When I picked up my ringing phone one afternoon as I made a post-school snack for Oliver, I saw that the caller was Josh, the CUNY grad student who had published the chapbooks of O’Hara letters. I left Oliver in the living room to take the call and closed the bedroom door behind me.
“So, Maureen called me yesterday,” Josh began. “I’m guessing she hasn’t called you, right?”
She had not. He said she’d thanked him for putting us in touch and wanted to ask him if I was on the level. “She said that she would talk to you and that she would be interested in meeting. She didn’t say when, but that’s kind of the way things go with her. She said that she sees no reason why the interviews shouldn’t be published, which I know isn’t the whole deal but it’s a step that seems positive.”
Then he said that Maureen told him that what turned her off of my father doing his project was one time when he came to see her along with my mother and me when I was a baby.
I asked Josh if Maureen told him what my father said.
“Yeah, it’s kind of funny actually,” he said. “She said that when he came to visit, he denigrated O’Hara in comparison with Ashbery: ‘Well, you know, Ashbery was the better critic and the better poet, but Frank was a more important figure socially.’ Which I think is something that she doesn’t like. Then she said he asked a question about Frank’s sexuality: ‘Do you know what Frank’s first sexual experience was?’”
In other words, he called O’Hara a lesser poet, said he was a scenester, and focused on his sex life. He hit the faux-pas trifecta, I thought. Just like in a fairy tale or in a sport: three chances, three wishes—three strikes, you’re out.
“I wouldn’t pull the rug out from somebody for that, but I understand why that would rub her the wrong way,” said Josh. “It was that and the way that the publishers were treating her. That part doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with him.”
I said my father was kind of famous for putting his foot in his mouth, so it didn’t surprise me too much.
“It’s like a Curb Your Enthusiasm sort of scenario,” Josh said, and laughed.
I told Josh that he was not the first to make a comparison between my father and Larry David. I wondered if I shouldn’t give Maureen some space to mull and see how she felt and then keep her up to date on the project. He said that sounded smart to him and that she seemed to like having been consulted and asked for an interview. As I hung up the phone, I felt vindicated: it was my father’s fault after all. And it looked like I would win.
I returned to listening to the tapes with renewed enthusiasm and was rewarded right away with the best Brooklyn accent I’d ever heard. Painter Jane Freilicher, née Niederhoffer, one of the New York School of painters, painted my friend and one-time babysitter Katie Schneeman topless; the picture hangs in Katie’s living room at 29 St. Marks. Freilicher met Frank O’Hara in 1950 or ’51 and they “all went out to dinnah.”
Jane Freilicher—2/19/77
Jane Freilicher: My first impression was I was stah-tled by his whole style, which was very exotic to me.
Peter Schjeldahl: Was his style intact from the beginning?
JF: Well, I think, as he was younger, it seemed in a way— Could I show you a photograph of him? I think you might like to see it.
PS: I’d love to see it. Looks like you’ve got a lot of goodies there.
JF: This is the photograph I mean.
PS: Good heavens.
JF: That will give you an impression of what he was like—what he seemed to be like. I couldn’t quite digest the fact of this great—
PS: Leaning on a rake and two mops.
JF: That was taken by George Montgomery.
PS: Probably in Cambridge.
JF: Yeah.
PS: There’s paint on it, too. Nice touch.
Later in the interview, she talked about how nice O’Hara was to have around.
JF: He was very good at any kind of manual work. He volunteered to do anything, helping.
PS: Odd jobs around the studio?
JF: Yeah, and he liked to do it. He just liked to hang around studios—my studio, Larry’s studio. And he might write something there. His life was so casual that great passages of time went by—sort of play, playtime.
My father told Freilicher that O’Hara’s “walking-around poems of the late fifties seem to me totally unique in literature.” He also said, “Absolutely part of what makes him a great poet—he could take a feeling right where it was.” Then Freilicher offered to let my father read the letters O’Hara sent her. He declined, even though across the span of time I screamed at him, Take the damn letters!
There was a real rapport between my father and Freilicher. She persisted in being charming and offering lyrical memories even as my father pushed her for dates. She talked about studying painting in the mid-1940s.
PS: What was that like?
JF: You know, art student days. Sort of strange and wonderful. I don’t know, it all seems very— I was thinking while this music was playing, the Dvořák concerto, which is so romantic—and I was thinking of my little flat I had on West Tenth Street, which was really abominable, and knowing Frank, and the sort of camaraderie of those days. It seemed very much like something out of Puccini. I was wondering if that’s what young artists have now. It seems very remote.
PS: It’s very hard for me to picture except as a Puccini. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it.
JF: I felt like I was Mimi or something.
[Knock on the door. She has a short exchange with a repairman.]
PS: Most things in life should be so simple.
JF: Of course, it wasn’t simple. It was full of agony and struggle and poverty and—
PS: I meant the television repair.
JF: Oh, it’s wonderful. They keep coming and fixing everything. Do you have it?
PS: No.
JF: We have to have it because—
PS: I’d love it.
JF: We have to have it because we can’t get reception here.
PS: There are all those funky, funny cable programs.
JF: If you have access to them.
They talked about who O’Hara slept with and who he didn’t.
PS: These are all things I probably wouldn’t have to wonder about if I’d known him.
JF: Well, they were crucial, I suppose, to a biography, if to nothing else. [Laughs.] That’s what people want to know, right—did he or didn’t he? It’s quite a job for you.
PS: Raking around—
JF: —in the muck. [Laughs.] You didn’t know him at all? You met him?
PS: I met him. Two or three times. And I had the experience that everyone of my generation had—an incredible kindness and the quality of “taking seriously,” which absolutely astounded me, to the point where I don’t remember anything about him. All I remember is—
JF: Your reaction.
PS: My reaction.
This line stops me dead. My father met Frank O’Hara and what did he take away from it? Only his own reaction. How could you be so self-involved as to not see someone you care about when they’re standing right in front of you?
And O’Hara was so remarkable. It seems that to know him was often to be both in love and afraid. One day at the beach, Jane Freilicher recalls, O’Hara dove into rough surf again and again, even as down the beach an ambulance arrived to collect someone whose arm had been broken by the waves. He was a marvelous swimmer, she said. And yet there was also something terrifying about the way he swam.
PS: The romance of death—
JF: It was very big.
PS: —was very big. Especially in Frank’s early poems, when he was youngest and most vibrant, it’s absolutely ubiquitous.
JF: Well, he was very much in the Rimbaud mold—what is it? The poète maudit. And he was—I hate to sound like that horrible [literary critic] Richard Howard, but he did have a certain carelessness with his life. He did things that were very foolhardy and risky. He lived at the edge of his stamina all the time.
In his little book I Remember, second-generation New York School poet Joe Brainard wrote: “I remember one very cold black winter night on the beach alone with Frank O’Hara. He ran into the ocean naked and it scared me to death.”
One evening when my mother was out of town and Neal was working late at his box office job, my father came to Williamsburg, and we went out for dinner with Oliver. Afterward, he came over for ice cream in the living room. Oliver went into his room to do homework.
“So,” I said. “I heard from Josh that Maureen remembers me. She said you brought me once when you went to see her. Does that sound right?”
“It could be.”
“Do you remember anything else about that trip?”
“It was a little tense.”
“Josh said Maureen remembers some things you said that made her concerned. Do you want to know what they were?”
He closed his eyes. This is a common experience for him—hearing what he’s done wrong, letting it wash over him. “What were they?”
“He said you told her that John Ashbery was a better poet. You said Frank was just the more social person, the glue that held the scene together. Then you asked if she knew about his first sexual experience. He said those were three of her biggest pet peeves: that people thought Ashbery was more talented, that O’Hara was just a partier, and anything at all to do with his sex life.”
“I can see myself doing that,” he said.