One Saturday when my parents were upstate, I went to their empty apartment on St. Marks Place to work for a couple of hours and eat some takeout borscht from Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant around the corner.
I walked in the front door and looked around at the elaborate mural that covered the entire hallway. A few years earlier, my mother had first painted the whole hall mustard yellow and then decorated it, including the ceiling, with hundreds of hand-painted flowers of various colors, in the style of New York School artist Joe Brainard. When I’d arrived during its creation, I asked my mother how she had the energy and attention required for that amount of grueling, detailed work. She said she’d been taking some amazing vitamins. I asked to see them. I inspected the bottle and learned that the “vitamin” was actually the dangerous diet drug fen-phen. Ever the killjoy, I told her she had to stop taking it.
After going through the addled hallway to the living room, I propped a front window open with a slide rule, filling the musty space with fresh air. The street below was blocked to traffic because a dance parade was to come through later and end in Tompkins Square Park. Police officers in full navy-blue uniforms walked up and down the middle of the empty street. It felt strange that there was no crosstown bus rattling the windows. The garish new condo building across the street was full of non-bohemian occupants parading before their mirrors, fully visible through their giant windows.
This is the same room where I’d posed for pictures as Keith Hernandez and where my father had done the interview with O’Hara’s friend Donald Droll, during which I and our incredibly annoying cat, Meow, made an unwelcome appearance.
Donald Droll—East Village, New York City (53 St. Marks Place)—10/19/77
Peter Schjeldahl: This puts Frank in the eyes of downtown in a considerable position of power. How did he handle that?
Donald Droll: Well, I think Frank handled it the way—
Ada Calhoun: Dah-dee!
DD: I don’t think he ever used it as power. I think—
PS: No, but—
Meow: Meow!
PS: —in terms of perception of him.
DD: I think a lot of people who— Hi there!
PS: Oh. [He shuts off the recorder.]
Now, forty years later, here I am listening to these tapes. As the parade blares below, I push Play on an interview conducted with Donald Allen in the remote California art-colony town of Bolinas.
Allen assembled the anthology that first made my father aware of Frank O’Hara. And as I listen to Allen talk, I’m struck by what a good job my father did tracking all these people down and making them sit in front of his recorder. I also marvel that he did so much traveling for this book—to California, Long Island, Illinois—with a one-year-old at home, no less. He invested so much in this project—even spent a lot of money, he tells Donald Allen, on his tape recorder.
Donald Allen—Bolinas, California—3/31/77
Donald Allen: What make is it?
Peter Schjeldahl: Sony. When I started to do the book, in the midst of my complete insecurity, I determined to go out and buy the best tape recorder I could, to make myself feel better.
DA: And it operates from a battery?
PS: Yeah.
He lets Allen drift into a long history of publishing in the early 1950s. The relevant upshot is that Allen worked at Barney Rosset’s Grove Press. At this, my ears perk up, because Grove was publishing my January 2020 book about Generation X.
After the Grove history, there’s more about the poetry scene, and I’m mostly tuning out until I hear this:
DA: My relationship with Frank was always, although we were good friends and I saw a great deal of him socially—
PS: I know from his appointment books that I see you pop up sometimes twice a day.
DA: But our relationship was essentially editor and writer, and I commissioned some things like that review of Dr. Zhivago for Evergreen. We did spend several weekends, perhaps more than several, on Long Island—I mean at East Hampton, or at other parts of Long Island.
PS: Who did you stay with?
DA: Well, we stayed one weekend, the first weekend, with Mike [Goldberg] and Norman [Bluhm]. It’s at the house that Bill de Kooning has now. And I remember we went and poured a libation of bourbon on [Jackson] Pollock’s grave. I did that more recently with Patsy [Southgate] over Frank’s grave.
Hold on. Did my father say he had O’Hara’s appointment books?
I email my father to ask. He tells me they might be in his office and that he’ll check. If not, he thinks perhaps he gave them to Amei Wallach.
The next time I’m over for dinner he says he can’t find the appointment books, but he carries a dozen metal notecard boxes out of his office, then stacks them on the kitchen counter. He says he’s not sure what they are but he thinks they belonged to Frank O’Hara.
I take them home in a taxi in a Duane Reade bag, so afraid I’ll lose them that I hold them to my chest the whole ride.
When I line them up on my coffee table and begin looking through them, I discover that they’re Donald Allen’s typewritten index cards, one for each of O’Hara’s poems. This must have been how he assembled the Collected Poems. I vow to reach out to Allen’s archive at the UC San Diego Library to repatriate the boxes. Meanwhile, I’m determined to find those appointment books, so I email Amei Wallach. She says I can stop by, and she will give me whatever she can find.
When I arrive at Wallach’s Upper West Side apartment, she hands me a stiff drink and a folder of papers. No dice on the appointment books, but there are some great unpublished interviews. She says I can keep all the material if I promise to email her scans of her interviews and if I will deliver a folder of Fairfield Porter letters she somehow ended up with to the proper archive. Then we sit down in front of a plate of olives and nuts and chat about Frank O’Hara until it’s time for me to go pick up Oliver from school.
Wallach got the idea for her Frank O’Hara book from a show put on by the Whitney Museum’s curatorial program. The students did a show of Frank O’Hara and artists. “I loved the crossover between the poetry and art, so I wrote about it,” Wallach says. “Then I decided it would be a really great book, and I started doing interviews.”
She sold the proposal to W. W. Norton for a $20,000 advance. In the beginning, Maureen was on board but then as the months went on, “she was slowly pulling back and then I think there was a letter that said, ‘No, you’re not going to have permission for anything.’”
Like my father, Wallach got to keep the first part of her advance, but the book was canceled.
After getting a little drunk, I leave Wallach’s apartment and head downtown. On the subway, I pull out a folder and start reading a long interview she did about O’Hara in the 1980s with Bob Dash, a poet and painter and a good friend of my mother’s.
My parents spent their honeymoon at Dash’s famous landmarked garden, the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack. I remember going there once when I was a little girl. I loved the hollyhocks he grew with seeds from Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny, some of which I now have growing in my own garden. Dash stopped hanging out with my mother when she had me because, she gathered from things he said when drunk, he thought becoming a mother made her boring.
While Frank O’Hara liked children far more than most men on the scene did, he, too, parted ways with some women when they married or had children.
When Bunny Lang moved to Boston and married, O’Hara felt abandoned.
When Grace Hartigan moved to Baltimore and got married, LeSueur said, her analyst told her she should cut ties with O’Hara (and all her “neurotic” friends back in New York) to give the marriage a better chance. She wrote O’Hara a letter that hurt him deeply. He’d adored Hartigan, even tried to get her to go to bed with him, but she’d rejected him first sexually as a lover and now as a friend. He would give her future art shows scathing reviews.
When the artist Jane Freilicher got married, inherited some money from her mother, and had a daughter, O’Hara felt betrayed. “She’s more interested in her new refrigerator than in her painting,” Joe LeSueur told my father O’Hara had said. “He didn’t like the way she got middle-class … He wanted it the way it was before, where you sit around and drink and talk and you weren’t concerned about all that shit.”
How often one person’s liberation is another’s subjugation. Second-generation New York School poet Alice Notley wrote:
There is no place in America for heterosexual poets with children
[…] except for
in your house.