When I walked into Sugarburg, a bar near my Brooklyn apartment, I was startled to discover that the Legacy Fieldwork Fellow was distractingly handsome. I was possessed by a sudden conspiracy theory as I mentally lined up all the good-looking men who had been given permission for O’Hara’s material. Brad Gooch was literally a fashion model, and this guy could’ve been January in a fireman calendar. Then I thought, No, there were also a couple of women. But I liked the idea that the estate might have shown a partiality to heartthrobs, just as O’Hara had swooned over movie star Tab Hunter.
Josh Schneiderman, a tattooed grad student from Philly teaching writing and American literature at Hunter, told me he thought he knew why I was there. I was glad, because looking at his muscled forearms I had forgotten. Everybody wanted to know how he’d convinced Maureen to give him permission to reprint some of her brother’s letters.
As I copied him in ordering a whiskey and treated us to bar snacks, he told me about his girlfriend, his dog, and how much he loved the New York School. His advice about Maureen was this: be very clear with her about what you’re doing and be patient. It might have been the whiskey, but I felt empowered leaving that bar.
The next day, I wrote Maureen an email with the subject “journalist inquiry,” explaining what I’d like to do and telling the Barbara Guest story about the snowball fight. I explained that I’d found the tapes and learned that my father had never finished his O’Hara book and that I wanted to make it right. I said that I’d love to come to Connecticut to interview her at her convenience and to tell her more about the proposed project.
A few days later, I was over at my parents’ apartment on St. Marks Place for dinner. I told them about Josh and how having his advice would surely help. I asked my father if he still had the Nakian catalog that O’Hara inscribed to him. He reached into the bookshelf and handed it to me, said I could keep it. The book had teeth marks along the spine, a victim of my childhood pet rabbit. For years, lop-eared, litter-trained Ginger hopped around the apartment and gnawed everything within reach—art catalogs, Broadway cast recordings, a rare Lynda Benglis sculpture. One day, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.
According to my father, there was at least one other would-be biographer between him and Brad Gooch: the art writer and documentary filmmaker Amei Wallach, who was working on her O’Hara biography in the 1980s when permission to quote from O’Hara’s poetry was rescinded. He said he would email her for me because he had given her some of his research back then and he thought maybe it would be useful to me.
Then, to all of us but really to Oliver, my father read “The Day Lady Died,” “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!],” and Kenneth Koch’s poem in imitation of Robert Frost, the one with the verse “for hay is dried-up grass / When you’re alone.”
Oliver burst out laughing, just like I had the first time I’d heard it.
My father remarked on the serendipity that had brought him—and so all of us—to New York.
Born in 1942, he was the first child of a young middle-class Norwegian-Lutheran couple in Fargo, North Dakota. His mother, Charlene, had gone to school for journalism. She’d always wanted to be a writer but instead she became a housewife and helpmeet to her husband, G. T., whom everyone called a genius. When G. T. returned from World War II, he became an entrepreneur with his own company. The couple had one more boy, Don, and three girls, Ann, Peggy, and Mary.
My grandfather was most famous as the inventor of the airsickness bag and the fabricator of material used in Echo 1, the first communications satellite. He was obsessive about his work and tended to notice his children only when they were doing something that interested him personally. He didn’t like to stop the car on road trips, even to see the sights. On one trip, in his eagerness to get back on the road, he inadvertently left two of his young children, Peggy and Don, at a gas station. When he returned, after eventually noticing the back seat was quieter than usual, their faces were covered in tears and snot—and ice cream that had been given to them by a good Samaritan.
My father never got along with his father. He found both his parents cold and self-involved. And he bridled at the pressure to be a good role model for his four younger siblings. As a hypersensitive boy in the Midwest, he knew his real life was somewhere else.
At the age of twenty-one, my father came across Frank O’Hara in an anthology edited by Donald Allen: New American Poetry 1945–1960. Allen’s book made contemporary poetry seem urgent. Its greatest revelation for my father was Frank O’Hara’s New York City: jovial drunkenness, Times Square billboards, Greenwich Village parties that spilled out into the street.
After giving up on ever graduating from college, my father moved to New York for good to be a part of the poetry world. Once there, he attended parties with guest lists that mimicked the Donald Allen anthology contributors’ page: Kenneth Koch in his big glasses and messy hair. Ron Padgett in his big glasses and messy hair. And, burning brighter than anyone else, Frank O’Hara. My father wanted to be a part of O’Hara’s world. And, with effort and talent, he succeeded.
Sitting in his East Village apartment, my father told a version of this story that he’d told many times before, and he concluded it with the happy ending: “And now here we all are!”
I sank into the couch with the cocktail my mother had made me and looked around in astonishment: How lucky I was. There was no better place to grow up than this. Even if I liked our Midwestern extended family much more than he did, I had to admit that he’d been right to start his family here. This was the promised land.
And now I was going to finish what he’d started as a young man back in the Midwest with his “After Frank O’Hara” poem. I was taking over the pursuit of our hero, and I was going to catch him at last because I was going to get Maureen to talk to me. I was going to bring those tapes out of the basement and into the light. Marcel Proust wrote: “To write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it.”
That’s how this book began to seem: like I didn’t even have to go out of my way for it; it was coming to me.