The next tape I pick to play is marked “Barbara Guest.” She was one of the New York School poets, but she’s omitted from quite a few anthologies and chronicles of the group. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that fans of the genre appear to prefer the Beatlesesque symmetry of O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, three of whom were gay and three of whom went to Harvard.
I like Guest right away. She’s cheerful, open, trying to be helpful.
Barbara Guest—Water Mill, New York—8/17/77
Barbara Guest: I can see [Frank] now, going out from the museum, down the street and around the corner of Seventh Avenue—or Sixth, where they had the Picayunes. It was a very special thing. He didn’t affect the French cigarettes the way Mike [Goldberg] did or others did, the Gauloises. It was the Picayunes.
The Internet tells me that Picayunes were a New Orleans regional tobacco brand sold in the South until the 1960s and “by far the strongest cigarettes ever made.”
I have friends who are truly great reporters, who have won Pulitzer Prizes. I am not one of those people. And yet I have enough experience as a journalist to know that the follow-up question my father asks does not come from a place of confidence.
Peter Schjeldahl: Do you remember him always smoking them, or was it …?
Guest pivots effortlessly, shares her own story. At age ten, she was sent to California from the South to live with her aunt and uncle in Beverly Hills. While a student at Berkeley, she went with other students from the college to visit Henry Miller at his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. She says Miller singled her out for attention—though she was neither protégé nor girlfriend, she insists. A Capricorn himself, Miller called her one of “those appalling Virgos” and told her she belonged in New York.
Guest took his advice. In New York, she says, many of the city’s intellectuals had to “forgive” her for being Southern. But O’Hara was gentlemanly. He had what Guest told my father was “that quality of a thirties or forties movie: It’s only you and the moonlight, you know?”
One day Guest wrote a poem while sitting at the fast-food restaurant Nedick’s, and she knew that it was good. She placed it in Commentary, the intellectual magazine founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. Another she sent to the Partisan Review. An editor there, the poet Delmore Schwartz, liked it and asked for more.
The painter Jane Freilicher saw Guest’s poetry in the magazines and decided to look her up in the telephone book. Just like that, Guest had a new set of friends. She told my father about one winter night in the 1950s when she and O’Hara went to a party at a Greenwich Village studio. There were so many parties in those days—gangs of friends roamed from the Cedar Tavern to the San Remo to one downtown loft or uptown collector’s apartment after another. After this party, O’Hara and Guest walked down Sixth Avenue.
Barbara Guest: In those days, it seemed to snow more. We walked home in the snow and laughed and laughed and laughed. We rolled down the street in [the middle of] Sixth Avenue and threw snowballs at each other. Absolutely treating it as if it were a country town—and, furthermore, as Frank would have always pointed out, our town. You know, he always thought of New York as his town. Although neither one of us were New Yorkers.
PS: Who is?
BG: Well, some are. And they don’t let you forget it.
As I listen to their voices emerge from the cassette player, I’m reminded that I’m here because O’Hara came to New York and made it his town. And that is what led my father to make it his—and mine and my family’s.
My husband, Neal, born in the Piney Woods of East Texas, came to New York and began performing at theaters everywhere from holes-in-the-wall like Collective Unconscious on the Lower East Side to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Our son, Oliver, rides the subway alone to and from his Times Square public school reading history books. He’s been playing dress-up since infancy. We say his memoir would be titled Where’s My Helmet? My stepson, Blake, age twenty-six, who grew up mostly in Texas with his mom, is studying for his doctorate in physical therapy at NYU, watching the sun set over Manhattan each evening from his sixteenth-floor window.
Together the four of us visit the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Natural History, Coney Island, Central Park. Alone, we each walk through neighborhoods, and we feel that the city is ours. Art world observer Martha King wrote: “Even casual acquaintances could feel [Frank O’Hara’s] ‘our’ about New York City. He lived in the glamorous swirl the gifted lonely can invent in a great city.”
The night after I listened to the Barbara Guest tape, my friend Jim took me to a concert at the Yotel. As I walked from the Eighth Avenue subway station, huge globs of wet snow snuck in around my flimsy umbrella and hit me in the face, and I thought of the Frank O’Hara line in his funniest poem, “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!],” in which it snows and rains in New York but not in Hollywood. I reminded myself this was not hail, because, as he says in that poem, hail is violent. This was just snow—wet, sneaky, aggressive snow, falling in soggy chunks on me and everyone else in Times Square.
Onstage, Jim’s friend, Broadway star Tonya Pinkins, sang show tunes and gave a PowerPoint presentation on ancestry and the state of politics. It took Jim and me half an hour to get our first drinks, but we caught up and I had three glasses of wine.
When we left the building after congratulating Tonya, Jim and I saw that the snow had stopped. There is nothing quite like walking around New York City three-drinks drunk after a heavy snowfall. It feels like waking up, finally, to find that you’re in the center of the universe. That is the feeling characters always have in Dawn Powell novels and in Replacements songs. You’re alive. You’re dead. You’re both at once.