From left, Frank O’Hara, John Button, Schuyler, and Joe LeSueur, ca. 1960. © Estate of John Button, courtesy of CLAMP, New York.
James Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923, grew up in Washington, D.C., and East Aurora, New York, and spent most of his adult years in New York City and Southampton, Long Island. Although he is perhaps less widely known than the fellow New York School poets with whom he is associated, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, he published six full-length books of poetry during his lifetime—beginning with Freely Espousing, published by Doubleday and Paris Review Editions in 1969—as well as two novels, and a third written in collaboration with Ashbery. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Morning of the Poem (1980). Mental illness plagued him intermittently, and there were times when his life threatened to veer out of control, but friends repeatedly rallied around him, and the years before his death in 1991 were happy and productive.
In 1995, when I was editing Schuyler’s diary and researching a chronology of his life, I learned that the poet and critic Peter Schjeldahl had interviewed him in January 1977, at Schjeldahl’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place, for a biography of Frank O’Hara. The book was never completed, and the conversation went unpublished. Intrigued, I approached Schjeldahl, who readily agreed to lend me the tapes. When I went to pick them up, he told me what an extraordinary experience it had been to talk to Jimmy, as he was often called. Schuyler had spoken at length, in complete, well-organized paragraphs—giving the impression that he was reading a fully formed text from an invisible screen lodged at the forefront of his brain.
When I listened to the recordings and began transcribing, I understood what Schjeldahl meant. Schuyler’s delivery was utterly poised. In the most inspired sections it was almost as though he were held in the same state of grace and attentive recall in which he had written “The Morning of the Poem” just months earlier. I returned the tapes to Schjeldahl along with the transcript, mentioning my hope that they might one day be broadcast. When, in 2018, Schjeldahl’s daughter, Ada Calhoun, discovered the stash of cassettes in his basement and began to work on what would become Also a Poet, her own attempt to complete her father’s O’Hara project, the Schuyler recording was not among them. The below is an edited version of the transcript, the only remaining record of the interview; the tapes were lost in the fire that, in October 2019, devastated the Schjeldahls’ apartment.
—Nathan Kernan
JAMES SCHUYLER
Well! Let’s see if I can get started. My first encounter with Frank O’Hara was not really an encounter—it was more of a rencontre. In the summer of 1951, I had that exciting experience of having something I had written appear in print for the first time. This was in a magazine called Accent. After I had tired myself out reading my own three very short stories over and over, I looked at the other work. Frankly, none of it seemed quite up to my level, except for a poem called “The Three-Penny Opera” by Frank O’Hara. The telephone rang. It was John Bernard Myers, who was still establishing himself as one of the leading art dealers in the New York scene. He said, “My dear! You never told me that you were a poet!” I said, “Oh, you liked my stories?” “They’re not stories, they’re poems!” This was all making me feel rather self-conscious and shy, so I said, “There’s a very good poem in that issue of Accent by somebody named Frank O’Hara.” “My dear, it’s too extraordinary. He’s sitting here in the room with me now!”
This, I’m sorry to say, did not lead to an immediate meeting. Frank returned to Michigan—he was studying at Ann Arbor, working on a thesis in creative writing. I went on to a nervous breakdown at Bloomingdale [Asylum], in White Plains, New York, so we did not meet until several months later.
PETER SCHJELDAHL
What was Accent magazine?
SCHUYLER
It was published at the University of Illinois. I don’t know how long it lasted. At that time it was one of the better-known and better-thought-of “little magazines.”
SCHJELDAHL
You heard of it through John Ashbery?
SCHUYLER
No, I didn’t know John Ashbery. I didn’t know anybody.
SCHJELDAHL
Oh, I see. Could we back up a minute? What was your upbringing like?
SCHUYLER
My upbringing?
SCHJELDAHL
Where did you grow up?
SCHUYLER
I was born in Chicago because there was a hospital there, which made it handier for my mother. We lived in a town called Downers Grove, right outside Chicago, but we shortly moved to Washington, D.C., where my father worked at the Washington Post as a copy editor. As far as I’m concerned, he was an enchantingly wonderful man. Unfortunately he was a compulsive gambler, which my mother found rather hard to take, so they split when I was about five.
SCHJELDAHL
Did you see him much after that?
SCHUYLER
Maybe twice. And he died in the forties, somewhere in Michigan.
SCHJELDAHL
What was your home situation like then?
SCHUYLER
Listen, you’re asking for a novel by Dostoyevsky.
SCHJELDAHL
You went to high school in Washington?
SCHUYLER
No, my stepfather kept moving around because of the Depression, getting different jobs. Junior high I spent in Buffalo, and then my family moved to a small town outside Buffalo called East Aurora, which is quite famous, in its way, because of Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters, which either means something to you or it doesn’t.
SCHJELDAHL
I’m afraid that goes right over my head.
SCHUYLER
Hubbard was a kind of phony William Morris. Although some of the things made at the Roycroft workshops are really quite handsome. They’re apt to be oaken planks, hammered copper, tooled leather, all of that.
Shouldn’t we be getting back to Frank O’Hara?
SCHJELDAHL
Well, I was going to creep up on it. So, you went to Harvard and … ?
SCHUYLER
What?
SCHJELDAHL
You went to Harvard and …
SCHUYLER
I didn’t go anywhere near Harvard!
SCHJELDAHL
Oh, you didn’t?
SCHUYLER
Alex Katz, at a party, once said something to the effect of my having been at Harvard.
