There weren’t many children on the downtown scene of the 1950s and ’60s, but I’m happy to discover that my father did find one to talk to. Born in Paris in 1953 to Patsy Southgate and author Peter Matthiessen, Lucas Matthiessen lived in New York with his mother and her new husband, Mike Goldberg, during the 1960s. In family friend Frank O’Hara Lucas discovered a third, more nurturing father figure.
Lucas Matthiessen—10/6/77
Lucas Matthiessen: Well, I remember particularly his presence. He was, as you probably know, around our house when I was a child a great deal of the time, particularly in the evenings. And I remember feeling very much a part of that world—very much one of the adults, so to speak.
Peter Schjeldahl: When were you born?
LM: I was born in 1953. I remember Frank as far back as when I was six or seven. I recall particularly how very, very warm he was towards—well, towards me especially—but towards children in general. As you probably also know, he really loved Larry Rivers’s kids, too. And I think that this is very unusual for a New York homosexual poet, that particular aspect of him. He was in many ways a sort of a surrogate father to me, in that—as you know my own parents were divorced when I was quite young. I was three, and Mike Goldberg spent a year in the nuthouse when I was twelve, right around the same time that Frank was killed. Also Mike, great pal that he is, had a certain sense of irresponsibility about him that Frank somehow made up for. This is not to say that Frank did not indeed display flightiness all the time, which he did, but there was a certain foundation about him, a certain security which I felt around him, which Mike did not possess. I remember especially a great deal of joking. We used to have great tomato and pear fights all the time. The two of us, we would each get a bucket of whatever rotten thing was lying around and whale away at each other. We even once contemplated watermelons, but then decided that neither of us wanted to risk a skull fracture.
PS: Would you go swimming with him at all?
LM: Oh yeah. There was a great deal of play in the ocean. I remember being tossed back and forth between Frank and Joe LeSueur all the time. We would ride waves together. Both of us were relatively fearless, I think, when it came to the water.
PS: Frank is legendary as a swimmer.
LM: Oh yes. So am I, actually. From a very young age I would plow into any surf and so would he. People would stand in awe, watching us disappear. I remember especially a sense of closeness toward him, which as a child now and talking about, I really don’t think has been replaced, at least that particular kind of closeness.
Aside from one memory in which O’Hara called de Kooning’s girlfriend Joan Ward a whore at John’s Restaurant on Twelfth Street, Matthiessen remembers O’Hara as being in control of himself and never cruel, even when extremely drunk.
O’Hara gave the young Matthiessen life advice, read his writing—including a sixty-page story about a dog named Arf who lived in medieval times—and helped him with his homework. In a chaotic world, O’Hara was an anchor.
One time, Matthiessen’s family spent the weekend at Sophie’s Choice author William Styron’s house in Connecticut. With Chubby Checker blaring, Styron boomed, “All we do in this house is twist and fuck!” Matthiessen says that remark summed up those years for him: the grown-ups around him all twisting and fucking their way through the Village and the Hamptons. When he was seven, he called his mother, to her face, “a beatnik nudist.”
O’Hara told Matthiessen that autonomy would be important for him, that he shouldn’t become a hanger-on or a junkie, as so many artists’ children did.
LM: Frank as poet meant nothing to me at that age. Nothing at all. Because everyone was a fucking poet or artist or something, you know. Everyone was creative, for Christ’s sake. I really didn’t place that much importance on it at the time. It was Frank’s personality that mattered to me. Frank as friend, certainly.
O’Hara died when Matthiessen was only twelve—the same year he entered boarding school (which he hated), Goldberg had a mental breakdown, his mother started drinking even more heavily, and he had a miserable visit in Ireland with his father. The boy spent the day of the funeral looking around at the adults, feeling disgust.
Matthiessen remembers Larry Rivers delivering his famous graveside eulogy, in which he described O’Hara’s bruised, broken body in the hospital room in great detail.
My father was at the funeral, but he went home to write up O’Hara’s obituary for the Village Voice rather than attending the reception that followed. Matthiessen tells him what he missed.
LM: I remember Joe [LeSueur] crying hysterically, just almost out of control. I remember Allen Ginsberg and his trio of Moonies or whatever. They were doing their Zen mantra number. And [Ginsberg’s partner] Peter Orlovsky … jerking off. Peter was jerking off.
PS: Where? In the house?
LM: On the deck outside. That was the first sense that I had of really how important Frank was. This is an indirect thing, but that the world didn’t make sense without him. In other words, that the funeral, with Larry haranguing on and on about what Frank looked like in the hospital and the awful business and the whole deal. And Orlovsky jerking off. And Ginsberg playing his little flute or whatever the hell it was. It was like bedlam.
PS: Frank would have been the policeman and straightened everybody out.
LM: That’s right. It’s not so much he would have made sure—it wouldn’t have happened with him. These people without him were just completely out of control somehow. There was no continuity. There was no—
PS: —center.
LM: Center. I was a child of twelve or thirteen, whatever I was when he died, but I remember feeling that very, very strongly—that this was just complete insanity.
PS: What else do you remember about the scene after the funeral?
LM: Well, everyone got very drunk. And I think what everyone was trying to do was to almost celebrate themselves. You know? That the ideal funeral was not to feel sorry for yourself but to give the dead a last drink or something, a last hurrah. But, Jesus, it certainly didn’t work that way. You know, it was just complete craziness.
PS: Do you remember Frank’s brother being there?
LM: I don’t remember him being there. I remember Maureen being there.
PS: What do you remember about that?
LM: I’ve always had a crush on Maureen, from a very young age.
PS: She does not have a crush on me, by the way. I don’t know if you’ve heard.
LM: I hadn’t heard that rumor.
When I look up Matthiessen online I discover that he is the only person besides my father on any of these tapes who is still alive. According to the article I find, he’s become a social worker. For me, he is the moral heart of these interviews, the voice of reason and gratitude, the defender of Frank O’Hara’s—for lack of a better word—soul. I feel a kinship to him because in a far more roundabout way Frank O’Hara, as my father’s role model, was a surrogate father figure for me, too.
Except that my father didn’t copy this side of O’Hara’s personality: his love of children. He saw the smoking, the drinking, the banter, the playfulness with language, but I don’t think he saw past any of that to the spiritual grace that let O’Hara have food fights with children.
LM: Frank, you know, always did have this—I think I used the word “foundation” earlier about him—something secure, something solid, which none of these people, or very few of them, showed after he died. And really have yet to show. Because there was a— God, why do I keep using the word “moral”? The word “moral” keeps coming up and rings true. There was a certain morality, and there was a certain dignity. “Dignity” is the real word. Frank had more dignity than anyone else around him. And despite all the reports you’re going to hear, in my opinion, of Frank’s bitchiness and blah blah blah, I don’t think that those people, that was the main lesson they didn’t learn, that dignity was perhaps the most important thing: personal, individual integrity and adherence to one’s own set of maxims or principles.
PS: I think that’s a good note to end on.