by the kitchen where the drinks were kept in her apartment on West Tenth Street, and according to John Ashbery, it is a portrait in which “Abstract Expressionism certainly inspired the wild brushwork rolling around like so many loose cannon, but which never loses sight of the fact that it is a portrait, and an eerily exact one at that.” During his first year in New York O’Hara’s enthusiastic loitering led to two nude sketches done in charcoal on paper as well as an abstract portrait in oil on canvas by Nell Blaine; Larry Rivers’s Portrait of Frank O’Hara in oil on canvas; and Grace Hartigan’s Frank O’Hara and the Demons in oil on canvas. “When he posed for you it was about the drawing,” says Rivers of O’Hara’s way of flatteringly deflecting attention onto his partner, even when in the spotlight of posing. “It was about you and your art. He was available. He was a professional fan.”

O’Hara soon discovered that all of Downtown’s roads led Uptown to the Museum of Modern Art, which was known among the young painters simply as “the Museum.” Located at 11 West Fifty-third Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, the Museum of Modern Art was housed in a stark, sleek International Style building designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, which by its functional facade announced its commitment to modernism. The museum was the brainchild of a group of three wealthy ladies: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Miss Lillie P. Bliss, and Miss Mary Sullivan. It had opened five days after the stock market crash of 1929 to show cutting-edge European art of the sort first seen in New York in the controversial 1913 Armory Show. These women had wisely brought in as their director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., a young, bespectacled art history instructor at Wellesley who had been a prize pupil of Paul Sachs at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. Barr was the son of a Presbyterian minister—thin-lipped, stiff, and rather intense—and he devoted himself with an almost ascetic intellectuality to modern music, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and industrial design. It was these eclectic tacks that helped him give the Museum its ability to shock and outrage. That Barr had succeeded at his avant-garde mission is obvious from O’Hara’s memoir of the Cedar days in which he deemed, “Meyer Shapiro a god and Alfred Barr right up there alongside him but more distant.”

In 1951 the Museum was an unpredictable showplace. Barr had emerged in 1948 after a series of Machiavellian power struggles as Advisory Director rather than Director, and the Museum’s exhibits three years later included such wide-ranging subjects as “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America,” “Korea—The Impact of War in Photographs,” “New Lamps (Design Competition),” “Modigliani,” “James Ensor,” and “Eight Automobiles.” The previous year a series of “Five Evenings with Modern Poets” had presented W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. Such constant updating on the state of the arts was underpinned by the Museum’s permanent collection, described by Jane Freilicher as “a dictionary of art,” in which the funding of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim alone had allowed the purchase of such modern masterpieces as Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, and Léger’s Three Women. But the special events that made an enormous impression on the Downtown artworld were Barr’s monumental retrospectives of Bonnard, Munch, Soutine, and, in 1951, Matisse. “It seems now that those surveys at the Modern always had immediate repercussions among painters, perhaps because they had seen less art than young painters today,” says Ashbery. “Travel to Europe wasn’t all that common yet, and the media hadn’t filled in the gaps.”

When Barr’s Matisse retrospective opened on November 14, O’Hara was so intent on viewing and reviewing the paintings that he applied for a job selling postcards, publications, and tickets at the Museum’s front desk. “Frank had idols (many) and if Matisse was one, so was Alfred Barr, and remained so during all Frank’s years of association with the museum,” Schuyler later wrote in Art News of O’Hara’s attempt to situate himself in a context he considered heroic. O’Hara’s job application, with recommendations from the poet Delmore Schwartz and the editor Jason Epstein, was accepted and on Monday, December 3, with the Christmas rush threatening, he began his clerkish duties at the Museum’s long sales counter. O’Hara was quite content to bask in the light flooding through the building’s large waxed front windows and then refracted along its hard-edge angled surfaces, the modernist texture of the lobby much like that pictured in Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway then hanging in a stairwell of the Museum. Stationed at one end of the counter, O’Hara continuously ran over to the other side to chat with friends or painters who had stopped by to see the show, or simply to visit him, a ritual that continued in later years when his friends needed to take the extra step of riding an elevator up to his office. Freilicher recalls O’Hara’s walking over to a typewriter at the counter to type up a poem. “He had this sort of instant creativity,” she says. When Schuyler dropped by the first time he came across O’Hara selling admissions tickets to visitors while writing on a yellow lined pad a poem, since lost, titled “It’s the blue!” Resting beside him was a translation of André Breton’s Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares. That month, transfixed more than ever by the riddles of a vocation in art, O’Hara wrote “Poet,” its theme the plight of the artist who, like Cocteau’s Orpheus, “escapes always and’s forever blinded.”

Within three months of his arrival, O’Hara had figured out a clever way to combine his need for art, money, friendship, and poetry. He needed a job, and he found one that exposed him to painting and painters while still allowing him time to write poems. These days would seem particularly halcyon and innocent by the end of the decade when O’Hara found himself, for better and worse, immersed more professionally in the Museum’s mission of promoting the New American Painting internationally, as well as in its Byzantine office politics.

On New Year’s Eve John Ashbery gave a party at his new one-room apartment at 44 Morton Street. His frequent changes of residence were typical and even desirable among this young crowd living experimentally in a city of cheap rents. Present was an attractive twenty-seven-year-old blond from Los Angeles named Joe LeSueur who was credited at the time with “Tab Hunter looks.” LeSueur was a graduate student in English at Columbia University who had a decided taste for poets and intellectuals. He was being introduced around by Paul Goodman, whom he had first met at Maxwell’s, a gay bar in Los Angeles. Goodman said to his protégé, “There’s a poet named Frank O’Hara I think you’ll like,” and led him across the room. O’Hara quickly took in the stranger, whom Larry Rivers has described at the time as “a blond beauty, sought after by everybody.” As Tchaikovsky’s Third Piano Concerto was playing full volume on Ashbery’s portable phonograph, O’Hara and LeSueur set to dreaming up a frivolous accompanying ballet scenario.

The two, who went on to share a series of apartments as roommates from 1955 to 1965, had actually been introduced cursorily by Ashbery at a concert of contemporary American music earlier in the fall at Town Hall, but the introduction had led nowhere. On this evening, though, O’Hara and LeSueur discovered much that was complementary. O’Hara, with his dazzling and confident intellect, satisfied LeSueur’s need for a knowledgeable guiding hand: at the time, LeSueur felt himself to have been “an intellectual climber with vague, pretentious notions about becoming a writer.” Although he was two years older than O’Hara, LeSueur immediately felt drawn to O’Hara’s big-brother quality and friends usually assumed that LeSueur was the younger of the two. O’Hara in turn was struck by LeSueur’s appearance. Blonds were mythologized in his private world: in a poem written three years later beginning, “All of a sudden all the world / is blonde,” as well as in the rhetorical question opening “Meditations in an Emergency,” “Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde?” LeSueur was also able to talk knowledgeably about movies, literature, and gossip. “He was a different type,” says Rivers. “He wasn’t that aggressive. So he didn’t have to express every minute every single idea he had on his brain. But he had a lot of ideas.” Before parting that night O’Hara and LeSueur happily discovered that they lived only a block away from each other in the East Forties. At the time, LeSueur was living with his boyfriend Gianni Bates, a photographer who worked as an assistant to Francesco Scavullo.

The next day O’Hara and Ashbery attended a concert of John Cage’s Music for Changes performed by David Tudor at the home of Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s migratory Living Theatre, the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street. (In March, Ashbery and O’Hara appeared at the same theatre as the two curtains and two bow-wows in Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail.) “When John Cage had his first concerts,” O’Hara later told a television interviewer, “or not his first but, you know, there was a limited audience, and it was bored and so forth, a lot of it. But everybody went because they had to know about it, whether they were bored or they weren’t bored, they felt it was important to know what John Cage thought, or did, or sounded like.” The piece was a piano work lasting over an hour and consisting almost entirely of tone clusters struck randomly up and down the keyboard according to a coin-tossing method adapted from the I Ching. As Ashbery later told John Gruen, “It had very little rhythm and it just went on and on until you sort of went not out of your mind but into your mind. I really felt that it was a kind of renewal. And the fact that it happened on New Year’s Day seemed to have a certain significance. So the cloud that had been hanging over me gradually lifted.” (Ashbery and O’Hara’s rhapsodizing that day was no different from their rhapsodizing earlier in the fall when they saw A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in Times Square and, according to Ashbery, “had to be almost carried out of the theatre.”) Although Ashbery dates the end of his writer’s block to the New Year’s Day concert, its aftereffects apparently carried over into February, when O’Hara wrote “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon,” prodding Ashbery to verse by reminding him of his poem “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” published the previous summer in Partisan Review:

You, dear poet

who addressed yourself to flowers, Electra,

and photographs on less painful occasions,

must save me from the void’s external noise.

In the middle of February O’Hara was wrenched back home and away from his successful exploration of New York life. The occasion was the death from breast cancer of his father’s sister, his Aunt Grace O’Hara, on February 12; her funeral was held on Thursday, February 14 at 8:15 a.m. at his Uncle Leonard’s home. In spite of O’Hara’s arguments with his Aunt Grace at the time of his father’s death—her spinsterish schoolmarm censoriousness creating rather than solving problems for his mother—O’Hara was genuinely indebted to her for having driven him to parochial school in Worcester every morning, as well as for giving him money to help pay his expenses at Harvard and Michigan. He was also to be a beneficiary in her will. The visit, however, was fraught with memories of his father’s funeral at the same time of year, and further deepened his sense of outrage at his mother’s deteriorating condition and his frustration at being unable to get through to her. This painful trip to Grafton, where he had been dutifully returning every year for Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas holidays, was his last.

Over the past five years O’Hara had put a tremendous amount of energy into trying to help his mother when he did go home. Although alcoholism was barely recognized as a disease, he used to accompany her to meetings of a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in Worcester. Usually she resisted, however, claiming a distinction between herself and “those drunks.” Similarly, he eschewed any such help when his own drinking became more and more out of control in later years, but now O’Hara spent a lot of time trying to find a psychiatrist who specialized in treating alcoholism. “Frank said he owed a psychiatrist a great deal,” says Grace Hartigan, “because he had gone to one a few times about his mother and the psychiatrist had said, ‘Save yourself. You can’t do anything about your mother.’” It was at this time that O’Hara counseled his sister, Maureen, “I’m leaving and I’m not coming back, and I think you should do the same”—advice she was grateful for and acted on.

When O’Hara returned to New York, his friendship with the painter Grace Hartigan began to intensify. O’Hara was, in fact, very upset by the break with his mother, and Hartigan, who had never felt his mother was exactly a good influence, tried to comfort him during this crucial time. “I never met Frank’s mother,” says Hartigan. “I didn’t want to because I was so loyal to Frank and I thought she caused him so much pain.” Hartigan was going through a transition of her own—one of many. She had a son from a first marriage in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She then briefly married ex-Marine and painter Harry Jackson, though their marriage was annulled soon after a honeymoon in Mexico. As Jackson was a friend of the Pollocks, who had hosted the party for their marriage in the Hamptons, Hartigan managed to see Jackson Pollock’s drip canvases early on and to learn from him about the Downtown painters. “They’re all shit but de Kooning and me,” Pollock advised her.

Hartigan was attractive, with clean-cut American looks, which Cecil Beaton captured in a portrait taken in 1952. “Hefty, big-boned, nicely proportioned, with expressive eyes and skin all aglow, she seemed to me to be in the Ann Sheridan mold,” recalls Joe LeSueur. She was then living in a top-floor loft over a pickle store on Essex and Hester streets. She shared the studio—which was full of the smell of vinegar, dill, and spices, as well as the noise of trucks, pushcarts, and merchants crying from the streets below—with Al Leslie, a young bodybuilder painter six years her junior always referred to by John Myers as “Mr. Bronx.” Leslie had started out on the scene as an artists’ model, something Hartigan had done as well, modeling nude for classes of the Hans Hofmann school on West Eighth Street. Although the couple seemingly thrived on their love of painting and struggling—sometimes dining on Wheatina three times a day—Leslie and Hartigan split up about the time of their 1952 shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, his in February, hers in March. “Grace always seemed to be having an unhappy love affair about which she could be very funny,” recalls William Weaver.

Hartigan first met O’Hara at one of John Myers’s regular Thursday night gatherings. She didn’t appear in his poetry, however, until the time of her March show, for which she assumed the name of George Hartigan, a pseudonym chosen by Myers supposedly to help her overcome the stigma against women painters. Hartigan’s version of her nom de brosse is slightly different: “When I first met John Myers I was taken with the idea that homosexuals had camp names. I wanted another name too. So we decided on George since other famous women had chosen it and it began with G like Grace.” O’Hara satirized this ruse in his play of late February, Grace and George, an eclogue—one of his unplayable plays with abstract dialogue and impossible stage directions such as “a breath of snow crumbles across southern Italy towards the pair who, hand in hand, think only of sunsets.” Hartigan’s show was praised by an Art News critic for going “directly and boldly to painting problems,” her Portrait of W (an Expressionist portrait of a photographer boyfriend, Walt Silver) showing her resolve to break out from the all-over abstractions that had won her the approval of the first-generation painters. This show was picked up on by the Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller, who began to select work for Museum shows. O’Hara’s admiring review was “Poem for a Painter”:

Grace,

you are the flowergirl on the candled plain

with fingers smelled of turpentine.

If Hartigan dressed like George while painting—in overalls, Army tans, and men’s shirts—at night she dressed like Grace, in skirts and sweaters that showed off her big-boned and robust figure. O’Hara responded to both sides. He and Hartigan became pals—often talking on the phone about parties, art, boyfriends. They shared an enthusiasm for movies, as well as for fanzines. (Seated in a big Fourteenth Street movie theatre in 1952 to see Marilyn Monroe’s Niagara, with Elaine and Willem de Kooning a few rows up, they overheard, to their unbridled amusement, a woman behind whisper to her friend, “I told you this was an arty movie. See. The de Koonings are here.”) O’Hara and Hartigan also shared an amorousness of the sort that O’Hara tended toward with the special women in his life. “We fell in love,” claims Hartigan. “If a homosexual and a heterosexual could be in love, it was a falling in love. . . . I think Frank as a homosexual was really unusual in his amount of love for a few women. I have many homosexual friends and that’s something I’ve never encountered.” As an expression of that love, O’Hara, as he did with many painters, male and female, helped articulate Hartigan to herself. “Grace brought a kind of gutsiness and toughness, and Frank was like her wings of language,” says Kenneth Koch. “He did that for a lot of people, painters especially. They’d have all these wonderful ideas and feelings about themselves, and they’d say, ‘Duh,’ and Frank would say, ‘Yes, you put that green there. That’s the first interesting thing that’s been done since Matisse’s “Number 267.”’” O’Hara made his and Hartigan’s mutual absorption practical by posing, his likeness appearing in her Frank O’Hara and the Demons, which, in turn, was evoked in “In Memory of My Feelings”: “I am naked with a plate of devils at my hip.” Ocean Bathers (after Matisse’s Bathers by a River, seen in Barr’s retrospective) is mentioned in the same poem: “One of me is standing in the waves, an ocean bather.” In The Masker, O’Hara posed barefoot in Hartigan’s Persian jacket looking, according to her, “like Hamlet.” In Masquerade, a harlequinade, he posed in tights along with Ashbery, Freilicher, and Daisy Aldan.

Following Hartigan’s exhibition, O’Hara managed to make his own appearance at Tibor de Nagy. At the end of March John Myers published a limited edition of a thirteen-page chapbook of O’Hara’s titled A City Winter and Other Poems, which the poet dedicated “To George Montgomery,” although the two had not recently been in touch. Myers printed 280 folded paper copies of the glorified pamphlet at one dollar each and twenty hardbound copies at twenty dollars, both versions including two drawings by Larry Rivers and thirteen poems. “It is to be remembered that in 1952, poetry like Frank’s was considered bizarre, a bit cuckoo,” Myers admitted later. “It was hard for me to decide which ones were better than others; I knew that I liked the work and thought it extremely original and fresh. My friends at Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Republic and other high brow publications thought I was getting soft in the head to admire such stuff. . . . The best supporters of Frank’s poetry were always artists who liked to purchase a poetry pamphlet while visiting my gallery.” O’Hara’s was the first in a Tibor de Nagy series of books by poets with artists’ drawings, which included, the following year, Poems by Kenneth Koch with Nell Blaine prints, and Turandot and Other Poems by John Ashbery with four Jane Freilicher drawings.

Although Myers did neglect some of the striking poems of O’Hara’s past, including “Autobiographia Literaria,” “Memorial Day 1950,” and “Les Etiquettes Jaunes,” his choices in A City Winter were actually an accurate reflection of the mixed poetics O’Hara was practicing during his first season in New York. The second part of the chapbook’s five-sonnet title sequence—a parody of Wyatt’s “The Lover Compareth His State to a Ship in Perilous Storm at Sea” that begins “My ship is flung upon the gutter’s wrist”—is a perfect example of his experiments at the time in using traditional forms—couplets, quatrains, sonnets, rhymes—to carry quite untraditional Surrealist dream imagery and disjunctive language such as “garter tongue” and “waveless bosom’s mist.” A City Winter—the first book of a poet experiencing life in New York City—is a collection of poems experimentally trying to match the rhymed schemes of Wyatt and Skelton with the language of Joyce, Mallarmé, and Breton. While O’Hara’s recent immersion in action painting and aleatory music explained his freer uses of words, he had yet to tamper with the underpinnings of verse itself. His attitude toward its traditional forms was still playful and parodistic rather than confrontational and rebellious.

Spring of 1952 was a heady time for O’Hara. His first book was published. “On Looking at La Grande Jatte, the Czar Wept Anew” appeared in Partisan Review, an event Kenneth Koch said was “like seeing somebody in his first tuxedo.” And, perhaps most exhilarating for O’Hara, he was invited to appear on a series of panels at the Club, the artists’ forum at 39 East Eighth Street where the Downtown painters met to haggle about serious topics before heading on to the Cedar to drink vociferously—both hangouts an antidote to the loneliness of the days in their studios.

Always a bit desperate for the café life of Paris, for their own version of Picasso’s Au Lapin Agile, the painters had gathered during most of the 1940s at the Waldorf Cafeteria at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street where they drank coffee and talked leftist politics and modern art. The cafeteria, though, became dangerous because of longshoremen who started rowdy fights; the owners also began to discourage the painters from lingering for hours over one cup of lukewarm coffee. (When Gorky was not allowed in with his dogs his painter friends had to go outside to speak with him.) In the fall of 1949 de Kooning, inspired by the social clubs of the Greeks and Italians along Eighth Street, said, “Let’s have discussion among the old-timers,” a wish that eventually led to the founding of the Club. While the Club changed locations often—only its large coffeepot remained a constant—its steadiest address was the Eighth Street location first used by Robert Motherwell for his short-lived “School of the Artists,” then replaced by Studio 35, a prototype of the Club, where Joseph Cornell showed his early films. Founding charter members of the Club, some jealous of their power to approve and disapprove later members, included Willem de Kooning, Philip Pavia, Franz Kline, Landes Lewitin, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Egan, Giorgio Cavallon, Milton Resnick, and Jack Tworkov. By 1951 the list included Robert Rauschenberg and Helen Frankenthaler (then Clement Greenberg’s girlfriend) and, in 1952, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Nell Blaine, Michael Goldberg, Leo Castelli, Herman Cherry, Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, and Harold Rosenberg. Friday night panels included Sir Harold Acton holding forth on Vasari, Max Ernst introduced by Robert Motherwell, Buckminster Fuller explaining his geodesic domes using egg containers and Ping-Pong balls, Suzuki on Zen, and Pierre Boulez performing the piano music of John Cage. Liquor was introduced on the scene by one of the Club’s rituals—passing a hat to buy it. It was then drunk greedily out of tiny paper cups by the artists scamming for second portions. When money began to filter in through early painting sales, a bottle of whiskey started to appear on the front table to loosen the tongues of some of the artists on that night’s symposium, only fanning the intensity of the debates. On most weekends the folding wooden chairs were temporarily cleared out to fashion a serviceable dance floor on which the artists attempted anything from the two-step to the tarantella, Pavia bringing in his own records of Italian folk music and jazz to help calm down the group fired up with drink and sexual excitement.

When O’Hara made his way to the Club that winter, the ongoing debate had been sparked by the appearance of Tom Hess’s Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, which O’Hara described as “the important book.” The discussion concerned the nature of the new American painting and, though Hess had not used the term, increasingly the label “Abstract Expressionism,” which seemed to be gaining credence among critics much to the frustration of many of the purist first-generation painters. At the opening discussion of Hess’s Abstract Painting on January 18, Pollock sat angrily clutching the book, frontispiece and endpapers all featuring Gorky’s The Betrothal II, its illustration plates placing his own work last, out of alphabetical order, until he finally flung the offending volume at de Kooning and shouted, “It’s a rotten book. He treats you better than me.” Pollock’s instincts were not mistaken. Hess, an independently wealthy and urbane Yale graduate who had recently taken over the editing of Art News and was trying to turn the magazine into as prescient a recorder of contemporary art as Cahiers d’Art in twenties and thirties Paris, clearly favored de Kooning over Pollock. (The other “starmaker,” Clement Greenberg at Partisan Review, was championing Pollock.) The debate that spun from this encounter was an angry and continuing shouting match about the impossibility of the term Abstract Expressionism, Abstract having been associated with the geometry of Mondrian and Expressionism with the more dramatic figurative paintings of Munch, Bonnard, and Soutine. “When anybody was called an Abstract Expressionist you thought they were joking,” recalled Club organizer Philip Pavia. “It’s like saying you’re black and blue. For about six months the artworld was in an upheaval over those words.” This was the maelstrom into which O’Hara stepped when he appeared on Friday, March 7, on a fourth and final panel on “Abstract Expressionism” titled “A Group of Younger Artists” with Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, Al Leslie, and Joan Mitchell, moderated by John Myers. Although O’Hara had plenty to say on any subject, his delight that evening had to do simply with having been taken up as an equal by the painters, confirmed as he was in the self-deprecating belief of “John Button Birthday”: “You know how / I feel about painters. I sometimes think poetry / only describes.” His presence as a poet was less threatening than that of the art writers whom Pavia tried to blackball. De Kooning was particularly enthusiastic about talks linking poetry and painting—the most recent had been on the relationship of Cézanne to Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

O’Hara’s chance to show off his quick wit and intellect and to air his views on contemporary poetry came the following month on Friday, April 11, when he appeared on a panel on “The Image in Poetry and Painting” with Edwin Denby, David Gascoyne, and Ruthven Todd, moderated by Nicholas Calas. O’Hara was invited onto the panel by Elaine de Kooning, his only peer in combining interests in writing and painting, talking and drinking, and in sharply appraising people. (Described at the time as a female O’Hara for her plunges—often rescue missions—into other people’s lives, de Kooning was characterized by O’Hara in his memoir of the early fifties as “the White Goddess: she knew everything, told little of it though she talked a lot.”) O’Hara used this opportunity to trace the tradition of contemporary poetry, from Pound, whom he called “the father of modern poets,” through Auden, Stevens, Crane, and early Dylan Thomas, though he blamed the later Thomas for peddling “an image of the poet as a storm-battered heather-kicking bard from the wilds.” The villain in his talk was T. S. Eliot for his “deadening and obscuring and precious effect.” Reading selections from these poets, O’Hara apologized for his “flat voice,” which did tend to disappoint listeners when poetry readings began to occur more frequently during the sixties. “I don’t read poetry well, this is just an expedience,” he said. That evening O’Hara arrived at a vision of poetry that sounded remarkably like the abstract painting Hess had been praising and tracing: “Poetry which liberates certain forces in language, permits them to emerge upon the void of silence, not poetry which seeks merely to express most effectively or most beautifully or most musically some preconceived idea or perception.”

O’Hara returned the following month on Wednesday, May 14, to a panel of “New Poets” moderated by Larry Rivers with James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Barbara Guest (the only woman member of the so-called New York School). “It was a poetry reading in which Frank did most of the reading,” recalls Schuyler. Reading his own poems as well as poems by the others on the panel to illustrate his declarations, O’Hara used this occasion to slyly distance his group from their immediate predecessors. In a humorously catty tone not unknown to him, O’Hara classified Delmore Schwartz as playing the “clown. . . . the brave young poet who is willing to take up any challenge, but one defeats him if encountered,” Karl Shapiro as a “machine poet” who “like a nickelodeon writes on every subject,” and Richard Wilbur and James Merrill as part of “the school of elegance” whose aesthetic “is based on the memory of adolescent reading of Tennyson’s Idylls.” In closing, O’Hara took a more dignified approach to the various personae of contemporary poets to talk about the attempts of his own group to use translation to explore “the varieties of technique” rather than slumping confessionally into “the mythology of the Ur-self” and of their striving, like the painters, for “the ideal of High Art,” for poems that would be “honest, tough, hard, beautiful.”

In 1952 O’Hara left his job at the Museum every evening in the spring to consider several options for the night’s entertainment. His life was still uncomplicated enough that he could simply return home to sit around with friends, including his current roommate, James Schuyler. (“I couldn’t stand it after Frank had been there a bit,” says Fondren of his decision to flee the apartment a few months earlier. “I could see that for my peace of mind, probably, as well as his, it would be better if I lived somewhere else. I really couldn’t stand the disorder.”) Or O’Hara could just get on the E train and see what happened.

Walking about the city was particularly stimulating to the peripatetic O’Hara, and those who accompanied him were often treated to a checkered blend of observation and intimacy that obviously suited him. “If you were out with him you were with him,” says Rivers. “It was the most extraordinary thing, a simple walk. It’s like everybody who wants to define the word ‘love.’ I think a corny description of ‘love’ would say, ‘If you’re in love you can go into a soda fountain and enjoy yourself with a person.’ Well Frank was just a joy to be with. He was smart on any subject. Anything you said he had like five responses and you were throwing the ideas against a fantastic wall and it would come back more brilliant than you had ever intended it.” This was the sort of experience recorded from O’Hara’s side in his March poem “Walking with Larry Rivers,” with its rumble of Rivers’s New York Jewish accent, so appealing to O’Hara’s poetic ear: “oi! prayer, prayer, be mine your lazy latenesses.” (The critic Peter Schjeldahl later wrote of Rivers’s style of speaking that its “giddy mixture of tones, from guttural-laconic to high-parodic,” was “his great natural gift to the poetry of Frank O’Hara.”)

“For Frank, New York was the New Jerusalem,” says Weaver of similar walks. “I remember just going down the street with him when they were tearing down some brownstones. I said, in the usual clichéd way, ‘Oh what a pity they’re tearing down those brownstones.’ Frank said, ‘Oh no, that’s the way New York is. You have to just keep tearing it down and building it up. Whatever they’re building they’ll tear that down in a few years.” O’Hara used the cityscape constantly in his wishful need to transmute life into game or art. “Once we were walking down Fifty-seventh Street,” recalls Weaver. “There were all these very grand antique shops, but small, each one with a window that would be arranged as a little Louis Quinze salon or a Victorian fumoir. One night Frank and I stopped and looked and a game began spontaneously where this was our living room and we were inviting all our idols in. He would say, ‘Tab, how nice to see you,’ and I would say, ‘Sugar Ray, I’m so glad you could come.’ We played the game the length of Fifty-seventh Street. This sort of thing happened every time you were with him.”

O’Hara spent many evenings as well at City Center on West Fifty-fifth Street, the converted mosquelike Shriners Temple, with its inlaid scimitars and crescents, which was serving at the time as the home of the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera. The City Ballet in the early fifties was a popular underdog compared to Ballet Theater which was in its twelfth year presenting dramatic ballets. But among the artists and intellectuals in O’Hara’s circle the only serious ballet was the City Ballet, and their attendance made up a true cult following. Under the direction of George Balanchine—the Russian choreographer who had been influenced by the experimentalists Lopukhov and Goleizovsky before leaving Petrograd in 1924, and who had then practiced his musically rather than theatrically biased choreography for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris in the late twenties—the company seemed a direct link to the finest in the avant-garde tradition. “The City Ballet had a kind of poetic mystique,” recalls the painter Howard Kanovitz. “It seemed as though here was this living legend. Balanchine had contacts with Stravinsky and Stravinsky with Picasso. It was almost like a metaphoric laying on of hands.” The program during the company’s busy 1951–52 season included premieres of such Balanchine works as Till Eulenspiegel, music by Richard Strauss, its title role danced by Jerome Robbins; Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with sets by Cecil Beaton, danced by Maria Tallchief (in “John Button Birthday” O’Hara recalls “watching Maria Tallchief in the Public / Gardens while the swanboats slumbered”); Caracole to Mozart’s Divertimento no. 15 in B Flat Major with principal dancers Diana Adams, Melissa Hayden, Tanaquil LeClercq (later the subject of O’Hara’s “Ode to Tanaquil Leclercq”), Maria Tallchief, Patricia Wilde, André Eglevsky, Nicholas Magallanes, and Jerome Robbins; Bayou, choreographed to the music of Virgil Thomson’s Acadian Songs and Dances.

The pitch of enthusiasm among O’Hara’s friends for the City Ballet was first sounded by Jane Freilicher in a letter she wrote to Ann Arbor after she had attended with John Ashbery La Valse—Balanchine’s ballet set to Ravel’s score, which premiered in February 1951. “It is the greatest ballet either of us has ever seen or anyone else I’m sure, if not the greatest work of art in history,” Freilicher insisted. Of course O’Hara had no trouble in matching, even somehow surpassing, their Balanchinomania. He began at once to see almost all the performances, the price for balcony seats at the time being a merciful $1.75, and sneaking in with a friend’s ticket stub during intermission was made even easier as performances were usually only half sold out. Sight lines were excellent from all vantage points. The prices, and absence of a yearly subscription policy, made it possible for O’Hara to treat City Center as casually as if it were a movie theatre. As an audience member he was every performer’s dream: rapt and expressive. “At the ballet he would just get up and cheer,” recalls Morris Golde, who had recently met O’Hara at the San Remo. “It just knocked him out.” O’Hara was also easily given to tears, a reaction he alluded to in “Notes from Row L,” written on request for a 1961 New York City Ballet program after a decade of his serving as one of the company’s more dedicated and visible fans: “It all depends on whether you want your heart to beat, your blood to pound through your veins and your mind to go blank with joy, until you are brought back to self-consciousness by an embarrassing tear your neighbor might see (we are still Americans, aren’t we?)” In the same essay O’Hara describes Balanchine’s genius in the establishment of dance as the true subject of dance, much as he would claim in his notes to his own poem “Second Avenue,” “I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it”: “One of Balanchine’s greatest achievements is in making the dancers be the dance, be human and yet have the theatrical grandeur of the specific occasion of the dance.” Actually O’Hara found Balanchine’s choreography as aesthetically satisfying as he did Balanchine’s corps of dancers, many of whom appear for short spins in his poems. As he went on in the program notes, “Ballet lovers have the knack of turning away at the right time during a wrong move; they are always enchanted.”

O’Hara’s constant companion at “the Ballet” was Edwin Denby whom he had first met at the Cedar. Denby was about twenty-five years older than O’Hara, tall and bony with pale blue eyes and a startling shock of white hair. He had been educated at Harvard and the University of Vienna and was a poet who had served as the dance critic for the New York Herald Tribune between 1942 and 1945 and continued to write for various dance magazines. Soft-spoken, reserved, and gentlemanly, Denby—another of O’Hara’s totemic figures and somewhat of a guru on the art scene—always deferred to his junior friend as the greater poet. “Frank O’Hara was a catalyst for me, although I was much older,” Denby later told John Gruen. “But then, he was everybody’s catalyst. My entrée was that I was an old friend of Bill de Kooning’s, who was a great hero of Frank’s. I liked to go to the ballet with Frank and John and Jimmy. We were all mad about George Balanchine. We all thought he was a genius. He was like de Kooning—going through difficult periods, defending what he wanted to do, seeing what else was possible.” Denby and O’Hara spent many hours at Carnegie Tavern, the bar across the street from City Center, discussing the ballets they had just seen. Denby made the sorts of idiosyncratic observations O’Hara mentally collected, such as the one that slipped into “A Step Away from Them”:

Neon in daylight is a

great pleasure, As Edwin Denby would

write, as are light bulbs in daylight.

For O’Hara, sitting next to Denby at the ballet felt like sitting next to a lightning rod.

Other evenings O’Hara went to the City Opera, or the movies, or both. “One night we took Larry Rivers to Madame Butterfly,” recalls Weaver:

It was the first time he had ever been to an opera. He didn’t run all the way to get there but he sort of enjoyed it, was sort of bemused actually. Afterwards we said goodnight to Larry at the subway at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Across the street was a big Loew’s Cinema with a double feature of Island of Desire with Tab Hunter and Linda Darnell and another movie with Gene Tierney and Clark Gable in which she played a Soviet ballet dancer. We saw the sign and without a word to each other went straight to the box office, bought our tickets, and went in. We didn’t even have to communicate. When we came out, kind of silent, it was almost four o’clock in the morning. Frank said, “Two more lousy movies under our belt.” Tab Hunter, though, was actually a great favorite of ours and we then talked very enthusiastically about the movie until we separated at the corner of Second Avenue and Fifty-first Street.

The summer of 1952 was the first of O’Hara’s yearly summers in the Hamptons. In the summer he tended to write more poems, to struggle through the beginnings or endings of more love affairs, to generally be more active. O’Hara came to see the sun as a personal poetic symbol, most obviously in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island,” in which the Sun, a descendant of Mayakovsky’s talking Sun, encourages him,

Frankly, I wanted to tell you

I like your poetry. I see a lot

on my rounds and you’re okay.

The landscape of beach, sun, sky, and water was his favorite. He had spent his childhood summers on Cape Cod, later, on Navy destroyers, identified with the leaping porpoises he watched from the deck and was, for his entire life, a tireless swimmer who seemed unnaturally invigorated by proximity to the sea. Not only had he, on more than one occasion, baked on the beach until his body blistered, but he had also been known to dive nude into the ocean at night during an electrical storm.

The Hamptons was where the luckier of the Cedar crowd spent their summers, or at least as many weekends as possible. A thirty-mile strip of hills, dunes, woods, potato fields, and beaches on the South Fork of eastern Long Island’s split fin, the Hamptons coastland had light, landscapes, and sky that appealed to the painters, especially to the painters of the fifties who were still enamored with the romantic notion of leaving the city to escape to the country. By the time O’Hara made his appearance, the barns, bungalows, and saltbox houses of the countryside were already being colonized by a small force of painters and wealthy Manhattanites. Indeed the process of transforming the Hamptons—its year-round local residents still making their living mostly by farming and fishing—into an artists’ colony and eventually a fashionably chic resort had been under way for almost a hundred years. Most amenable to this trend was the village of East Hampton. Its Guild Hall had been built in 1931 to exhibit oil paintings by local artists, and its involvement in the more recreational side of art history dated back to the nineteenth-century American painters Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Winslow Homer and continued with the 1940s French Surrealists Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, and André Breton, who had strolled its blue-and-white-striped awninged streets and breathed its salty air reminiscent of Deauville. Most of these artists had arrived, as had most visitors since the 1870s, by means of the somewhat unpredictable Long Island Rail Road. O’Hara immortalized his trips into the old Penn Station’s vast iron and glass train shed to catch the 4:19 to East Hampton in “The Day Lady Died,” and “Joe’s Jacket” begins “Entraining to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent.”

During the summer of 1952 Jackson Pollock was living with his wife, Lee Krasner, in his small clapboard house in the Springs as he had been year-round since 1945. (“Below the bridge” from East Hampton, the Springs was muggier and hotter. Patsy Southgate had described a Springs house where O’Hara visited her in the early sixties as “a hot house, with cedar trees pressing against the windows like big women in fur coats, blocking out the air.”) Elaine and Willem de Kooning were spending the summer as guests in art dealer Leo Castelli’s sprawling house in East Hampton, where de Kooning worked on his Woman series in an enclosed porch. Robert Motherwell lived for a while in a Quonset hut, an architectural oddity designed by the famous French architect of the Maison de Verre in Paris, Pierre Charreau. Motherwell revealed his patrician roots that summer by joining the stuffy Maidstone Club, the exclusive East Hampton country club with tennis, swimming, and golf founded a hundred years earlier by the painter Thomas Moran. Larry Rivers had yet to move to the house on Toylsome Lane in Southampton that he rented the following year. Rivers’s presence was felt, however, in his cement and plaster sculpture of a nude woman, which was mounted near Castelli’s driveway, where Pollock tried to run it down one night because he found it too realistic.

O’Hara was staying at a house rented by John LaTouche (nicknamed Touche) on Georgica Pond in East Hampton. The occasion was the making of a sixteen-millimeter black-and-white silent film, “Presenting Jane,” produced by LaTouche’s Aries Productions, based on a screenplay by Schuyler, and starring Jane Freilicher, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and John Bernard Myers. The entire cast, along with Kenward Elmslie, LaTouche’s friend at the time, lived in the big “swell-elegant, very Middle America” residence with a large living room on its first floor and eight bedrooms on the second, which was located in a wooded area next to the pond. Most of the hand-held filming by Harrison Starr took place in and around the water so that Freilicher, to whose ineffable qualities this film was purported to be an homage, spent much time mucking around in wet sand. Its most memorable scene showed Freilicher walking on water by means of the special effect of a dock located, invisibly, slightly below the surface. This tongue-in-cheek Helen of Troy treatment inspired O’Hara to write even more of his Jane poems, the poems that had started the mock-troubadour cult in the first place. He wrote “Jane at Twelve,” “Jane Bathing,” and “Chez Jane” that summer, assuring her, “I don’t want to give the impression that you are a fille de joie in our gloomy society and thus a misfit.” As theatrical as the filming itself was the day-to-day life unfolding in LaTouche’s house, where John Myers did all the cooking in his role as film commissary. Elmslie, still in a rather innocent phase of his life, was startled one morning to find the door to an upstairs bedroom wide open and Freilicher in bed sandwiched between O’Hara and Ashbery and on yet another morning to find her in the same bed with Larry Rivers. He was puzzled as to what was going on. “I was goggle-eyed,” says Elmslie, who did not realize the innocence of her frolicking with O’Hara and Ashbery.

This was the summer in which the poet Kenneth Koch began to figure more fully in O’Hara’s life. Until then they had been playing an at least partly unintentional game of cat-and-mouse. Koch was at Harvard serving on the Advocate and studying poetry with Delmore Schwartz during O’Hara’s first two years but graduated in 1948 without meeting him. In the summer of 1950 Koch was in his hometown of Cincinnati about to leave for Aix-en-Provence on a Fulbright grant when he read some poems of O’Hara’s, including “Memorial Day 1950,” which had been mailed to him by Ashbery. Unimpressed with the new contender, he wrote back that he didn’t believe O’Hara was as good as they were. Koch packed the letter in one of his suitcases, however, and a year later he read the poems again and felt differently. “I read them on my way to Vienna and all of a sudden my poems got full of pennies, raisins, raspberries, banana splits, exclamations,” says Koch. “It was great. It was like love. I really loved Frank’s poetry.” O’Hara, then at school in Ann Arbor, heard of this geopolitical shift in their tiny world. “Alack aday, who has changed Kenneth Koch’s mind about my poetry,” he wrote to Freilicher upon hearing the news. “Is it you, Tabby? I pinch your paws. Anyhow, I was thinking perhaps I shouldn’t like him if he didn’t because Paul G said there was no line between the artist and his work, do you think this is true? what is art? what is life? who is Koch? I hear he writes his lyrics on human skin, is this correct?” O’Hara later inscribed a book of his poems: “To Kenneth, in honor of the conversion in Vienna.” Koch recorded one of their first post-“conversion” brushes, in New York in June 1951, in “Fate”: “Frank so sure of his / Talent but didn’t say it that way, I / Didn’t know it till after he was / Dead just how sure he had been.” Koch was then off again to California where he worked as a teaching assistant for a year and met his future wife, Janice Elwood.

If the poets of the New York School could be grouped together because they wrote in language that was illogical and often meaningless, O’Hara’s particular tone was Surrealist, Ashbery’s was philosophical, and Koch’s was comic. Koch’s nickname was Dr. Fun. When Ashbery first came down from Harvard in 1949 to stay at Koch’s loft in the undistinguished three-story building on Third Avenue and Sixteenth Street, Koch once donned a rubber ape’s mask to entertain the passengers on the El train rushing by. (This was also the summer of the ape movie Mighty Joe Young.) Koch lived up to his nickname by indefatigably assuming accents, such as a hillbilly accent, or speaking in flawless and uninterruptible blank verse. As O’Hara once commented, “I don’t know why Kenneth is so fond of John’s poetry, because he thinks everything should be funny and John’s poetry is about as funny as a wrecked train.” Yet in spite of his somewhat feckless veneer, Koch was actually deliberately pursuing an academic career, juggling teaching jobs at Columbia, Rutgers, and Brooklyn College. This often drew him away, keeping him a bit off to the side, a trait picked up on by O’Hara in his gossipy prose poem written in East Hampton that summer, “Day and Night in 1952”: “Kenneth continually goes away and by this device is able to remain intensely friendly if not actually intimate.” Koch’s heterosexuality also led to some reverse kidding. “When Frank first brought Kenneth around I started carrying on in a sort of campy way, in an including-him-in way,” remembers LeSueur. “Kenneth took Frank aside and said, ‘Would you tell him I’m not queer?’ I said to Frank, ‘I don’t believe it. He’s a big swish. What are you talking about?’” Because of Koch’s skittishness, O’Hara began to tease him for what he called his “H.D.”—“homosexual dread.”

The benefits of his friendship with O’Hara were worth the price to Koch of some occasionally heavy teasing. That summer O’Hara encouraged him in the joys of collaboration, particularly suited to O’Hara’s preferred style of creating with people around rather than in solitude—a condition he strenuously avoided. Together they composed a sestina for the sixteenth birthday of Leo Castelli’s daughter, Nina. “Something about Frank that impressed me during the composition of the sestina,” Koch later wrote, “was his feeling that the silliest idea actually in his head was better than the most profound idea actually in somebody else’s head—which seems obvious once you know it, but how many poets have lived how many total years without ever finding it out?”

The most famous of O’Hara’s creations during the summer of 1952 was “Hatred,” a poem of twenty-seven five-line stanzas he had typed out on a long roll of office-machine paper such as court stenographers used. The poem revealed O’Hara’s growing desire for an epic length, for a poem that would go on and on as Cage’s aleatory piano music had gone on and on. Its scale was an important step in the blossoming of his style. The poem’s Surrealist images (“held like a cleft palate in a bus of silver”) are kept moving by a grinding revelation of underlying pain, the pain of being compulsively pursued as in a nightmare. No matter how playful and witty O’Hara could be at the cocktail hour, his poems were often glimpses into other, unrevealed moods and thoughts, the glimpses given and taken as quickly as an opening and shutting door, their brevity part of their pathos. As in “In Memory of My Feelings” written four summers later, in which the autobiographical theme is that of “The dead hunting / and the alive, ahunted,” so “Hatred” is filled with the same feeling of being hunted and haunted: “I hounded and hounded into being born / my own death,” or “I have been hunted in the purple arms of a lover.” Whether the sources are family ghosts, alcohol, frustrated sexuality, or death, there is evidence of a high anxiety, which he felt throughout his adult years, his burgeoning social life a double symptom of love and anxiousness.

In “Easter,” which, according to Koch, “burst on us all like a bomb” that summer, O’Hara finally managed an “action poem” in which his form was as free as the canvases of the “action painters,” a term coined by Harold Rosenberg in Art News in 1952 to describe the effort of the Abstract Expressionists to turn the action of painting into its own end. His language was unabashedly surreal and Joycean, especially in its reveling like Joyce in body parts and bodily functions: “when the world booms its seven cunts” or “to be pelted by the shit of the stars at last in flood / like a breath.” As the critic Marjorie Perloff has pointed out in Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, the poem recalls the long catalogue poems of the French Surrealists and Dadaists, especially Tristan Tzara’s “Droguerie-conscience” and Benjamin Peret’s “Nebuleuse.” Its conversion of melodic pastoral imagery into angry scatological shoutings is in the mood of Rimbaud’s “Ce qu’on dit au poète” as well as O’Hara’s own Grafton “Pastorals,” the long lines of both prose poems making way for the open verse of “Easter.”

Although some of the obscenity of “Easter” was shocking in the early fifties, more startling and unusual was the use of the coded language of homosexuality. “Camp,” the sort of theatrical double-talking and double-acting by which homosexuals tended to both reveal themselves to each other and conceal themselves from a potentially dangerous larger society, had never been discussed in print until Christopher Isherwood devoted two pages to a discussion in his 1952 novel The World in the Evening. The term was then picked up by Eric Bentley, when he described Ruth Gordon as “camping all over the stage” in a review of The Matchmaker in 1956, and Susan Sontag, in her “Notes on ‘Camp’” in Partisan Review in 1964. Yet O’Hara had already written earlier in “Easter” of “swish” and “camp”: “a self-coral serpent wrapped round an arm with no jujubes / without swish / without camp.” Using the gay argot of the time he exclaimed, “it’s the night like I love it all cruisy and nelly.” Providing a glimpse of the furtive urban landscape of homosexual cruising, he wrote “Giving and getting the pubic foliage of precarious hazard / sailors.” He revealed personal tastes with “the big nigger of noon” and “Black bastard black prick black pirate.” While O’Hara’s expression of his own homosexuality was not as direct as in the love poems he wrote to Vincent Warren in the late fifties and early sixties, he was already obliquely identifying himself in the coded style of the times by including gay dialect in his art. It was the method he had used a few weeks earlier in “Locarno,” in which the lines “I had overheard you telling / Dorabella and Jo” refer to Schuyler, whose “gay name” was Dorabella, and to Joe LeSueur. The adoption by men of women’s names is part of the gender-switching sort of role-playing common to camp.

That fall John LaTouche arranged a reading of “Easter” at his penthouse on the sixth floor of an apartment building opposite a fire station on East Sixty-seventh Street. About forty people attended the informal reading at which LaTouche played the piano in the living room followed by O’Hara’s reading along with John Ashbery and Barbara Guest. (Guest’s “New York Remembering Nights Awake” had just been published in Partisan Review.) O’Hara’s effect on the understatedly elegant audience was a bit strong. “I hated it—the violence of the language scared me to death,” recalled Elmslie. “Ashbery read a witty poem called ‘He’ which could have evolved out of a Cole Porter ‘list’ lyric, so I could understand him.” One of the most shocked was Jackson Pollock’s dealer, Betty Parsons. “Afterward Betty Parson was saying, ‘I don’t know why I’ve been invited to hear this, I don’t know why I have to hear this,’” recalls Schuyler. “You wouldn’t have expected this reaction from her, not because she was a lesbian, but because everything in her gallery was the furthest out there was.” Particular exception was possibly taken by Parsons to a line about “women who use cigars.”

The fall also brought about a crisis in the increasingly complicated three-way relationship between O’Hara, Rivers, and Freilicher. Ever since moving to New York O’Hara had nurtured a crush on Rivers while being much more publicly demonstrative about his infatuation with Freilicher; his feelings for her were less troublesome and so more easily flaunted. “Working at my relationship with Frank and behind all these enthusiasms was I felt his real passion for Larry,” says Freilicher. “He obviously had this great passion for Larry but somehow he repressed it and sort of turned it on me. There seemed to be some sort of ambivalence.” Rivers concurs that “Most people cynically would probably have thought that since he wanted to sleep with me he was keeping on the best side of Jane.” The only solid emotional truth at the bottom of the puzzle O’Hara was creating was his passion for Rivers. “He tended to develop crushes on people who were straight, or almost straight,” recalls Ashbery. “I don’t remember his really being in love with anybody, though, until Larry Rivers.”

Although Rivers and Freilicher had been fitfully involved for many years, their relationship had been rocky and uneven. “I think she decided that I was impossible,” says Rivers of Freilicher’s stance by 1952. “There was drugs. I could go with men, I could go with women. Even though I imagined myself to be in love with her I would sleep with anybody who came along. But as soon as she did something I got rather upset.” The “something” was Freilicher’s growing romantic involvement with Joe Hazan, a young painter she eventually married in 1957. Rivers, already capable of exhibiting extreme behavior, went on a rampage of obsessed espionage, spying on Freilicher and Hazan from shadowy doorways, climbing onto a roof across the street to observe them through a window. “Larry had this thing of using jealousy as a motivator in his sex life,” complains Freilicher. “We had been friends for a long time. The whole thing was burnt-out. Then when I started going out with Joe, he suddenly brought this old ember back to life and acted like some kind of spurned lover and completely went insane. It had no basis in reality.”

Rivers decided one November night to act out his tortured feelings by slashing his wrists. “I probably thought I was in either a Russian or a French novel,” figures Rivers. “I would think of characters in novels. It all seemed to be literature. There wasn’t anything that was happening that wasn’t literature.” Rivers was canny enough about the difference between literature and life, however, to cut the skin of his wrists with a razor but no arteries. He then called up O’Hara who came rushing over to bandage them. (Hartigan claims that Rivers checked first to make sure the phone was working before doing the deed.) O’Hara took it upon himself to nurse Rivers through this difficult period, allowing him to stay for a few days at East Forty-ninth Street during which time they slept together in the same bed. Rivers then went to stay briefly with the painter Fairfield Porter in Southampton, writing to O’Hara on November 18, “My wound seems to be healing. Both of them. I have eaten and even had a glass of beer. If I tear now it is because of how sweet everybody has been to me. Self-indulgence on dark Saturday was revenge. . . . I’m glad I was unsuccessful. I knew I would be. If you weren’t someplace I could get you I’d probably never have attempted it.” Larry Osgood recalls that O’Hara brought Rivers to a Thanksgiving Day dinner of roast turkey later that month at Hal Fondren’s new apartment on Lexington and Ninety-third Street, and that Rivers was wearing a long-sleeved undershirt to conceal his wrists still showing signs of the abortive suicide attempt.

O’Hara not only bolstered Rivers in the wake of the accident, he also took it upon himself to make sure that Freilicher was kept away. According to Freilicher, “Frank said that Larry doesn’t want to see you and don’t prolong the agony by trying to contact him because that will only make it harder for him to get over this great thing that he’s going through.” O’Hara’s sympathy, though, was a bit self-serving, even “a little nasty,” as Freilicher characterizes it: “He took the opportunity to sort of get rid of me.” Rivers, too, later felt manipulated by the manner in which O’Hara played the role of go-between to his own advantage. “For a guy who had fifty insights per minute into human behavior and human reasoning, for him to make a statement I might have made that I don’t want to see her because she hurt my feelings, to take that as a final statement worked very much into his plan,” says Rivers. “Once that gap was established between myself and Jane he wasn’t going to do anything about reestablishing the old thing.” Feeling doubly slighted, Rivers began a campaign of not speaking to Freilicher at parties and of walking out of any room she happened to be in.

Insofar as O’Hara was interested in pushing his relationship with Rivers ahead, the melodrama of the wrist-slashing did lead to a period of working, sleeping, living, and spending hours of each day and night together, an acceleration that O’Hara could construe as the beginning of a love affair. Some of his friends, though, cast a cold eye on the goings on. “It seemed doomed,” says William Weaver. “I have a much sort of simpler mind and I couldn’t understand all the complications of it.” “I think Frank was more aggressive sexually,” recalls Rivers. “I was in a rather conventional tradition of men who are mainly heterosexual, or have had mostly heterosexual experience, who when they get with men who are homosexual act as if they are allowing themselves to be had. So he would get me aroused enough by a blow-job for me to get a hard-on and then screw him in the ass. That was what it was about. And then I’d sort of play with him I think as I was doing that and he would come off. One night I’d be with him and the next night I’d be with a woman. It got to be funny.”

As a switch-hitting figure, Rivers had a particular allure for certain homosexual men in the fifties for whom a heterosexual or married male was often the most desirable sexual partner. In Drawings and Digressions, Rivers gave a fair sense of O’Hara’s tendencies: “He usually picks on guys who also like women—the classic case of the homosexual who likes ‘men’: by definition a ‘man’ is someone who likes women.” As O’Hara deferred to painters, giving them precedence over poets, so he deferred to straight men, preferring them as sexual partners and romantic interests to gay men. His ultimate dream lover was clearly a straight painter. This attitude, of course, was self-deception. It showed a lack of self-acceptance. Yet the glorification of the straight male in the homosexual scene—later called the “eroticization of the oppressor” in the radical gay political language that came into use after O’Hara’s death—was so endemic as to be almost invisible. In this sense, O’Hara was a type, although in other predilections and impulses he definitely transcended his genre.

More upset than Jane Freilicher by this turn of events was John Bernard Myers. Like a jealous character in one of Proust’s novels, to which he was so fond of comparing life, Myers one night began banging at Rivers’s door when he was in bed with O’Hara shouting “Let me in, I know you’re there.” Rivers finally got up to let in a sobbing Myers. After all, Myers had been investing both money and time in Rivers, his amorousness leading, like O’Hara’s, to hours of posing: as all twelve disciples for the painting The Agony in the Garden, as what Rivers has described as a “depressed schizophrenic” for a series of drawings, “The Disturbed” and, in October, as Balzac in Rivers’s parody of Rodin’s famous sculpture. One evening at the City Center toward the end of 1952 Myers raged jealously when he saw Rivers and O’Hara descending the stairs from the cheap seats to the mezzanine together, “There they are, all covered with blood and semen!” This spiteful remark having originally been uttered by Madame Verlaine upon seeing her husband with his lover, Rimbaud, at the Opéra amused O’Hara, but was a bit lost on Rivers, and recurred by virtue of its excellence as a bon mot when O’Hara and Rivers collaborated in the late fifties on a series of lithographs, Stones, in which Rivers sketched himself and O’Hara as Rimbaud and Verlaine surrounded by several bullets shaped like penises.

“Luckily, just as my high feelings were about to turn into a first class obsession,” Myers later wrote, “I met the theatre director, Herbert Machiz, who seemed to me to be far more thrilling than Larry Rivers, perhaps even a greater artist.” Machiz directed many poets’ plays, off-Broadway plays, and, in the summer of 1955, ran the Lakeside Summer Theatre at Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. “John Myers was like the brood hen trying to find something for Herbert to do,” recalls Kenward Elmslie. “He really had no talent for poetry theatre. Actually what he did best was meat and potatoes kind of theatre. Every so often he’d really come through—with Suddenly Last Summer off-Broadway, as well as with a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Tallulah Bankhead.” Myers’s appraisal of Machiz’s directing talent was always open to debate, and Bunny Lang wrote to Alison Lurie after Machiz directed her play Fire Exit at the Amato Opera in 1954, “Herbert Machiz is about the worst director in NY or anywhere.”

The increased intimacy between O’Hara and Rivers led to a productive, if emotionally hectic, period in both their lives. It was a boon to the art scene as well, which was enlivened by the presence of its two most electric figures as a couple. According to the painter Jane Wilson, “Larry and Frank had a very unique . . . timing is much too trivial . . . but they were connected to some kind of energy . . . As they were both talkers, the threat of silence when they were around was impossible.” “They talked endlessly when they were together,” remembers Kenneth Koch. “They were always challenging each other. Sometimes they’d make me a little bored because they were so abstract and profound. Of course Frank’s conversation was more sophisticated in the ordinary sense of the word than Larry’s was. But Frank admired Larry’s intelligence enormously. He thought Larry was really brilliant, with which I agree.” The painter Howard Kanovitz, who briefly shared Rivers’s fifty-dollar-a-month loft on Second Avenue, remembers, “One aspect of their being together was in a funny kind of way argumentative. It had a sort of competitive ring to it. There was high tension. It seemed as if Frank wanted to get Larry down to earth a little bit, or level him up in life. Larry seemed to want to soar on certain levels of fancy while Frank took pleasure in bringing him back to something that seemed more communicable. He could remind him that he’d gone off someplace.” According to the painter Mike Goldberg, “Larry alone always got to be a pain in the ass because he was always involved with the dance he was doing. I think with Frank it became a minuet. He was a partner.”

Wise and opinionated, O’Hara quickly settled into the role of Rivers’s artistic and ethical director, constantly giving him advice on his career. “He talked a lot of artists into thinking that they were terrific,” says Rivers. “That’s why he was so popular and so sought after. He had you on his mind. And if 20 percent of it was horseshit, so what? With most people 90 percent of it is horseshit, about thinking about you.” This dynamic, however, led to a Pygmalion myth among their friends that, if true, did not take into consideration Rivers’s success before or after his involvement with O’Hara. “Larry has never been as good a person, or an artist, or a mind as he was when Frank was running herd on him, keeping him in order, checking him, making sure he did the best and insulting him when he didn’t,” says Hartigan, on whose life and art O’Hara had had a similar effect. As one observer noted: “It seemed to me as if the electrodes had been planted in Larry’s mind. It was like the college girl sleeping with the professor.”

While Rivers was content with the flirting friendship with O’Hara, O’Hara sometimes wanted more. The frustrations of his love affair with Rivers resulted in a series of powerful poems beginning in the summer of 1952, many of them dark and tortured. The emotional insecurity shook him. “A lot of those very unhappy, wretched, miserable poems about unsatisfied love I think were about Larry,” says Kenneth Koch. “His feelings about Larry seemed to correspond to a big change in his poetry from the happiness of the early poems, the sort of excitement.” The poems of the period that reflect this new anxiety about Rivers begin with “Invincibility” (original titles: “Razors at Twilight,” “The Tears of Invincibility”), “Savoy,” “Round Robin,” “Sonnet for Larry Rivers & His Sister,” and “River,” its title an obvious pun, in which he laments “that brutal tenderness” that held him “like a slave / in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day, / though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me.”

In February 1953, O’Hara and Rivers’s collaboration on a new production of Try! Try! was presented as part of the opening program of the Artists’ Theatre at the Theatre De Lys, which had recently been converted from a movie theatre on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. As the original Try! Try! had opened the Poets Theater in Cambridge, so this new production helped launch a New York attempt at a similar theatrical Yeatsian dream, this time conceived by John Bernard Myers and under the direction of his new boyfriend, Herbert Machiz. Try! Try! shared the bill with Red Riding Hood by Kenneth Koch, decor by Grace Hartigan, and Presenting Jane by James Schuyler, decor by Elaine de Kooning, including a showing of a three-minute version of the summer movie. The collaborating artists were given thirty dollars for set materials. Rivers spent his money on metal pipes from which he made a weird sculpture, which doubled as a coat rack. He also painted a large suspended mural, which consisted, according to Myers, of “strange, large-eyed figures placed in a cityspace that suggested Istanbul.” At rehearsal, however, O’Hara was unhappy with his original play. “At the first run-through I realized it was all wrong and withdrew it,” he later wrote in his memoir of Rivers. “He, however, insisted that if he had done the work for the set I should be willing to rewrite to my own satisfaction, and so I rewrote the play for Anne Meacham, J. D. Cannon, Louis Edmonds and Larry’s set.” O’Hara’s new version dispensed with the clever shifting of poetic forms that had marked his first version in favor of a looser bebop style of verse more in keeping with his current work. “Up until rehearsal I didn’t think there were going to be any plays the way everyone screamed at each other,” recalls Hartigan, who spent her thirty dollars on brown paper and gouache for an inside-outside backdrop and then filled the stage with chairs and a drawing table from her studio. “It was such an idealistic thing to do, for poets to write plays and for artists to do the sets.” Their sense of success among themselves, however, was intimate and unsustained by public acclaim—the theatre had been only half-filled with the usual crew of friends and artworld supporters. As O’Hara later told a television interviewer, “John . . . when he was producing us, he would look at the audience and say, ‘Well, Harold Rosenberg is here; Tom Hess is here, Mark Rothko just came in. It must be a hit.’ Only it’d be a one-night hit.”

A few months later, O’Hara, fed up by now with Myers after their rivalry over Rivers and his experience working with him on a book and a play, lit into him in a letter to Rivers. “John’s chief characteristic in every area, emotional, financial, sexual, social, every single characteristic one can remark is based on the greed which is gradually eating up whatever distinction of personality one used to find traces of in the elaborating camouflage which is his manner.” O’Hara, eminently capable of bitchery, complained too of the nonexistent “royalties” from Try! Try! that he claimed had been “intended to raise money for his and Herbert’s shirts, ties and silver sets.” In the same letter, O’Hara revealed his sense of the crucial importance of the artist’s (in this case opposed to the dealer’s) life. “I think of other occupations as related to life in almost the same inconsequential and peripheral way that a lay person is related to the church,” he wrote, slipping in his Thomistic training. “I realize how biased this is, but I do believe that the artist is near the mysteries that govern us or that we govern subconsciously, and that other people are only aware of them in some sketchy way.”

In spite of O’Hara’s annoyance with Myers and Machiz, however, the productions at the Artists’ Theatre, when finally mounted, inspired him again with the possibilities for poets in theatre, for rekindling the successes of Yeats and Lorca. In this spirit he encouraged Kenneth Koch later in February to keep up the good work of Red Riding Hood: “One day I told Frank I wanted to write a play, and he suggested that I, like no other writer living, could write a great drama about the conquest of Mexico,” Koch has recalled. “I thought about this, but not for too long, since within three or four days Frank had written his play Awake in Spain, which seemed to me to cover the subject rather thoroughly.” A short five-act play written for over eighty characters including Church Steeple and Marlene Dietrich, Awake in Spain was another of O’Hara’s conceptual closet plays best read, as it was at the Living Theatre in 1960 by ten seated players wearing different hats. “Frank called me up one day and said, ‘I’ve just written a five-act play,’” recalls William Weaver, who in 1953 was working at Collier’s magazine. “I said, ‘Oh that’s wonderful, Frank.’ He said, ‘Shall I read it to you?’ It was Awake in Spain so an act was very short and he did read it, too.”

During March and April O’Hara wrote his longest poem, the eleven-part 478-line “Second Avenue,” the culmination of his accelerating desire to use a kind of automatic writing to match the epic scale and grandeur built up by accident and subconscious connections in Abstract Expressionist painting, aleatory music, and French Surrealist catalogue poems. O’Hara worked on “Second Avenue” mostly in Larry Rivers’s plaster garden studio overlooking Second Avenue between Seventh and Eighth streets. Rivers at the time was making a sculpture of O’Hara who, between poses, would sit down to add more and more lines. Rivers has recalled the night when “Three fat cops saw the light and made their way up to make the ‘you call this art and what are you doing here’ scene that every N.Y. artist must have experienced.” During this phase, Hartigan stopped by occasionally on missions of mercy. “They were lovers,” she recalls, “and I’d come by and bring them chocolate éclairs because Frank had hangovers and Larry was coming down from drugs. Sweets are always good for both those cases.”

O’Hara was encouraged to keep pressing forward by the pressure he was putting on Kenneth Koch to work on his long poem, “When the Sun Tries to Go On.” (Ashbery was working on a similarly long and deranged work at the time titled “Petroleum Lima Beans.”) O’Hara and Koch used to call each other up every day to read their daily results, or sometimes they met for a sandwich with pages in hand. One such meeting was recorded in “Second Avenue”:

of umbrella satrap square-carts with hotdogs

and onions of red syrup blended, of sand bejewelling the prepuce

in tank suits, of Majestic Camera Stores and Schuster’s,

of Kenneth in an abandoned storeway on Sunday cutting ever more

insinuating lobotomies of a yet-to-be-more-yielding world of ears.

As Koch has said, “I had no clear intention of writing a 2400-line poem (which it turned out to be) before Frank said to me, on seeing the first 72 lines—which I regarded as a poem by itself—‘Why don’t you go on with it as long as you can?’ Frank at this time decided to write a long poem too; I can’t remember how much his decision to write such a poem had to do with his suggestion to me to write mine.” Koch feels there was a sense of racing to the finish line, adding that O’Hara “was very polite and also very competitive.” Following the publication of “Second Avenue” by Totem Press in 1960, Koch later wrote about the work in Partisan Review that “To speak historically, I think ‘Second Avenue’ is evidence that the avant-garde style of French poetry from Baudelaire to Reverdy has now infiltrated the American consciousness to such an extent that it is possible for an American poet to write lyrically in it with perfect ease.” Hartigan, also perhaps influenced by her personal involvement in its making, told an interviewer that she felt “Second Avenue” to be “Frank’s greatest poem, one of the great epic poems of our time. . . . Name it, name anything, and it’s got it.” Ashbery distanced himself a bit in his introduction to the Collected Poems by describing the extremely experimental poem as a “difficult pleasure” and relegating it to what he somewhat mystifyingly labeled as O’Hara’s “French Zen” period.

The original dedication of “Second Avenue,” “To Willem de Kooning,” was scratched and replaced with an epigraph from the Russian revolutionary poet Mayakovsky’s “The Cloud in Trousers”—“In the church of my heart the choir is on fire”—and then simply to “In memory of Vladimir Mayakovsky.” The example of both de Kooning and Mayakovsky figured in the voice and feel and scale of the poem. In “Notes on Second Avenue,” a collection of stray observations written that year by O’Hara at the request of Time/Life cultural editor Rosalind Constable for her in-house memorandum on the arts, O’Hara explains that “Where Mayakovsky and de Kooning come in, is that they both have done works as big as cities where the life in the work is autonomous (not about actual city life) and yet similar: Mayakovsky: ‘Lenin,’ ‘150,000,000’ ‘Eiffel Tower,’ etc.; de Kooning: ‘Asheville,’ ‘Excavation,’ ‘Gansevoort Street,’ etc.” The de Kooning painting that found its way into his poem was the Woman he had seen the summer previously in the Hamptons, its demonic Mona Lisa female landscape built up from viscous grinds, halts, and erasures executed violently about the focal point of the pasted-on ruby smile of a Lucky Strike lady from an ad. The canvas’s flirtation with a figure, no matter how distorted, was extremely upsetting to those painters who believed that the hegemony of pure abstraction was already a closed case. Even more upset was Elaine de Kooning who, frustrated with rumors that the fierce woman was modeled on her, had asked a friend to take a snapshot of her in front of the canvas only to discover in the photograph that the painted arm of the Woman seemed to rest maternally on her shoulder. O’Hara claimed that his own woman in “Second Avenue” began as a description of a woman leaning out a window on Second Avenue with her arms on a pillow but was soon permeated with de Kooning’s fractured icon:

how like a yellow pillow on a sill

in the many-windowed dusk where the air is compartmented!

her red lips of Hollywood, soft as a Titian and as tender,

her grey face which refrains from thrusting aside the mane

of your languorous black smells, the hand crushed by her chin,

According to Koch, who like the rest of O’Hara’s gang had witnessed the pile of slashed and discarded Woman canvases mounting out back at Castelli’s during the summer of 1952, “The Women were obviously wonderful. They had that double vision of things which we were so interested in in poetry. Those sorts of double-exposure effects. You’d see a woman, and her lips would also look like a seascape.”

While O’Hara was finishing “Second Avenue,” another of his collaborations with a painter was exhibited in Grace Hartigan’s show opening on April 7 at Tibor de Nagy. As O’Hara had been writing poems to Hartigan, including “Portrait of Grace,” based, he said, on “Rivers’ drawing of Grace as a girl monk,” she wanted to make paintings with his poems. So he gave her twelve of his original nineteen “Pastorals” and called them “Oranges,” saying as he handed them over to her, “How about a dozen oranges?” These led to the twelve oil paintings on paper—Hartigan couldn’t afford canvas that month—that were displayed on cardboard nailed to the gallery’s wall. “It coincided with a time when I was moving out of completely abstract work into imagery,” says Hartigan. “So he was handing me image after image after image in these things.” A few days before the show Myers decided to mimeograph O’Hara’s poems and bind them in gray three-hole paper binders of the style used by schoolchildren on which Hartigan painted about twenty original covers. These were sold for one dollar each. O’Hara was quite sentimental about the show. He kept one of Hartigan’s Oranges paintings over his bed all through the sixties, and in 1956 wrote to her from Boston, “I often think of your paintings for the Oranges—where are the snows of yesteryear?”

During the spring and early summer of 1953 O’Hara, who had been promoted in March to Front Desk Manager at the Museum, was spending as much of his free time as possible at the house Larry Rivers had begun renting in May on Toylsome Lane in Southampton. Although his mother had become by then an enormous burden, O’Hara kept enough warm memories of his own early family life that he enjoyed becoming part of the families of certain of his heterosexual friends. Other people’s families were a curious comfort to him. As Rivers was living with his two sons and his mother-in-law, O’Hara not only had the benefit of their own complicated romantic and artistic collaboration, but also of a family scene. O’Hara became close to Rivers’s two boys, including them in poems such as “Steven” and “Two Shepherds: A Novel” while they referred to him as Uncle Frank, a development that allowed him to express those obliquely paternal impulses that sounded so strongly in his Navy letters to his little brother and sister. Tibor de Nagy recalls that whenever he saw O’Hara during the day in the Hamptons he was with Rivers’s two boys, especially at the beach. Rivers never had any tolerance for the beach and was always impatient to return to the barn that Fairfield Porter, a Southampton resident since 1949, was allowing him to use as a studio. As O’Hara once remarked to a friend, his humor thinly disguising his subliminal desire, “I’m Larry Rivers’ sons’ stepmother.” (The incestuousness threatening this surreal family surfaced in the sixties when a drunken O’Hara made a pass one night at the teenage Steven Rivers, who was “bugged” because, he says, “for all these years I thought I was sort of more like some kind of relative.”)

It was Mrs. Bertha Burger who acted like the mother of them all. Known as Berdie, Rivers’s mother-in-law, a widow from the Bronx, was the perfect Jewish grandmother; her kindness and unquestioning acceptance of all the characters around her made her the ideal maternal figure just as her lack of bohemian values made her paradoxically a source of fascination in this world of artists devoted to willful eccentricity. As O’Hara wrote in his sonnet “Mrs. Bertha Burger”:

Her life is beautiful, and free from hate;

to know her is to know how rarely one

may love, as one again beholds the sun.

“She was a very saintly type, meaning sort of a little stupid and a little amazed by everything, and sort of the worst cook that ever lived,” says Rivers. “Tennessee Williams came and used to spend nights with her so she must have had something I didn’t understand.” O’Hara, in his memoir of Rivers, was more happily mythological about Rivers’s most constant model in those years:

She was called Berdie by everyone, a woman of infinite patience and sweetness, who held together a Bohemian household of such staggering complexity it would have driven a less great woman mad. . . . She appears in every period: an early Soutinesque painting with a cat; at an Impressionistic breakfast table; in the semi-abstract paintings of her seated in a wicker chair; as the double nude, very realistic, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum; in the later The Athlete’s Dream, which she especially enjoyed because I posed with her and it made her less self-conscious if she was in a painting with a friend; she is also all the figures in the Museum of Modern Art’s great painting The Pool. Her gentle interestedness extended beyond her own family to everyone who frequented the house in a completely incurious way. Surrounded by painters and poets suddenly in mid-life, she had an admirable directness with esthetic decisions: “it must be very good work, he’s such a wonderful person.” Considering the polemics of the time, this was not only a relaxing attitude, it was an adorable one.

O’Hara was only too happy to find such a nurturing mother after his recent and painful experience with his own mother.

O’Hara and Rivers were both obsessed that season with the Russians. O’Hara’s obsession was with Mayakovsky, who had so stridently declared that “The poet himself is the theme of his poetry” and “The city must take the place of nature,” and from whom O’Hara had picked up what James Schuyler has described as “the intimate yell.” (In a nasty swipe of a poem, “Answer to Voznesensky & Evtushenko,” in 1963 O’Hara accused the Soviet poets of being “Mayakovsky’s hat worn by a horse.”) Rivers was busily reading War and Peace, about which John Myers grudgingly asked in a memoir: “And who got him to read War and Peace? Not Frank.” Between Mayakovsky’s “The Cloud in Trousers,” O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the epic was in the air. So Rivers decided to make his own attempt at a large scale epic painting, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which he has described as “like getting into the ring with Tolstoy.” It was based on the original work by the nineteenth-century academic painter Emmanuel Leutze, a German-American sentimental realist known for the stage-set heroics in this tableau as well as in his mural decorations for the Capitol. O’Hara found the notion of updating this historic figure “hopelessly corny” until he saw the painting finished, his coming around later recorded in his 1955 poem “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art.” Among the painters, however, the work—with its parodistic figure drawing—was a battle cry, thumbing its nose at Abstract Expressionism and pointing the way toward what would later become Pop Art. It was also quite revolutionary in dispensing with the lush brushwork of de Kooning in favor of thin, soaked washes. Rivers was sneered at in the Cedar, where Gandy Brodie, an abstract painter who had studied dance with Martha Graham, described him as a “phony” and one persnickety woman painter dubbed the new canvas Pascin Crossing the Delaware. The painting was a breakthrough for Rivers in finding his own breathing space in the increasingly claustrophobic crowd of young painters.

Meanwhile his relationship with O’Hara was becoming more difficult. O’Hara was making demands that Rivers felt were unreasonable. “He thought he wasn’t putting pressure on me but he actually was,” remembers Rivers of O’Hara’s wanting to go home with him after a party. “Like we’d be somewhere and I’d be enjoying myself. And he says, ‘Well are we going?’ Like meaning, ‘Well is anything going to happen?’ I wasn’t in love in that sense.” On July 27, Rivers mailed O’Hara a letter spelling out the obvious, which they had discussed many times recently:

I hammer home my same boring points and affectionate anxieties. You begin each session with belligerence based on some wrong that seems to disappear as soon as you are satisfied that you still maintain a certain place. You mean very much to me but probably not in the way you could wish. I feel alone and without any strong allies and your concern and glow fill me with strength and a power to go on against all the difficulties and jealousies of my contemporaries. I feel that wherever you are my light shines very powerfully and is protected. This makes me love you but something holds me from rushing up to you and fondling you I don’t feel like kissing you anymore. I get so nervous that this is apparent to you that I am unhappy and I don’t mean a lack of exuberances I mean oppressed by all that a minus of feelings inspire. . . . If Courbet knew Byron would he throw it away. Not after such joy and juice. Not Byron I mean Rimbaud.

As anticipated as the message of Rivers’s letter had been, O’Hara took the news as a decisive upset. It was July, and O’Hara uncharacteristically wrote out with a pencil a responding poem on long yellow sheets of tablet paper. This was “Life on Earth,” its concluding stanza wincing with the acceptance of a homosexual life, which O’Hara links ruefully with his romantic disappointment and more gleefully with the poisonous tang of an adolescently rebellious “evil”:

Vile, ghastly, ignorant, I wander through the barriers,

I suck upon rue for my distinguished heart.

I roam through the city in a shirt and get very high.

I will not go away. I will never take a wife.

My heart is my own, the trapped hare belongs to the hour.

The loving earth bleeds out its laughing grunts which are green

and new and, above all! tender! yes, tender!

like the blue light seeping towards you under my closed eyelids,

so evil, and now closed at last in evil! evil! evil!

Yet O’Hara had already pinpointed Rivers’s attitude and his own wry response more acerbically, flatly, and comically three months earlier in “Round Robin.” He anticipated the present temporary breakdown of intimacy between them when he described Rivers as

moved by my smile like a public accusation

of homosexuality against the Great Wall of China;

to him my affection’s as pleasing as an insult

to a nun.