When Vincent Warren left for Canada to work in a ballet company, O’Hara cursed the entire Canadian nation for stealing his boyfriend. In his grief, he took comfort in the company of Bill Berkson, a nineteen-year-old poet.
Berkson fit a pattern: he was good-looking, more than a decade younger, and straight, and O’Hara seemed to be in love with him. There was something about Berkson, though, that inspired more jealousy than usual in O’Hara’s friends. One wrote: “One summer, in the late fifties, Frank appeared on the beach at Water Mill in the company of a very young, outrageously handsome, and sullen young man.”
Berkson introduced O’Hara to Biotherm, a $12 suntan lotion, which became the subject of the late, long poem “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson).” From 1960 to 1962, O’Hara dedicated poems to Berkson, and Berkson dedicated poems to O’Hara. Together they wrote a chapbook called Hymns of St. Bridget, about the church off Tompkins Square Park.
O’Hara loved hearing Berkson’s childhood stories of growing up rich on Fifth Avenue, the son of Eleanor Lambert, who created the International Best Dressed List and New York Fashion Week, but my father and Berkson don’t seem to get along so well.
Bill Berkson—Bolinas, California—3/31/77
Peter Schjeldahl: Who would take care of you?
Bill Berkson: Oh, I had nannies and governesses. I had one governess who lived with us for a long time, maybe ten years. And she had a lovely daughter, too, who lived with us and was like my sister and in a way probably my first love, too.
PS: Sounds like it’s an at once very rich and impoverished childhood.
BB: Oh, I guess. I don’t know. You mean like a poor little rich boy or something?
PS: Not quite that, no.
BB: Um.
PS: I don’t want to get psychological.
BB: Yeah. I don’t know.
As a freshman at Brown in 1957, Berkson became aware of On the Road and Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, as well as the painters Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Piet Mondrian. For Thanksgiving break, he went out to San Francisco to find the Beats. He went stumbling around North Beach saying, “Where’s Allen Ginsberg?” “Where’s Philip Whalen?” But the only San Francisco poet he encountered was Jack Spicer. The party was over.
Still in search of his tribe, Berkson spent that summer in Europe, though his only Beat sighting there was Gregory Corso acting up in a bar. Back at school his sophomore year, he took a short story class with John Hawkes. Hawkes mentioned some poems by Frank O’Hara in the Evergreen Review as poems he liked, in contrast with almost all other new poetry. Berkson discovered he liked them, too, very much.
The night before the end of Christmas vacation, he got a phone call that his father, who was a publisher at Hearst, had died. Berkson was living with some friends in an apartment off campus. He walked down the stairs with his bag. Upon seeing his housemate, he said, “My father died and I’m going to New York … And I don’t think I’m coming back to Brown.”
He moved into his mother’s New York City apartment and attended the New School. He had a choice between studying poetry with Kenneth Koch or music composition with John Cage, which Berkson heard involved making songs out of coughing and dropping pencils on desks. He opted for the former. Koch made him believe it was possible to be a poet, and introduced him to O’Hara. That was in May or June 1959; they were inseparable from then until O’Hara died seven years later.
In his 2016 New York Times obituary, Bill Berkson is called “the ever-present third man from the left in the group photographs that chronicle the era.” As he wrote in his memoir Since When, he was probably the only person at both the Woodstock Music Festival and Truman Capote’s Black and White Masked Ball at the Plaza Hotel.
In 2019, his widow, the curator Connie Lewallen, agreed to meet with me and to show me Berkson’s brand-new posthumous book, a beautifully reproduced notebook he’d kept with stories about and souvenirs of Frank O’Hara. We did not know it then but days later the book would get a rave review in the Washington Post.
Lewallen said, “Even though Frank was so important to Bill—inspired him, encouraged him—that Bill came along in Frank’s life when he did was really helpful to Frank. Kind of inspired him. Because Frank had been so busy as a curator and wasn’t really doing a lot of writing. It wasn’t just a completely one-way street.”
She asked me to tell her more about my project.
When I finished explaining to Lewallen about the tapes she said, “You must know Spencer?” She’d heard that he and my father were friends.
I said yes.
She said, “Spencer was in Bill’s class. A number of years ago, Bill said, ‘You know, I have this student. He’s very young. He’s read everything. He comes from this very unexpected background considering what he’s read and what he knows.’ He didn’t often talk about his students much, but this one he talked about. So, then we got to know Spencer. It was funny because he came here to go to graduate school, and he quit. Me, being a mother, I said, ‘No! You can’t quit. You’ve got to get your degree.’ I remember saying that as if he were my son. Of course, it turns out he was completely fine without that degree because he’s kind of extra special.”
There’s no beating Spencer, I thought. He’s the good son even when he’s dropping out of school.
Berkson left New York just four years after O’Hara’s death, and he stayed in California from 1970 on except for the many trips he and Lewallen took around the world, including two weeks in Istanbul after a successful lung transplant. And he kept doing readings, often from his long poem “Costanza”:
A woman has fallen the museum guard
Tells us in a light blue turban plus dark suit …
“Bill finally retired,” Lewallen said. “He continued to teach seminars. He did more writing in the last twelve years of his life, he said, than he had in the previous twenty. That’s because he had this renewed energy. And also because, although he never said it, I think he knew that he was a little bit on borrowed time. He just wanted to keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.”
In 2009, Berkson published his book of collected poems, Portrait and Dream. Although he joked: “Who’s going to read these? Someone said that at any given time, there are only about twenty poets that are read.”
The artist George Schneeman painted nude portraits of a number of poets, including my father and Bill Berkson. Lewallen tells me that Berkson wanted to hang the gigantic full-frontal portrait of himself in their home, but there wasn’t a wall big enough. Now it’s in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Berkson was proud of that painting and yet he was a little tired of being called handsome all the time. “Bill didn’t want to be known as handsome,” Lewallen told me. “He wanted to be known as a really great writer.”
But what can you do? He was absurdly handsome.
Being known for that, Lewallen grants, smiling: “It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
A student in Bill Berkson’s 1966 New School class, Frances LeFevre, sent letters to her daughter, the poet Anne Waldman. Those letters have been collected into a small press book called Dearest Annie. In one of the first letters, LeFevre observes my father arguing passionately with Berkson after class: “Noticed P. Scheldahjl [sic] having serious discussion with B. after getting his own papers back and heard him say, ‘Yes, but I’m very serious about what I’m trying to do …’ B. kept apparently saying something to him and he didn’t look very happy—but then he has a sad face anyhow.”
I knew my father had studied with Koch, but I didn’t know he studied with Berkson, too. LeFevre later said that my father’s love of John Ashbery’s poetry was “unthinking worship … Scheldahjl [sic] doesn’t seem to have much humor and looks so sad and ashen all the time. I’d like to put him under a sun lamp for a couple of hours.” She also suspected he was in love with their fellow classmate Bernadette Mayer, which he was.
Mayer would become close friends with Waldman, who would move to 33 St. Marks Place. She ran the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1966 to 1978 and published my father’s poetry collection Dreams as part of her Angel Hair Books press.
Waldman’s neighbors at 29 St. Marks Place were my parents’ close friends George and Katie Schneeman. Katie took care of me sometimes when I was a baby. I still stop in to see her every few months. On one of these visits, Katie told me that after my father’s first wife, Linda, died in 2011, she was cleaning out Linda’s place and discovered a file on me with articles I’d written and my wedding announcement.
Katie said that Linda thought of me as the child she never had. On Linda’s second date with my father, she’d become pregnant; a backstreet abortion in Chicago had left her unable to ever bear children. Linda was a poet, and her work had appeared in some of the same anthologies as my father’s had in the 1960s. But after their divorce she stopped writing poetry and became a copy editor. When she died, there was no obituary in the New York Times or in any paper that I could find. I felt sad for her and strange. All these years I was being watched without knowing it.