After my father’s diagnosis, I feel haunted by the tapes. I’ve been pouring the voices of all these dead and dying people into my head and hoping I can do something with them. And the book project begins to feel more personal and more upsetting than I thought it would be. I try listening to the tapes again, hoping that I can get back to Frank O’Hara, which feels like safer ground. I turn to O’Hara’s memorial service in the hope that the eulogies will help me make sense of his death and my father’s, which might be imminent.
My father recorded the event from the audience at St. Mark’s Church. At the front of the room were Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Kenneth Koch. Koch began.
Frank O’Hara’s Memorial Service—East Village, New York City—1976 Kenneth Koch: Frank died ten years ago. I have a few remarks, which will be very brief, and then I want friends of Frank’s to take [over] from me. For all its cheer, and charm, and chumminess, for all its glamour and its gladness, I think we hear something else ten years later in Frank’s poetry. Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern. There is a pervasive discontent in this work.
Koch read aloud from O’Hara’s poetry and offered commentary. He said, “I think there’s evidence that Frank O’Hara saw himself as the Byronic personality of our time”; and “Surely Frank would have recognized [his] death [on Fire Island] as the death of Hippolytus”; and “For all the laments and celebrations, we overhear the restless whimpers of a self desperately aware that time is being snatched out from underneath.”
Jesus, I think. Calm down. I’d come to find nearly all these people irritating and self-important. Do they deserve to be resurrected? Maybe I should have let these tapes rot in the basement. I could have written a fun book, maybe A Cultural History of Kittens.
On the memorial service tape, a young poet named Michael Lally came up to talk about how reading Frank O’Hara made him believe poetry could be fun.
Larry Rivers made a snide remark. The crowd laughed. They couldn’t get enough of him, even when he insisted that O’Hara’s references to musicians like Billie Holiday were just shout-outs to his friends who cared about jazz (in other words, to Rivers).
Jane Freilicher, acting the diplomat, suggested that all the material in his life, all the names and facts he heard, acted as compost: “Everything is converted to soil eventually.”
Koch kept providing anecdotes. In one, at the Cedar Tavern, Grove editor Barney Rosset supposedly said, “Frank, I’m really disappointed. I thought you’d come to more.” And O’Hara said, in a nod to the poet Robert Graves: “What did you want me to do, go live on Majorca and take dope?”
Rivers kept cracking wise.
Larry Rivers: I figured out toward the end of his life that almost everything he did was about sex. Everything. Everything. And so, I think some of the collaborations were … I don’t mean that they would get into bed necessarily, but there was some erotic something that was going. In fact, he collaborated with my children, my two male children. I think that even there, there was some kind of thing that had to do with that.
To be fair, Larry Rivers thought everything was about sex. Here he is writing about the Cedar Tavern in New York magazine in 1979: “What is a bar? Figured it out the other day—all it is, is about sex, really. And loneliness.”
Why was I still listening to these people talk? I needed to focus attention on the present, where my father might be dying.