I was over at my parents’ place for dinner when I spotted a new novel by the art historian Irving Sandler called Goodbye to Tenth Street. Irving Sandler managed the Tanager Gallery on East Tenth Street in the 1950s and drank with the abstract expressionists at the Cedar Tavern. I flipped the book over and read the back. It was a novel set in the downtown art world from 1956 to 1962. O’Hara appeared in it as a character. I skimmed for his name and found him a third of the way into the book, at the Five Spot. Someone compliments a review he wrote about the abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline and he replies, “Gee, thanks.”
Irving Sandler was one of the tapes I still had to listen to.
“Oh, hey!” I said to get my father’s attention. He was reading a newspaper. “Can I borrow this Irving Sandler book?”
“No,” he said. “I’m saving it for Spencer.”
At least I had the Sandler tape.
Irving Sandler—6/3/77
Irving Sandler: Again, the thing I had mentioned was this absolutely fantastic concentration. Anyone he was with and talking to. You could be in a room with several hundred people. If Frank was talking to you, there was no one else there. Extraordinary. The other thing was this generosity. I mentioned that even before I had achieved any kind of recognition or reputation, Frank asked me to do a proposal and an early show of abstract expressionism that he not only presented at the Museum of Modern Art, which was quite extraordinary, but really tried to push.
Peter Schjeldahl: What year was that?
Oh my God! I shout at the tape recorder. You do this every time! They’re trying to share feelings and memories and you start grabbing for years! You’re dragging them to the analytical, boring side of their brains like some kind of bohemian Joe Friday—“Just the facts, ma’am.”
My father also keeps interjecting his own opinions. It sounds like he’s trying them on for size. “[O’Hara] is much more a creature of sentiment and soul,” he tells Sandler. “He never went to a psychiatrist. He had nothing against it. I think he just never needed it. He was astoundingly nonneurotic. For being as unconventional as he was.”
Sandler tells a long story about writing an ARTnews article in 1957 called “Mitchell Paints a Picture.” And he recalls getting a statement from her for a piece titled “Is the Artist with or Against the Past?”
“Frank was sitting there while Joan was dictating her statement to me. We didn’t have a tape recorder. Nobody used tapes then.” When Sandler read Mitchell’s words back to her, she got cold feet.
IS: Joan suddenly got very unsure about her answers and whether to let them go. She turned to Frank, and Frank just said very simply—I remember how simply and directly and how tough he was about it—he said, “Your answers are terrific. Don’t change a word. Let it go.” And Joan said, “That’s it.” And it was printed the way she said it.
PS: That sounds very characteristic. That would seem to be his—I think that was his basic piece of advice in every circumstance whatsoever, from poem to painting to love affair to whatever: Go with your first impulse and you’re terrific, do it! Or else: You’re horrible, get lost! [Laughs.]
IS: I have a feeling about Frank, that I half kept expecting him to say that to me: Get lost. I don’t know why. There was a fastness about him that I never had. I always felt like I was stumbling when I was talking to him. I would really almost exaggerate certain—
PS: You felt intimidated by him?
IS: A little bit. Inadequate.
PS: You weren’t quite interesting enough?
IS: Yeah! That I wasn’t quite interesting enough. But also I would pull conversational gaffes almost that I normally wouldn’t unless I was in a situation where …
PS: Out of an urge to become interesting, to him.
IS: Yeah.
I keep thinking about that phrase Sandler uses: “I wasn’t quite interesting enough.”
That’s how I feel about my father: I’ve just never been that interesting to him.
Listening to his voice on the tape recorder, I realize he is in his midthirties, ten years younger than I am now, a new father, trying to do something he’s never done before. But he can’t maintain focus even in these one-hour interviews about his favorite writer.
I want him to be better. Why can’t he just sit back and listen to these stories, gently guide them? Instead, he follows tangents, asks irrelevant questions, interrupts stories that are going well in order to nail down a timeline, causing his subjects to lose track of what they were saying. He keeps wanting to show off, when everyone knows the way you get good quotes is by playing dumb. He loses track because he’s not paying attention.
PS: Let’s see, what were we talking about?
Younger than the people he’s speaking with, unsure of himself—he’s not a version of my father I’ve ever considered before. I feel pity for him.
The truth is, he isn’t suited to biography, which requires sustained curiosity about other people and their meaning to one another. His writing is about looking closely at art, which does not talk back, and then thinking about what he’s seen. Neal describes it like this: “He not only doesn’t see the forest for the trees; he’s down on the ground with a magnifying glass.”
My aunt Ann says my father told her: “I’m happiest when I’m talking and other people are listening.”
Even though he is not doing a very good job of asking the right questions, I still feel like I’m getting to know O’Hara personally through these interviews. What I’m starting to see is how strangely spiritual O’Hara was while being so present in the world. He was witty and charming, and yet so much of what he wrote was about death.
Bill Berkson once said, “There is always some death in an ‘I do this I do that’ poem.”
Helen Vendler wrote, “O’Hara was stubborn enough to wish, like Emily in Our Town, that life could always be lived on the very edge of loss, so that every instant would seem wistfully precious. Therefore the attitude of perpetual wonder, perpetual exclamation, perpetual naïveté. O’Hara had enough of all these qualities by nature (judging from their consistent presence from the earliest poems to the latest) so that this poise at the brink of life was no pose, but it does make me wonder how he would have endured that jadedness of age that, in their different ways, all poets confront.”
This may be what I admire in O’Hara more than anything else: his “poise at the brink of life.” One of my pen pals, the poet Sparrow, once told me that his daughter had made him see that Frank O’Hara had an enlightened, saintlike quality that often gets ignored: “We fail to recognize an elevated being simply because he’s smoking a cigarette. God speaks through inebriated curators.”