Chapter 19
On February 13, a bit more than a month after my first overture to her, I received a message from Maureen. My heart leapt. She wrote:
Dear Ada,
Thank you for your journalist inquiry. I appreciated reading about your interest in Frank. I would like to talk with you. However, I would not like to be interviewed, as you suggested. Biography is not a good idea.
Although the interviews Peter recorded with Frank’s friends were never shared with me, it would be important to think about publishing them if they are interesting.
I have a question. What has your father said to you about what happened when he and Maxine Groffsky, his agent, proceeded regarding a biography of Frank that did not work out at HarperCollins? Also, did your parents ever say that you were with them when they visited with me to talk about Frank here at my home? We were happy to greet you three.
Best wishes and congratulations regarding your lively, very interesting books, St. Marks Is Dead and Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and all the great reviews. I have enjoyed both books.
Congratulations to Peter regarding the collection of his art writings that will be published by Abrams in 2019.
Thank you for sending more details about your book idea. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Maureen
The email confused me. On one hand, it seemed warm and promising. On the other, there were red flags. I read and reread the line about how biography was “not a good idea.” Did she mean in this instance or in general? If the latter, I wondered who would break the news to Ron Chernow.
I decided I should find some more people who knew her and could help me understand what she meant, so I reached out to the poet Vincent Katz. Katz had just asked my father to read at the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series he ran at Dia Chelsea.
At Le Pain Quotidien in Chelsea I found Katz still to be the sunken-eyed dreamboat who took me to The Nutcracker when I was five and he was twenty. I talked about the project and said I’d heard about a number of books Maureen had effectively killed, noting that she seemed to mostly only give permission to academic and small-press projects.
He said I should get to know her. I assured him I was trying.
When I asked Katz for his thoughts on Frank O’Hara he said, “God. He’s God to me. He’s just so good. Every time I think about him or read his work, it’s just so inspiring. I mean, I could go on for days and days. I’ll just say that I was reading your dad’s poems out loud. I like to read poems out loud. And I came to ‘To the Art Profession,’ one of his later poems, and there’s this one bit where he starts to do one-liners on contemporary critics. I said, ‘Oh my God. He’s doing a riff on Frank O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis”!’ So, I pulled that out and I read that and then I went back to Peter’s poem.”
Katz met O’Hara when he was a little boy: “My parents—probably you had this experience, too—if they were going to parties, they would take me most of the time. I remember at a party at his loft on Broadway I looked up and I saw him, and he said, ‘Oh, he’s just a bag of shit!’ That was one of his favorite expressions. It was just so vivid that it imprinted on my memory. Then I said to my mom, apparently, ‘I’d like to invite someone to dinner.’ I was six. And she said, ‘Who would you like to invite?’ And I said, ‘Frank O’Hara.’
“The last time my mother saw him, he was wearing this little button of James Dean and he took it off and he gave it to her. James Dean was very important to him. He wrote those three very memorable poems when James Dean died. To do that to me seems so generous. It’s a generosity of spirit: ‘I love this thing and here, why don’t you take it.’ That’s him as a person.”
Katz adored his parents’ friends: “[New York School poet] Kenward Elmslie once played this game with me where he put this piece of paper in the typewriter and said, ‘Whatever you say, I’m going to type.’ And I said something like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he typed, ‘What do you mean?’ He didn’t say anything else—so I realized I had to play the game.”
When Katz was a teenager, he found poets as glamorous as rock stars. “Like that whole crowd, from your dad to Ted Berrigan to Anne Waldman—I knew them and they were friendly to me. I just loved the way they dressed and their poetry and seeing their attitude toward life.”
This was not my experience. When I was young, I had no love for my parents’ art-world orbit. Sometimes people hear that I grew up on St. Marks Place around famous artists and imagine it was like Paris in the twenties. And it might have been glamorous, but I didn’t see it that way. I wanted to travel, to do things that felt important and Real. (As a teenager, I was prone to capitalizing words like “Real.”) If anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my typical answer was farmer, because that was the most tangible, least cosmopolitan option I could think of.
I asked Katz how he felt about the fact that these people were so famous at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project but largely unknown outside of it. He said that’s a problem for poetry in general: “There’s a lot of energy but it doesn’t seep out into the general culture as much. But it can. Bill Berkson talked about that and used the word ‘seep.’ He used the image of a leeching field. [Poetry] goes out into the culture, not always on the surface. It’s not always that you’re reading an article about it in the Times or the New York Review of Books, but it’s somehow getting out there and affecting things.”
I asked him what he thought of my father’s poetry. He said, “I think he’s really one of the best poets, honestly, of the generation. He should write poetry again. He should come back.”
I mentioned a term I’d learned: “postulator,” an investigator in the Catholic Church who builds a case for someone to be sainted. I told him that in this case maybe that’s what I should be to Frank O’Hara, rather than his biographer.
Katz didn’t think so. “I’m not sure if that needs to be done. I always think: What is my ideal readership or viewership for this particular thing? I always think of a specific person. My wife’s a filmmaker. We worked on a documentary together once. I thought of a woman I know who’s the editor of a Swiss art magazine: If she likes this film, then it’s going to be good. If you want to reach a much broader audience, I could see that, but I’m thinking maybe you want to make it more about yourself. It’s a great project. You can make use of the tapes and have a conversation with your dad, too.”
Given the choice, is it better to write for a tiny audience of like-minded people or for a mass audience of strangers? I think most East Village bohemians would say the former—that their aesthetic was only meant to be understood by a select few, including some who haven’t been born yet.
In college I took advanced Sanskrit; my thesis was a translation from the Atharvaveda. I chose the course because I loved the Upanishads and wanted to read them in the original, because I loved dictionaries and grammar and Sanskrit had so many and so much of both, and because I didn’t want to be compared with my father, to be called a chip off the old block, as if he were a monolith and I a tiny shard. If that meant I had to hide out in academia, I was okay with that. I was with Vincent: it’s okay if you have a small audience if it’s the right audience.
A Sanskritist friend of mine at the University of Chicago with whom I have a weekly online Vedic translation club emailed me a verse from an eighth-century play. She said it made her laugh because it epitomized the fantasy to which writers of every era cling, from Thucydides to the debut novelist whose book is remaindered.
Those, whosoever they are, who show disdain for us,
What do they know? This effort is not directed toward them.
Anyhow, some person simpatico to me will arise,
For time is boundless and the earth is wide.
At Dia Chelsea the day after our coffee date, Vincent Katz gave my father a glowing introduction, calling him a smart and funny member of the second-generation New York School and displaying an incredible grasp on the history of my father’s poetry output. He appeared proud that he had wrangled my father into giving his first poetry reading in more than thirty years.
Vincent Katz—Dia, Chelsea, New York City
(124 Seventh Avenue)—3/5/19
Vincent Katz: Peter Schjeldahl’s poetry keeps reminding me how poetry and life are inextricably intertwined—for everyone, although only some are aware of it.
Katz said his favorite of my father’s poems was the surprisingly tender “On Cocksucking.” No doubt disappointing the crowd, my father did not read that poem, nor any others that Katz referenced. He read only one poem, “Challenger Elegy,” the last he wrote in verse, on January 29, 1986, and one he told me my book about Generation X reminded him of. I felt proud to have inspired its resurrection.
Dia—Chelsea, New York City (537 West Twenty-Second Street)—3/5/19
PS:
8.
I am here to say that I loved my teachers
A couple of them, anyway
And have been ungratefully forgetful
I am here to state
That father driving the station wagon pleased me in ways
That I am now only dimly aware of
Though it wouldn’t have killed him to stop now and then
I refer to the goodness in going
Even if nowhere special
Of a nice, vague sensation of momentum
When someone you trust drives
A feeling that you can’t remember the start of
And can’t imagine ending
And should it go out in a cupola of flames, say?
It couldn’t help but continue
Cradled in unknowing
As even now it continues
Father at the wheel
And the sky, so blue
After reading the poem, he read a medley of art columns from his forthcoming book with “the brilliant Spencer, who couldn’t be here tonight.”
Another night, not long after, my father read at the Strand from his new book of collected art criticism. Spencer interviewed him onstage and they discussed, among other things, how much Frank O’Hara had influenced his work.
After the event, keeping in mind what Spencer had said to my father about how I didn’t seem to like his friends, I tried hard to be extra friendly to Spencer. I mentioned trying to do something with the Frank O’Hara tapes I’d found. Spencer recommended that I read Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman. I thanked him for the suggestion and bought the book.
Malcolm writes that we do not own the facts of our own lives: “The ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed … Our business is everybody’s business, should anybody wish to make it so … The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”
If that’s true, it would make sense that Maureen would want to bar the doors to my father, to me, and to everyone else. But I don’t think every biographer is like a thief in the night. There are so many different ways to tell the story of a person’s life, to do what Virginia Woolf called life-writing. I think of what Elaine de Kooning said of her faceless 1962 portrait of O’Hara: “When I painted Frank O’Hara, Frank was standing there. First, I painted the whole structure of his face; then I wiped out the face, and when the face was gone, it was more Frank than when the face was there.”
I emailed Josh about the Maureen email and he said that, again, this all seemed promising. He predicted that over time she would come around and I’d have her cooperation, which would let me quote from his poetry and letters.
I wrote a note back to Maureen and told her that I was planning to drive up to Connecticut soon to visit the archives at the University of Connecticut, which contained some Frank O’Hara material. I asked if I could take her out for lunch when I was there.
I decided that when I went, I would bring her an early copy of my Generation X book and my father’s new book and some New York City delicacies. Maybe rugelach. I would arrive right on time with my tape recorder and my notebooks—and my best manners. When she inevitably gave me permission to quote from O’Hara’s work, it would be a lesson to my father about the right way to get things done, with diligence, deference, and professionalism.
Weeks passed and she did not respond. At the end of April, I decided it was time to schedule the O’Hara research trip, so I wrote Maureen again:
I hope you’ve been well! I will be visiting the University of Connecticut library next month, May 14 and 15. Would it be possible for me to take you out for a coffee or lunch either of those days? I would love to see you again—forty years since the last time I was there!”
The next day she called to give me her answer.