Invigorated, the next day at the library I put my headphones on and listened to an interview with Larry Osgood, one of O’Hara’s Harvard friends and a novelist then living in SoHo. After World War II, Osgood had arrived at Harvard from Buffalo, New York, to find a campus teeming with veterans taking advantage of the G.I. Bill. It was the first time he’d ever been away from home. As a roommate of one of O’Hara’s friends at Eliot House, he fell in with the intellectual gang including O’Hara, Lyon Phelps, George Montgomery, Hal Fondren, Edward Gorey, Freddy English, and Violet R. “Bunny” Lang. Of the group, Osgood was the youngest and least sophisticated. “My eyes were opened very wide, and my ears were open very wide,” he said. “I didn’t have very much to say.”
As Osgood and my father talked in Osgood’s apartment on Wooster Street, there was street noise in the background, and a cat meowed into the recorder. My father seemed stressed out. When presented with Osgood’s letters from O’Hara, my father said there was no need to look at them because he would be receiving the lot any day from Maureen.
You sure about that? I almost say out loud.
Then Osgood described how he and O’Hara became lovers.
Larry Osgood—SoHo, New York City (141 Wooster Street)—6/1/77
Larry Osgood: We were standing around on a street corner. This must have been in January or February of 1950. We were trying to decide if we should go to the Harvard liquor store and buy a pint of rye and go back to Frank’s apartment and drink or whether we should—
Peter Schjeldahl: The liquor store was open after midnight?
LO: Yes, it was. Maybe it closed at midnight, but there was always a period before last call at [the popular student bar] Cronin’s and the time the liquor store closed. We were trying to decide whether we should do that or not and Frank finally turned to me and said, “Well, it’s about time you decided something, Larry.” So I said, “Well, okay, let’s buy a pint of liquor and go back to your apartment.” We all got drunk at Frank’s place … We got to dancing with each other. And I spent the night with Frank that night. And fell just hopelessly in love with Frank O’Hara. And for the rest of the spring we had an affair going … I was very serious about the affair myself. And I think Frank didn’t want that particularly. As I look back on it, I realize that I rather instinctively pulled every possible trick a lover can pull to keep a lover, without really intending to do so, without calculatingly doing it.
Osgood still sounded a little bit lovesick, in that way one often is when it’s not clear what an affair meant to the other person. He recalled a code they had: If O’Hara said, “Would you like to come up and listen to Schumann?” it meant “Would you like to spend the night with me?” Osgood mused about whether O’Hara had ever slept with their other friend, George Montgomery.
My father, seemingly oblivious to how sensitive Osgood was on this score and eager to show off that he had been doing his research, told Osgood that O’Hara and Montgomery had indeed been lovers. I winced when he said it, sure that Osgood would have preferred to live with the mystery.
There was a push-pull between Osgood and O’Hara for years. Osgood decided that O’Hara had a psychological block against ever getting too close to anyone—that time-honored refuge of the scorned.
LO: Maybe half a dozen—no, maybe not that many. Say, on three or four occasions Frank would have very black depressions. I don’t know what the source of them was, but he would literally draw the blinds and lie on the couch all day or most of the day and simply not want to be disturbed by anybody at all. I don’t know what it was that he was going through, but that did happen from time to time that spring when I knew him.
PS: Compensating for manic [episode]s?
LO: It’s so hard to say if Frank was ever manic because it seemed like he was manic much of the time. Frank’s energy was always …
PS: He certainly seemed remarkably free of neurosis.
LO: Hmm.
PS: He was one of the few members of his generation who was never in psychoanalysis. Do you remember him talking about psychoanalysis?
LO: I would certainly talk to him about mine. I had what I suppose was a mini analysis with Frank during that spring because a lot of the times we were alone together were spent with me talking to him and telling him about my problems and Frank’s elucidating things for me.
PS: What was his theoretical framework?
LO: Mostly that the way to deal with problems of that nature, psychological problems in general, was to do something. It was an activist attitude. With the exception of the times he lay on the couch for three hours without stirring, it was to write a poem. To read a book. To take a walk. To call up somebody.
PS: To have an affair.
LO: Have an affair. Have drinks. Have a conversation. This is a little colored by a conversation I had with Joe LeSueur a few days ago or a couple of weeks ago about Jimmy Schuyler, and when Jimmy started having psychological problems and started having his first breakdown while he was living with Frank. And how Frank wanted nothing to do with it. Really even in a somewhat ruthless way. Frank could be a very ruthless person. He just didn’t want to see that or look at it or deal with it or become part of it.
PS: Could it have been a realistic admission of his own inability? He didn’t have much appetite for lost causes.
LO: None at all. I think with me that spring of 1950 he was extremely gentle on a lot of occasions and very mean and bitchy on others. I think anyone who ever was in love with Frank experienced that absolutely unexpected streak of close to viciousness in Frank. That would come out in retrospect. Perhaps it would happen if he was touched too close and felt that the other person at that moment was going to interfere with—was going to reach him in a way he didn’t want to be reached—that would interfere with his work and fuck him up. Frank from the very beginning—one of the extraordinary things from the very beginning—was so completely a poet that that really governed his life. As I was just actually writing to Don Allen about the early writings, Frank’s voice is altogether there. It became richer and fuller, and the poems got a lot better. But even then he had made up his mind and had become a poet. Period.
I’m reminded of what another friend of O’Hara’s, Kenward Elmslie, said: “He didn’t set a value judgment on emotions. That’s what gets you into analysis. Panic is what happens. And he evidently never panicked. Or if he did, he would accept the panic. Then he was in a panic. Then he was in a rage. Then he was wildly aroused. He accepted each shift as it came.”
I imagine my father, forever consumed with panic, listening to this description of a man truly okay with who he was. I wonder why he tried to emulate his hero in so many ways, but not in this one.