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Ravishing
James Schuyler’s hungry eye
BY MAUREEN N. MCLANE
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In 1956, the poet James Schuyler offered his friend painter John Button some characteristic advice: "I hope you’ll be able to paint a lot this summer in natural light: if the world is a good looker, it’s the sun that makes it so." James Schuyler was a good looker and, as this handsome edition of his letters makes plain, a luminous correspondent. He may still be the least known of the New York School of poets, which included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest. This selection of letters is edited by fellow poet, memoirist, art critic, and Phoenix contributor William Corbett, who observes in his efficient introduction, "Those who know and love his poetry, novels, art criticism, and diary will find the same man and writer present in these letters." Those who don’t know Schuyler may find themselves adrift on the sea of names and places so abundantly invoked here. Fortunately, brief notes shepherd us from Philip Johnson to poet Ron Padgett to painter and beloved friend Fairfield Porter to opera singers, 1930s movie stars, and minor English diarists; from shared Manhattan apartments to the occasional gay bathhouse to mental institutions to the Porters’ homes in Southampton and in Maine, where Schuyler resided throughout the ’60s. To those unacquainted with Schuyler, one can only say: what pleasures are in store! His perfectly etched lyrics, his stunning longer poems ("The Crystal Lithium," "Hymn to Life"), his novel Alfred and Guinevere, his writing on painting, his diary. And these letters, with their arresting passages on books (from Proust to English gardening manuals to Scottish history), the weather, wildflowers, gossip, and parties. What he later wrote of Button’s paintings can be said of his own works: "They are the perishable monuments of our daily life." Schuyler’s highest word of praise was "fresh." He saw freshly, and he aspired to write freshly, and he most often did. He loved the look of things, and he had the patience to let the look of the world disclose itself, unencumbered by human grasping. He had not a ravenous but a ravishable eye. Thus his affinity for those painters who sought to discover what they were seeing through the act of painting. It takes enormous discipline, or a gift of vision silently protected and nurtured, to write poems and prose that seem so inevitable, so unrhetorical, so immediate. For all his difficulties — and one discerns the outlines of a life marked by mental breakdowns, botched love affairs, illness, and disappointment — Schuyler wrote pellucid, surprising, musical poems, and his letters often have the same transparency and uncloying charm. Subtle and swift, his work is less interested in deft pyrotechnics or jazzed energy than in delivering "just the thing." He seems to have no designs on the world, or on his readers: his vision vibrates with Keats’s "negative capability," that capacity to respect and inhabit the singularity and strangeness of things, plants, animals, and other people. Flowers are aptly noted, even when he’s unsure of their names: "there’s sweet alyssum, and poppies, deep yellow ones and a scarlet one, but are they California, Iceland or Siberian poppies?" Receptive and responsive, he counsels friends about poems, prose, and gardening. There is something positively 18th century about Schuyler’s epistolary sociability, his interest in his friends, his attunement to whatever might amuse or instruct them. These letters trace the lineaments of rich friendships with Porter, Ashbery, and the younger artist and writer Joe Brainard. Although it is common to consider the explosive vitality of mid-20th-century US poetry and painting as a wholly new phenomenon, one can see in this intense and at times competitive camaraderie something of the playful, collaborative, vaulting sociable spirit that animated the coffeehouse culture of early-18th-century London: Pope, Steele, Addison, Swift. Schuyler saluted Porter’s wife, Anne, as the "wittiest person I have ever met," but he also referred to Ashbery, Koch, and O’Hara as "The Harvard Wits," distancing himself from their more ostentatious bravura. (Schuyler, unlike his friends, did not attend Harvard; he appears to have spent his brief West Virginia college career playing cards.) Corbett has delivered what was clearly a labor of love (a communal labor, as his gracious acknowledgments suggest): this is a gift not only to the friends of Schuyler whom he invokes but also to the man’s future appreciators. What it lacks, as he notes with regret, are Schuyler’s letters to Frank O’Hara, which the O’Hara estate promised but did not deliver. One hopes that they will soon appear, and that aficionados will create their own Schuylerian books filled with clouds, trees, light, flowers, foibles, jokes, reading notes, and excerpts from Schuyler’s work in many genres.
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