The Death of Lady Day
Andrew Ross’s reading of Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” presented at the 1987 conference of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco, opened an entirely new approach to O’Hara and New York School poetry. Departing from aesthetic approaches that identified O’Hara with painterly form and surrealist influences in the 1950s, Ross considers O’Hara’s writing as a “protopolitical” intervention into urban everyday life. Rather than seeing the poem as a species of ideology—“the imaginary solution to real contradictions”—Ross reads it as a moment of praxis and critique that anticipates a fully political response, just as the everyday-life politics of the 1950s anticipated the counterculture of the 1960s. Ross locates O’Hara’s politics in his negotiations with consumerism (his tour of midtown Manhattan), race (his invocation of Billie Holiday and the aesthetics of jazz), and masculinity (in a new style of self-presentation, camp), a “grace to be born and live variously” that configures identity among competing identifications. “O’Hara’s is a code of personal politics, which says that at some level you have to take responsibility for your own conduct in the everyday world and toward others,” even as normalizing social pressures required a high degree of dissimulation for gay men as a survival strategy. In his revisionist essay, Ross positions O’Hara in the cultural and gender debates where he continues to be read today.
Some of those who attended Frank O’Hara’s funeral in 1966 heard Larry Rivers read a speech which they found distasteful. The offending portion was a graphic account of the state of O’Hara’s body on his hospital deathbed:
This extraordinary man lay without a pillow in a bed that looked like a large crib…. He was purple wherever his skin showed through the white hospital gown. He was a quarter larger than usual. Every few inches there was some sewing composed of dark blue thread. Some stitching was straight and three or four inches long, others were longer and semicircular. The lids of both eyes were bluish black. It was hard to see his beautiful blue eyes which receded a little into his head. He breathed with quick gasps. His whole body quivered. There was a tube in one of his nostrils down to his stomach. On paper he was improving. In the crib he looked like a shaped wound, an innocent victim of someone else’s war….1
Not everyone, however, found these comments inappropriate. That evening, in a bar, Rivers recounted the details to Andy Warhol, and recalled how, at the funeral, “everyone was screaming at [him] to shut up.” Warhol noted: “It sounded like a very Pop eulogy to me—just the surface things. It was just what I hoped people would do for me if I died.” In fact, the circumstances of O’Hara’s death inspired another thought on Warhol’s part that has since proved to be prophetic: “It was scary to think that you could lose your life if you were taken to the wrong hospital or if you happened to get the wrong doctor at the right hospital.”2
If both of these commentaries on the death of O’Hara are aimed at a kind of stylized shock-effect, Warhol’s response is the one that trades on language and not the body; it distances itself sympathetically from the gruesome details and from the madding crowd, and even suggests a conventional form for Rivers’s tone of address—the Pop eulogy. And yet one cannot help but feel that it is nothing short of violence that reduces, in Warhol’s comment about Rivers, a horrid corporeal realism to formal elegance. It is nothing short of violence, however banal and anti-apocalyptic, that reduces the busyness of everyday life to business as usual, to the ethic of “surface things” which Warholian Pop came to consecrate under its rubric of maximum indifference—Everything is Good.
In what way, exactly, could a eulogy of “surface things” have been appropriate for O’Hara, who is increasingly remembered today as one of the poets of everyday life? It’s true that the painters in Rivers and O’Hara’s circle had been obsessed with “surface,” but this technical obsession was underpinned by a whole ideology of depth—angst, alienation, and autonomy—which marked the tradition of moral seriousness that was their heritage as artist-intellectuals. Pop’s egalitarian crusade was to put to the sword the whole apparatus of discrimination that had rested upon a hermeneutics of depth, interpretation, and moral value. Value could be located in any and every object, and because everything mattered, nothing mattered very much more than everything else. Pop, in its purist, theoretical form, was intended as an utter negation of the use of taste as a category of cultural power.
Whatever one could say about the friendliness of O’Hara, in his poetry, to the surface detail of everyday life, it is as difficult to find evidence there of this Pop disavowal of taste as it is to detect any sign of heroic Nietzschean loneliness of the sort espoused by Jackson Pollock and others. In fact, his poetry is very much the record of a man of taste, not in the bourgeois mode, of course, but in the sense in which it presents a discourse about a certain kind of masculinity that takes a responsible interest in “surface things” at the cost of the more traditional male leaning towards “important” affairs, topics, judgments, values, etc. For O’Hara’s man of taste, everyday life things matter, not because they are a way of advertising wealth or power, nor because everything matters equally, but because their value is linked to how people use them to make sense of their world. Taste, in this sense, is more like a survivalist guide than a cultural category through which class-marked power is defined and exercised. No doubt this notion of taste also contains the rudiments of the principle that came to be recognized by feminism as “the personal is the political.” In this respect, then, surely there are good reasons for remembering O’Hara through “just the surface things” he wrote about, and little danger in confusing this O’Hara with his other reputation as a poet of trivia who shunned the social, artistic, and political questions of his day.
If that is so, then there are also good reasons for rethinking the categories of surface and depth which have come to plague our debates about cultural politics in the two decades since O’Hara died, or, more exactly, ever since Pop inaugurated the kind of culture, known today as postmodernist, which seems to take itself at face value. A culture of surface is not simply a culture that declares its immunity to historical anxiety; it is also a culture that has become suspicious of History with a capital H, moving with awesome solemnity and depth through our lives, a culture which recognizes that history, for the most part, is also made out of particulars, by people whose everyday acts do not always add up to the grand aggregates of canonical martyrdom which make for real politics.
In fact, it is a commonly held view that, when it comes to politics, cultural texts are least successful when they are long on militant fiber (and short on pleasure); in other words, when they are at their most articulate or didactic, and when their explicit relation to the political is there for all to read, and to be deferred to or browbeaten by. Indeed, most of the cultural texts we encounter are protopolitical—they express an imaginary relation to real conditions of oppression or resistance, a relation that is often difficult to read, not least because of its contradictions, but more generally because it is expressed in a symbolic form. Texts, in other words, speak more than they say, even when they seem to be about “surface things.” We have learned to recognize this state of affairs as the work of ideology, often viewed by left critics in terms similar to the work of Satan. But there are good reasons, I think, for preferring the term “protopolitical” to the term “ideological.” “Protopolitical,” for example, suggests submerged activity, while “ideological” suggests unremitting passivity; “protopolitical” suggests embryonic or future forms, while “ideological” suggests the oppressive weight of the past extending into the present. So too, in looking at texts that occur “elsewhere,” whether in time or place, we ought to be encouraged to look for the protopolitical in those things that can be said, rather than in what cannot be said—what is suppressed, in short, by the work of ideology.
To illustrate generally what I mean, I have taken the example of one of O’Hara’s best-known poems, “The Day Lady Died.” It was written in 1959, a kind of prepolitical age—which is to say, an age that preexists the more explicit formation, in the sixties, of the kind of political culture which most of us have come to live and breathe. It was written, elsewhere, in that prelapsarian period of innocence—before the break-up of consensus liberalism, before the conspiracy climate of all post-Kennedy ideology, before the sixties “changed everything”—a period that has been celebrated, for over a decade now, in that glut of yuppie nostalgia culture that stretches from American Graffiti to Dirty Dancing. It was written by a poet, as I have suggested, whose blithe disregard for politics is equally well known, a disregard, for example, that caused a stir when, in 1966, a minor quarrel broke out among certain literati over his refusal to sign a petition condemning U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Agit-prop, or anything like it, is the last thing we would expect from Frank O’Hara in 1959. And yet, this is a poem, recording one of his celebrated lunchtime walks, which (and those who know and love O’Hara’s “I-do-this-I-do-that” poems will surely agree) has radically transformed modern poetry’s expectations of how it is licensed to represent everyday life. It is a poem, like the three-minute rock ’n’ roll classics of its day, which brashly articulates the fresh disposability of time and energy, lived at high speed, in the new pop continuum of a consumer culture.
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richard Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
It’s the day after Billie Holiday’s death, and America’s consumer markets have never been busier; bank tellers are dispensing cash to spendthrift clients without even consulting their balances. Bohemian poets, as we can see from the conspicuous consumption described here, are no longer immune to the contagious seductions of the commodity world. This is not Baudelaire’s poet-dandy-flaneur lured to the marketplace to look but not buy. In the space of a few blocks, O’Hara’s motivated, discriminating consumer-poet has found an entire range of cultural goods to purchase from all over the world, from hamburgers to ancient philosophy. Robert Von Hallberg points out that all of art and history (most of it is not American) is available here, not through Eliotic tradition, but through the benefits of mass production and cheapness.3 The last stanza, however, suggests that there are some cultural experiences that are literally priceless, and which therefore lie beyond the realm of paperback discount shopping:
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
This memory of a “live” Billie Holiday moment, with its extreme effect on the motor functions of the body—sweating, constricted breathing—contrasts with the somnolent, low-key anxiety of “quandariness” which was the physical effect of making the earlier consumer choices. Such live moments cannot be reproduced on vinyl for mass consumption—you had to be there. Although O’Hara’s poet seems to be perfectly at home in the modern environment of consumer culture, the poem in which he acts out his nostalgia-struck desire ends up paying its tribute to what we might recognize as the modernist poem, with its own epiphanic moment to record the loss, in the past, even the very recent past, of a culture of authenticity evoked by Lady Day’s “breath-taking” live presence.
In a poem called “Jitterbugs” Amiri Baraka put the matter more succinctly: “though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass ain’t.”4 Baraka is addressing himself more to the contradictions of ghetto realism than to the romantic spirit of the white bohemian in ritual thrall to the spectacle of jazz performance. But his tone here might serve as an earthy corrective to the rapt mood of O’Hara’s last stanza. In fact, if we look back through the poem, beginning with the encounter in the first stanza with the probably black shoeshine boy, who may be worried about how he is going to be fed in a way that is different from the poet’s anxiety about his unknown hosts in Easthampton, we begin to see how the references to postcolonial “Negritude”—Genet’s Les Nègres, and those “poets in Ghana”—have indirectly, perhaps even unconsciously, prepared the reader for the final confrontation with American “negritude.”
By 1959, scenes of jazz idolatry on the part of white intellectuals had become a commonplace, if not a cliché, especially in the poetry world where the Beat cult of hipsterdom had become an object of national media attention. What is striking, however, is that O’Hara is not like that; he is not that kind of poet. Sure, he frequented the jazz clubs, and even gave readings at the 5-Spot. There is enough personal testimony around, from friends and acquaintances, to establish that he was quite familiar with jazz music. But when it comes to his poetry, jazz almost never figures in the taste milieu within which he represented himself, or in the realm of cultural events about which he wrote in copious detail. True to his impeccably camp outlook, Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House were more standard venues in his poetry than the 5-Spot, Rachmaninoff a more constant source of religious ecstasy than Miles Davis. This scene in the 5-Spot doesn’t seem properly to belong in O’Hara’s work, where it is employed nonetheless to invoke a spirit of authenticity. It appeals to me as a fond reader of O’Hara that this scenario might be read as an ironic, even parodic, gloss on the stereotyped Beat devotee of the more “authentic” world of jazz culture.
By 1959, the image of the white intellectual worshipping a black jazz performer had become a popular icon, the subject of a thousand cartoons and comedy routines. Jazz was beginning to acquire the legitimacy of a high art form and was therefore being annexed as a realm of minority and not popular taste. But while intellectuals of the day were ritually crowding into small jazz clubs, the popular action was elsewhere, ever since white high school kids had begun to tune in to black R&B radio stations in the late forties and early fifties. By 1959, the rock ’n’ roll revolution was over three years old, but you can comb through O’Hara’s entire oeuvre—compendiously packed with cultural details—and never find any evidence that such a revolution had taken whole regions and sectors of the culture by storm. The civil rights movement was beginning to gain momentum. But which would prove more crucial to the future gains of multiculturalism—the power of white liberal fantasies, centered upon the idolizing of the purity of black culture and its fine arts? or the prospect of fully integrated dance floors—black and white bodies moving to recognizably black rhythms, and the other racial crossovers which rock ’n’ roll culture has generated ever since its scandalous origin?
For white intellectuals, the sacred spectacle of the spontaneous jazz performer was underscored, among other things, by a highly romantic form of racism. It suggested that work was simply an extension of a kind of pre-social culture that was at ease with play and had mastered leisure; in other words, making jazz was work that didn’t look like work, by people who weren’t supposed to know the difference. In O’Hara’s poem, what Billie Holiday does comes “naturally.” Her languorous “whisper,” by contrast, precipitates an unnatural response, a near cardiovascular attack, on the poet’s part, which can be compared, diametrically, with the nonchalance which he had earlier displayed during his bout of compulsive buying. Then, what was most self-conscious about consuming had been made to seem like the most natural thing in the world. “Just” strolling in here and there and “casually” asking for this and that, at once indecisive and pragmatic in his purchasing, he had behaved almost like a practiced shoplifter, carefully covering his tracks with a whole range of consumer rituals. But, for all of its worked-at insouciance, the art of consuming, unlike the art of the jazz singer, proves to be hard work: after a while, he’s “sweating a lot,” unlike Lady Day, who is remembered as the very image of cool. Even now, when she literally has stopped breathing, it is the poet who takes on her symptoms as he reads of her death in the newspaper.
That it is a Lady Day and not a Charlie Parker being commemorated in this way is, of course, O’Hara’s own personal touch. As a gay poet, and one of the most spontaneous of all camp writers, it is no surprise to find that it is a woman singer who shares the billing along with the goddesses of the screen which he celebrates in other poems. In fact, O’Hara’s most celebrated camp line occurs in a poem in which the poet sees a newspaper headline which announces that “LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!” It ends thus:
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Survivalist exhortations of this sort lie at the very heart of camp’s insistence that the show must go on, and that irony and parody can redeem even the most tragic and sordid events which color everyday life. The last years of Judy Garland’s life, for example, in which she transformed her career role as a self-destructive loser into that of a reliant, irrepressible fighter, came to exemplify this survivalist spirit for the gay community, and the final period of Billie Holiday’s checkered life and career is certainly the closest equivalent among female jazz performers (“The Day Lady Died” takes place almost exactly a decade before the day which saw both Garland’s funeral and the Stonewall riots).
In the prepolitical climate of O’Hara’s day, this survivalism found expression in the highly ironized flamboyance of the camp ethic—“laughing to keep from crying”—which structured a whole subculture around the act of imagining a different relation to the existing world of too strictly authorized and legitimized sexual positions. In this respect, camp has to be seen as an imaginative conquest of everyday conditions of oppression, where more articulate expressions of resistance or empowerment were impossible. The most elaborate of these imaginary codes involved identification with the “power,” however restricted, exercised by certain women, especially those in the cinema, and especially those like Bette Davis whose mannered repertoire was a highly performed caricature of the conventional representations of women. The suggestion that role-playing, and the destabilizing of fixed sexual positions, could actually add to the exercise of sexual power was a very attractive suggestion for the gay male, who knew that his sexuality, in everyday life, was likely to get him into trouble.
The sometimes mawkish sentimentalism of camp is often seen as an institutionalized expression of self-hatred, and thus a dangerous form of acceptance, by an oppressed group, of the oppressor’s definition of the oppressed. Like the eponymous “Jewish self-hatred or “Tomming” in black culture, or certain expressions of “machismo” in Latin cultures, camp is a form of defense constructed by an oppressed group out of conditions not of its own making. That is why it is protopolitical; in other words, it is a response to politically induced oppression, but at the same time, it is a response which accepts its current inability to act in an explicit political manner to combat that oppression. This response takes many covert forms and baroque systems of disclosure, not least in the heavily coded speech repertoires and intonations of gay vernacular which the attentive reader can find everywhere in O’Hara’s poetry.5
Looking back over O’Hara’s poem, we can see how it tends to accept what might have been stereotypically regarded as the social contours of gay masculinity in 1959: the obsession, for example, with trivia, with feelings, with dis-criminations of taste, and, of course, with the fine arts. The tone of the poem marks its obvious distance from the voice of legitimate masculinity; O’Hara’s is not the voice of the public sphere, where real decisions are made by real men, and where real politics is supposed to take place. In fact, the hectic itinerary followed by his poet could just as well be that of a genteel lady about town, if you substitute a hairdresser for the shoeshine, the Russian Tea Room for the soda parlor, Rizzoli’s for the Golden Griffin, and so on. This is a man on a shopping trip, and the dizzy combination of quandariness, fastidiousness, vagrant attention, distaste for ugly items, and the general air of practiced nonchalance which he displays in the process of making the various purchases—all of this mirrors or mimics the way in which a woman of means with a busy social schedule might have conducted herself as the fifties were drawing to a close. (It is open to debate whether, in fact, a woman would deliberate for so long over the choice of gift for “Patsy,” while proving so confident in making such a straightforward selection for “Mike.”) The “lady’s” version of this poem would have ended, of course, with the shock of reading the obituary, in the Times, of a fashionable musician or composer. In fact, the “day lady died” is an account of a lady’s day, played out by a man through the imaginary of a lunch hour which is the very opposite of the power lunches which were being eaten in restaurants in the same few blocks by the men who make real history—no quandariness for them! they know what they like, and it’s not Gauloises and it’s not Genet, even though they may share the 4:19 to Easthampton, the same commuter train as O’Hara’s poet, who, incidentally, shares the same working hours as they do.
Even while it accepts a stereotype of gay masculinity, itself based upon a sexist stereotype of female character traits and mannerisms, O’Hara’s poem begins to imagine a different relation to everyday life for men in general. The masculinity he imagines here has increasingly become more familiar along with the steady erosion, since 1959, of the sexual division of labor, and the gradual softening of the contours of social masculinity to incorporate more attention to style, feeling, taste, desire, consumer creativity, and sexual toleration. It marks the beginning of a whole chapter of sexual politics that will come to learn almost as much from the redefinition of masculinity articulated by gay males, as from the struggle against everyday oppression mounted by feminists.
O’Hara’s poetry rejects the big, global questions of politics and economics, even the big “artistic” questions of aesthetics. His is certainly not a heroic poetics of self-reliance or self-making in the transcendent, Emersonian tradition, nor does it make a pragmatic religion out of individualism, in the American grain. Instead it subscribes to the micropolitics of personal detail, faithfully noting down dates, times, events, feelings, moods, fears, and so on, and devoting a bricoleur’s disciplined attention to details in the world and in the people around him. O’Hara’s is a code of personal politics, which says that at some level you have to take responsibility for your own conduct in the everyday world and towards others; you can’t rely on organized politics or unorganized religions to change that. It is a code which starts from what we find lying, unplanned, around us, rather than from achieved utopias of the body and mind. In 1959, well before the coming riots of self-liberation, this was a mannered way of saying: take things into your own hands.
It seems impossible to end without recalling the elegiac note with which I began, for death is a very important part of “The Day Lady Died.” Who can read this poem about Billie Holiday’s death without thinking of O’Hara’s own untimely death seven years later? Who can read it without thinking of the deaths today, from AIDS, of thousands of young homosexual men, like O’Hara, in a culture that is only beginning to recognize how public agendas work by re-organizing and redefining private responsibilities? It is in this context that O’Hara’s code of everyday responsibility begins to take on a new kind of sense, three decades later. It is in this context that the survivalism of the camp sensibility, always prepared to deal with an apocalypse of worst possible outcomes, takes on new meanings, when danger is located today in the smallest things in our lives. It is in this context, perhaps, that the “surface things” in O’Hara’s poetry show their unhidden depths.
NOTES
1 Larry Rivers, “Speech Read at Frank O’Hara’s Funeral, Springs, Long Island, 27 July 1966,” in Bill Berkson and Joe Le Sueur, eds., Homage to Frank O’Hara (Bolinas, Calif.: Big Sky Books, 1978), 138.
2 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 186–87.
3 Robert Von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture: 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 178.
4 Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Selected Poetry (New York: William Morrow, 1979), 93.
5 Bruce Boone describes the “oppositional” significance of these covert forms in the context of O’Hara’s work in “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 59–92.
PUBLICATION: Elsewhere (1989), 8:68–77.
KEYWORDS: New York School; queer; cultural studies; readings.
LINKS: Andrew Ross, “The Oxygen of Publicity” (PJ 6); Bob Perelman, “Three Case Histories: Ross’s Failure of Modernism” (PJ 7); Dodie Bellamy, “Can’t We Just Call It Sex?: In Memory of David Wojnarowicz” (PJ 10); Bruce Boone, “Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations” (PJ 4); Steve Evans, “Gizzi’s No Both” (PJ 10); Robert Glück, “Fame” (PJ 10); Tom Mandel, “Codes/Texts: Reading S/Z” (PJ 2); Ted Pearson, “‘A Form of Assumptions’” (Guide; PJ 9); Aaron Shurin, “The Irruptive Text” (PJ 8); Reva Wolf, “Thinking You Know” (Guide; PJ 10).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism (ed.; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989); Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991); The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994); Science Wars (ed.; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (New York: NYU Press, 1998); The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town (New York: Ballantine, 1999); No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2003); with Kristin Ross, Anti-Americanism (eds.; New York: NYU Press, 2004); Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons from Shanghai (New York: Pantheon, 2006); Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: NYU Press, 2009).