Tuesday afternoon. I was working in a little basement office space I’d rented for a few months because I’d taken on two big ghostwriting projects at the same time. It was my first office with a door ever, and I loved it even though it was tiny, the walls were glass, and I was surrounded by tech bros yelling into headsets.
When the phone rang, I knew it was Maureen because I had her number saved.
This is it! I thought when I saw her name come up on my phone. It’s all happening!
I grabbed a pen, planning to write down her address and the time and place we’d be meeting in May. But she was not calling to schedule a meeting.
As she spoke, I wrote down everything she said. I’ve been taking shorthand notes as a professional reporter for more than twenty years, so I’m confident in the accuracy of my transcription. As she knew I was a journalist investigating my father’s book project, she never asked to go off the record, and this seemed likely to be her only comment on the matter. I present our conversation with only minor edits for clarity.
Maureen Granville-Smith: You wrote and said you’ll be in Connecticut and you’d like to meet. I’d love to meet you, of course, but I do not support this project. I do not really think it is a good idea. I think it’s great that you want to write about your father, but I think it’s not a good idea to bring Frank into it. Frank really doesn’t have anything to do with it. You have no idea what you’re getting into. You probably know Maxine Groffsky.
Ada Calhoun: No.
MG-S: Well, she and your father … Your dad has all these wonderful things going on in his life. He has this book coming out. He’s done this reading at Dia. If he didn’t tell you what happened … Everybody was enthusiastic about his book at first. My feeling is that when people do a project, they need to use their strengths. You mention that some projects haven’t happened. I expect one of those people was Amei Wallach.
AC: Yes.
MG-S: She is a wonderful person and art writer. She wanted to do a biography of Frank. She couldn’t write about his poetry. She thought of him in terms of F. Scott Fitzgerald—Zelda, drinking, blah blah blah. That tells you everything you need to know. Biography is a subject where people need to know what they’re talking about. When your father and mother came here, you were with them. You were just a baby. Peter was antagonistic, which surprised me. Frank liked his poetry, and I liked his poetry. He said all these things. Maxine Groffsky called me and told me they wanted access to the letters and all these things for five years and not to let others use them. Well, I said, “Look, I’m not in a position to grant those rights.” There were already other publishers doing various things. They also wanted no usage fee. I thought it was preposterous, especially coming from a friend of Frank’s, which Maxine was. They obviously had an agreement with Harper. You think you’re dealing with friends and you’re not. They asked another publisher who had the letters if they could see them, without even asking me! Well, of course that publisher called me right away. That was it. You have to understand this about Frank O’Hara: his legacy is fine. He doesn’t need any help from you. Ada, you have all these wonderful books. Your career is going so well. You have to be very careful.
You love your father. It’s a mistake to bring Frank into it. It’s enough that I lost my brother the way he died. It’s worse when people treat his work in this way. I cannot go along with anything that would treat Frank this way. Your dad when he was here was very antagonistic. I was very happy to have him here, of course. We talked and I told him about Frank and how good he was to me. I told him about all the books he gave me.
“He was controlling, wasn’t he?” your father asked.
He was young. I just laughed, and I said, “No, Peter. He was a very loving person. He loved to share.”
Peter said his relationship with women was a cover for his own sexuality.
I said, “No, no, no.”
Another thing he said was that Frank wasn’t a great poet. He said that John Ashbery was a much better poet. I started to laugh. I said, “I’m not in the ranking business.”
He said he didn’t think Frank was a great art writer. I said, “Why do a book about him, then?”
“Because he was an important art world figure,” your father said.
You have no idea, do you? … You’re so young. You have so many good things going for you. You don’t want to dredge up a past that’s not attractive. I was surprised you wrote to me as if you didn’t know me. I can understand if Peter wants to publish his interviews. Why do a biography?
AC: I’m troubled that not everyone knows about O’Hara. I think more people should know about him.
MG-S: The trouble with Brad [Gooch]’s book [City Poet] is that he’s very accurate in many ways but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you can’t do a good job. I knew him since he was an undergraduate. It’s not really a biography. It’s a hearsay book. Wasn’t his life interesting enough without that? I came to New York. I worked at the Met, at the Guggenheim. I met Frank’s friends. Frank was such a sharing, wonderful person. I knew who he loved the most. I won’t tolerate gossip about him.
I hated the [2018 Mark Dery] biography of Ted Gorey [Born to be Posthumous]. It’s people who didn’t know him writing about him. I would caution you. You are young. You don’t want to get into all this. All the people you listed who you want to interview—it’s all hearsay. When I saw the draft of Brad’s book, I was appalled. He sensationalized Frank’s life. I tried to talk to Brad. I thought he should have gone to John [Ashbery], Kenneth [Koch], so they could see it and comment. I said, “Because you know they will comment afterward.” I said to Brad, “You started out the book with the funeral service. It was exaggerated. You slap people in the face doing that. Young people reading it will never get a chance to really know him.”
Peter wrote a piece in the Village Voice. That was good—it was okay, but he said he was on the decline in the last year. It’s not true. When you get that out there—that he drank a lot, he wasn’t writing, it’s not true. He was not unhappy. He’d done [MoMA catalogs for] David Smith, Nakian. He was excited to have the summer off. I’m his sister. I knew. People say, publishers say, “You’re just his sister.” One publisher said, “You wouldn’t like anything any writer wrote about your brother.” That’s not true.
Brad [Gooch]’s partner, Howard [Brookner], was dying of AIDS. When he slapped Frank, it seemed sad. I’m very respectful of people. Brad said, “Now the daggers are coming my way.”
Frank did not have a miserable childhood. He had wonderful friendships when he was young. Being Catholic was different then. Being “over-parochialized” was how he put it, which was funny. Barbara Guest and all those poets were such individuals and so supportive of one another.
I’m distressed for Peter. It’s nothing to me, of course. I wouldn’t want this ugliness dredged up. I had no choice but to say no. I have nothing to do with any of it.
Ada, you have so many good things going for you. Now I hear you want to read the letters. You’re going to go to the University of Connecticut. What does it have to do with Peter and Maxine? If you want to write about your father, write about your father. Don’t bring Frank into it.
AC: I respect your feelings. I understand that—
MG-S: Do you? If you respect my feelings, you won’t do this. But you’ve already interviewed people. I’ve heard about it from other people.
AC: Yes. I told you in my email to you, I’ve talked to a few people, but—
MG-S: I do not support the project. You sent me a “journalist query.” What is that? I thought, I’m Frank’s sister! I don’t want to be interviewed! Frank had a wonderful life. I loved Joe LeSueur. Frank always said, “You are going to be so unhappy when Joe and I aren’t living together anymore.” But Joe got mean when he got older. No one likes to be in a position to say no, but … You’re a journalist. You’ve written personal things about your life. You have your life ahead of you. I liked your book St. Marks Is Dead, but I saw in the description of the book, “Frank O’Hara caroused. Emma Goldman plotted.” What was that? That is the kind of thing I am talking about. He did not carouse.
AC: I didn’t write that. The publisher did. That’s just part of a long description of the book.
MG-S: You seem confident, but you don’t know that much about poetry or about music. In your letter to me, you’re telling me it changed your father’s life when he didn’t finish the book … I would write about your father, but don’t bring Frank into it. Play to your strengths.
AC: I hope I will prove your suspicions wrong. I want more people to know about Frank O’Hara. I think it’s sad that he’s so great and a lot of people have never heard of him.
MG-S: No, they do know him! People know him through his work! He was glad that he was known through his work. It’s a preposterous idea that you’re going to create some false construct of him. As George Montgomery said, “Don’t lionize people.”
AC: If you are worried that I will get it wrong, perhaps you can tell me how to construct one that’s truer to life.
MG-S: I got from your letter that you want to do a biography, but you don’t know enough about anything Frank cared about. Frank was an intellectual. It’s not good to make someone into a character. You don’t understand him.
AC: Well, I’m not coming at it as an expert but as a fan. He was my dad’s favorite writer, and he is mine—
MG-S: No he wasn’t!
AC: I know my father said something dumb when he was with you. He is kind of famous for putting his foot in his mouth, and I’m sorry about that. He misspoke.
MG-S: That’s called misspeaking?! Everybody has always liked Peter and your mom. Peter didn’t stop writing poetry because of this book. You are not in New York because of Frank. Your father didn’t move there because of Frank. You are not on this earth because of Frank. You’re saying, “I’m going to make things right.” Why? You have this book on Gen X coming out. You’ve written about your life. I don’t think you’re up for this. What do you know about the composers Frank admired? [She starts talking fast now; I didn’t get all of it.] He was just terrific. You don’t want to make a false character.
AC: No. Perhaps you could help me by telling me what other people have done wrong.
MG-S: I don’t want to help you! Your writing is interesting, but that is not enough. Another writer who wanted to do a book about Frank couldn’t write about art, only about theater. That’s why Marjorie Perloff was good to work with. That’s her field. She does understand the poetry. [Call got dropped, probably because I’m in the basement. I called back and she answered.] That was the phone telling me I’ve talked too long. I wish you all the very best. You can always contact me. You’ve taken on an ambitious project.
AC: I understand that.
MG-S: I don’t think you understand! Do you? Do you think I will be allowed to listen to the tapes? Ada, you say your parents didn’t tell you what was going on. You wrote to me and inferred that it was my fault, that I was difficult. I know what Peter said about me. I never went around badmouthing him. When John Ashbery asked me about the ordeal, I said, “I like to avoid painful situations.” He said, “I like to avoid painful situations, too,” and he laughed, because he understood what I meant. Frank died fifty years ago. I can’t believe it. You say you want to finish a story your father didn’t finish. I still don’t know what story he wanted to finish. I don’t know what else he wanted. I’ve written things down. I write everything down.
The Joe LeSueur business. FSG wanted to add Frank’s poems to the book. They exploited him. Joe was very mean. And now Frank gets to be the mean guy? I know Frank made remarks people didn’t always like. I was close to people he worked with at the Museum of Modern Art.
I would tread lightly. You are young. You have your whole life ahead of you. You have a child. I’ve never heard a word of apology from your dad or Maxine. They tried to take advantage of Frank! I did nothing to Peter. This is so silly. I’m talking about not getting into something you’re not up for. You think you can go to someone and talk to them and you’ll get a sense of the Odes? When I got your letter, I thought, Oh my God, her parents didn’t tell her.
AC: I’m sorry you don’t think I can do a good job with my idea. I’m disappointed to hear you don’t trust me to do a good job.
MG-S: I trust in your writing. I don’t think this will be a good project. Josh Schneid—is it Josh Schneiderman?
AC: Yes. I talked to him.
MG-S: When he told me what you were trying to do, I said it was a bad idea. Please do not use Frank. That’s so unfair. It’s using Frank to talk about a situation that is just between you and your father. It’s very sad. You don’t have any idea.
AC: I understand you feel that way.
MG-S: You don’t understand, Ada! You don’t understand at all! I can’t work with someone who is not playing straight!
AC: I feel that I am playing straight. Would you like an apology from my father? Would that help with closure in some way?
MG-S: I would never demand an apology. Don’t you get it? Frank would be so alien to this! Think about that! He would never even have bothered to call you as I have. It’s very exploitative! I liked your book, but why would you talk about Auden that way?
AC: In what way? [I adore W. H. Auden. I told some stories about him in St. Marks Is Dead that are, if anything, hagiographic.]
MG-S: Why would you use those adjectives about him? [Later, I looked up the adjectives I used for Auden. They were: British, superhuman, generous, gay, Christian.] Please spare Frank the journalist’s approach. If you want to do the interviews, that’s fine. You can’t do the gossipy hearsay stuff. I’ve been through enough of that with other projects. I have liked and worked with so many people. I’m not even going to tell you. I’ve known Kenneth, John, and everyone all these years.
AC: It was an honest question. I’ve only asked questions I genuinely wanted to know the answer to. I’m sorry it doesn’t seem that way to you.
MG-S: I’m sure you really want to know.
AC: Okay. Thank you for calling. I understand that you don’t support the project. May I ask if you will try to block it?
MG-S: [Laughs.] This is Harper all over again! That is exactly what they asked me! No. I don’t intend to block anything by anyone. My message is simple. I personally don’t like someone doing a biography who’s not up to doing a biography. Unless people know the poetry well, they should not be writing about it. Other people have done fine things. Other people have done bad things. [Abstract expressionist painter Robert] Motherwell told me it was hard to have someone do a retrospective about your work. A biography is like a retrospective. It’s daunting for the author.
AC: Perhaps you could tell me which writing about him you do like? You mentioned Marjorie Perloff. Is she one?
MG-S: See? This is how you are! I’ve known enough of your work to know this is how you think. You grab on to one thing I say, and you run with it. You think you know. I am glad you corresponded with me. I do not like the area. I don’t know what you think you’re going to straighten up. Write about your dad if you want to write about your dad. I don’t get it. It’s important for you to straighten this out. Maybe your dad should straighten his own life out. It has nothing to do with Frank. I had nothing to do with canceling his book. You have your new book coming out. Your father has his book. I haven’t read it yet. You show me this proposal that you are going to send around to editors. I don’t get it.
AC: Excuse me, but several times you have said something like “Your career is going well. You have a child. You have your life ahead of you.” Forgive me, but it sounds menacing. Are you trying to say that if I go ahead with this project and write about Frank in some way, that these things will be in jeopardy? That I will be in danger somehow?
MG-S: This is ridiculous! So, it would be fine if I called your editor at Grove and asked if I could see your manuscript, without you knowing? Would you like that? Would you?
AC: Well, I don’t think it’s the same thing. If you were a journalist writing about me, I would expect you to try to read as much of my writing as you could. Of course, in this case I would also be happy to give you a copy myself. I want people to read my books.
MG-S: This is a ridiculous conversation! You really don’t get it! They tried to do the project by contacting someone else! I’m more upset now about all this than when I called. Distress, distress! If you want to quote Frank’s work, you may write for permission, but I do not get what you are trying to do. Distress, distress! Bye.
AC: Bye.
When we hung up, at 12:33 p.m., I was sweating through my St. Mark’s Comics T-shirt. My face was red. I had a headache. How could I have failed so spectacularly to win her over? How could she have accused me of not playing straight, of not being up to the challenge? As a journalist, I’d successfully interviewed tempestuous stars and imprisoned felons. Why should writing something about a long-dead poet I loved prove so much more complicated than any of those assignments? And how was it possible that nothing I said helped my cause? Everything I said seemed to make it worse.
Here I’d been thinking that if only my father had played it differently, he would have finished his book. But I’d approached Maureen with diplomacy and care. She’d accused me of ignorance. She only blew off my father. She didn’t even say why she’d disapproved of him until I started asking around forty years later. He was dismissed; I was castigated.
I emailed Josh and recapped the call, thinking he could help me understand what had just happened. He didn’t write back for a while, which made me even more anxious. That evening, I took the subway deep into Brooklyn to do a bookstore reading. When I got home, I went straight to sleep.
At 5:33 a.m., I was wide awake, and there was one word in my head: Vincent. Vincent must have told Maureen what I said at our lunch. It explained everything: how she knew about the Dia reading and my conversation with Amei Wallach and my knowledge of the projects she’s opposed.
Neal woke up to find me on the living room couch deep in conspiracy theories. I’d been betrayed! This was war and I had been compromised!
As he poured himself coffee, Neal asked, “When did this become all shadowy figures in trench coats with popped collars, flashlights darting through the night? Maureen’s an old woman who manages a poetry estate.”
I thought of what my father said about how everyone he talked to for the book seemed to be paranoid and watching their own reputation—everyone except Larry Rivers, who didn’t care what anyone thought. He appreciated Larry Rivers because “at least he was actually present.”
“It’s strange and sad,” Neal said, “how hard people hang on to things that don’t really matter. This is not the Bay of Pigs. This is two successive generations of writers trying to say something of value about a wonderful, talented, funny young man who wrote lovely poetry and died in a freak accident. What a series of dying stars all collapsing in on each other: your dad’s book, Maureen’s machinations, your dad’s poetry career, your attempts to win the scenario, your relationship with your dad, your relationship with Maureen. It’s kind of amazing and beautiful—the ultimate unknowability of others.”
I appreciated Neal’s poetic take, but I did not find the situation remotely amazing or beautiful. I—teacher’s pet of teacher’s pets—had been dressed down by an authority figure, cast into the corner in a dunce cap. It was as though my 4:00 a.m. carousel of intrusive negative thoughts—you’re not good enough, your ideas are bad, you better watch out—had come to life, taken on the aspect of an eighty-year-old woman in Connecticut. I felt misunderstood and embarrassed.
Worse, if I couldn’t quote from O’Hara’s work, I definitely couldn’t do the book my father had wanted to do. Anything authorized or definitive was out. Anything I’d make out of this material would have to be some strange, subjective thing. If she’d just given me permission, I could have done a straightforward biography or an oral history, let everyone pontificate and gotten out of their way.
Then, as the days passed, my humiliation yielded to reflection. As I walked through the city from business meetings to school pickups to the grocery store, I kept trying to answer Maureen’s questions, which boiled down to: Why write about this? Taking the question further: Why write anything ever?
I wonder if you’d get the same answer from me, from O’Hara, and from my father. I wonder if it’s as simple as that we write to be known. To be seen. To be loved. To make rent. A part of me is writing this because I want people to know more about Frank O’Hara. But maybe, if I’m honest, what I also really want is for people to know about me, so I can feel like I left some mark on the world, however slight. As the novelist James Salter wrote, “There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them.”
In 1983, my father said in an interview: “I think at the root of the critical impulse is some kind of adolescent outrage at growing up and discovering that the world is not nearly what you hoped or thought it might be. And that criticism is then a career of trying to move it over and make it more habitable for one’s sensibility.”
That sounds like what we do both as artists and as children: look at our parents, critique them like a work of art, figure out how we can make room for ourselves.
Aren’t all stories ultimately, in one way or another, about the people writing them? On the last page of his memoir about his parents, writer Christopher Isherwood quotes a note his mother once wrote on a childhood project of his: “Perhaps, on closer examination, this book too may prove to be chiefly about Christopher.”
I gather that there will always be people who see this desire to leave a trace as inherently selfish, mean, or dumb. When you write anything, you risk infuriating people, whether you’re writing a pan of an artist or trying to tell the life story of someone you’ve never met. But if we never try to say anything about other people, who wins?
In “The Virtues of the Alterable,” literary scholar Helen Vendler discusses an O’Hara poem about a night out dancing. She says, “Why is it worth recording? Because it happened. Why is what happened worth recording? Because what else is there to record? And why should we want to read it? Because what else is there to know except what has happened to people?”
I try to sort through the reasons Maureen gave for why she didn’t support my project. She seemed mad that I interviewed people and that I wanted to go to the University of Connecticut to read material in the archive. But she’s also mad that I don’t know more about O’Hara. How would I learn more if I didn’t do research? She accuses me of dealing in hearsay but says she won’t tell me anything herself and seems mad that I’ve called some of the very few others who knew him and are still alive.
Maybe Maureen is right that I’m not smart enough to write about her brother. I’ve never even pretended to be as talented a writer as my father, who was also apparently not good enough for her.
I’m no poetry expert. I don’t know much about classical music, either. I never learned how to play a musical instrument. I was too busy watching five hours of TV a day. But I’ve read a lot. And I do know some things. I know that in the late fifties, Frank O’Hara did a playful panel at the Club with Elaine de Kooning, Mike Goldberg, and Norman Bluhm. The panel’s title? “Hearsay.” O’Hara introduced the transcript by saying the panel’s members had paid “careful attention to misattribution and misquotation in keeping with the spirit of the art world.”
They comically misremembered and deliberately misidentified one source after another. Elaine quoted her mother: “Isn’t it odd—thousands of years and the human race has come up with only five pieces of furniture.” Bluhm quoted Mr. Wizard. Elaine quoted Emily Dickinson. O’Hara quoted Thoreau: “No matter how I try to think of Nature, my thoughts go constantly to plotting against the state.” Goldberg quoted Elaine’s brother Peter: “Why live simply when it’s so easy to make life complicated.”
I know grammar. I know what a zeugma is (make me a millionaire and a dirty martini).
I’ve lived pretty much my whole life in the city O’Hara loved. The movie theater where he watched Rhapsody once held 2,342 people. In 1969, it was torn down and the land was acquired by St. Vincent’s Hospital, where I gave birth to my son in 2006.
I know that Frank O’Hara heard Stravinsky in the wind. I know he used listening to Robert Schumann as a pretext for inviting lovesick Larry Osgood up to his dorm room. I know he and Norman Bluhm listened to Tchaikovsky when they collaborated on poem-paintings. Do I need to know how to play these pieces of music, too, or what year they were composed and how to identify them after hearing sixteen bars? Or two bars? What amount of knowledge is enough?
Maureen asked me: Why would you bring up something unattractive? Why would you write something that makes your father look bad?
Because it’s the truth. And if she had something she wanted to say, I would listen to her.
But apparently that call was what she wanted to say. And giving me that insight into the spirit that has guided her decades of estate management might be, in its own way, a gift.
In Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, the narrator says, in response to a question about whether it’s right to “rake up the past”: “How can we get at it unless we dig a little? The present has such a rough way of treading it down.”
Donald Allen said in his 1977 interview with my father that when he announced in 1957 that he was going to do a San Francisco issue of Evergreen Review, a well-meaning friend spent a whole dinner telling him it was a terrible idea. He left the dinner more determined to do the issue. That’s how I feel too: a Frank O’Hara book is getting written by me now, by God. What book? Who knows? It seemed clear that Maureen would hate anything I did, whatever it was, and there was some liberation in that.
Reading back over my transcript of the call, which I do again and again, I’m sort of impressed with myself. I didn’t cry. I didn’t tell her she could have her way or promise to slink off without ever writing a word about her brother. I made it clear that if I couldn’t have her blessing or her permission to quote from the work, I’d figure something else out.
And maybe what I’m figuring out is that the book I was meant to write was never a book about O’Hara—or even really about my father. It was about me. My mother likes to tell the story that a therapist once advised her to “seek disapproval.” This always seemed absurd to me. Approval was my drug of choice. But now, suddenly, I understand. Maureen’s categorical disapproval has shown me the freedom that can come from defeat. The truth is, now I can say whatever I want. Quoting from O’Hara’s poetry would be necessary for exegesis, and it was a requirement for any book about him before the Internet. But now anyone who wants to can google the poems while I talk about what O’Hara’s friends said about him and about what it’s like to live with him as my family’s patron saint.
In a way, Maureen saved me from the hardship of crafting a conventional, academic biography she would sign off on. Now all other paths were open. O’Hara’s friend Helen Frankenthaler said she had no plan when she went to paint: “There is no ‘always.’ No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.” My father asked a version of this question each year when he judged a scarecrow contest at a local farm day: What does hay want to be? Finishing my father’s book would be impossible; I would have to write my own.