How the Poet James Schuyler Wrung Sense from Sensibility
The American poet James Schuyler composed his first significant poem during a nine-week stay at the Payne Whitney Westchester psychiatric clinic, in White Plains, New York, in late 1951. That fall, Schuyler, still a fresh face on the New York arts scene after an extended sojourn in Europe, had begun to introduce himself to friends as the Infant Jesus of Prague, a sixteenth-century wax-and-wood statuette clothed in embroidered vestments, and claimed that he had received from the Virgin Mary a package of Du Maurier cigarettes. The poem, called “Salute”—the word itself implies a toast to good health—was written as a step in Schuyler’s convalescence, between sessions of weaving belts and crafting moccasins for visitors. They included W. H. Auden, Schuyler’s old mentor, who footed the bill for the hospital stay, and a new friend, Marianne Moore, whom Schuyler called “entrancing and somehow a little terrifying.”
“Salute,” like many of Schuyler’s best works, is a form of strenuous mental calisthenics presented as an easygoing nature poem. “Past is past,” it begins:
You could memorize this mayfly-brief poem in an hour but devote a lifetime to pondering its teachings: “is / not to have thought to do / enough?” In certain moral and legal scenarios, no, not at all, but, for poetry, it seems to be more than enough, and it may be necessary. Though the actual “clover, / daisy, paintbrush” weren’t gathered that day (other, more enticing pastimes likely awaited inside that “cabin”), “Salute” preserves them in Schuyler’s proprietary solution of pert melancholy stirred into gloomy sweetness.
Poets sometimes orphan their early work, but Schuyler stood by “my all-important ‘Salute,’ ” as he described it, perhaps because of its weirdly elastic temporality. The poem was a souvenir of the fleeting moment of its composition, its irregular right margin suggesting words jotted on scrap paper. Yet Schuyler kept “Salute” around to mark the phases of his career. In 1960, the poem appeared in an influential avant-garde anthology, Donald Allen’s “New American Poetry.” Schuyler used “Salute” to conclude his much belated first commercially published volume, “Freely Espousing,” printed in 1969, when he was forty-six, and to open his “Selected Poems” in 1988. That year, the reclusive poet was persuaded to give his début public reading, at the age of sixty-five. Schuyler took to the stage with some difficulty and, his catarrhal baritone thickened by years of illness, began again at the beginning: “Past is past.”
Nathan Kernan’s intrepid new biography of Schuyler, over thirty years in the making, is “A Day Like Any Other” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It plucks its title from “February,” another of Schuyler’s early poems. The phrase seems at once blasé and foreboding; we say “it was a day like any other” when, uh-oh, catastrophe awaits around the bend. (“Another day, another dolor,” Schuyler once quipped.) Jimmy, as most everyone called him, knew many such days, when ordinary life gave way to what a friend called his “incandescence”: the normally courteous gentleman in the blue crewneck sweater and wrinkled khakis, a prized playmate of his friends’ young children, might appear in the kitchen and darkly intone, “Harm may befall the infant.” During one spell, in 1971, a housemate contemplated knocking Schuyler over the head with a cast-iron skillet but feared that the blow would only provoke him. Visitors expecting the serene, beatific presence that we meet in Schuyler’s poems sometimes found instead a naked man covered in rose petals or a terrified soul “sitting on his bed, holding out a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him, frozen in place and trembling.” Twice, Schuyler set fire to his apartment by smoking in bed; the second time, he ended up in an intensive-care unit for weeks and received extensive skin grafts for third-degree burns. In the seventies and early eighties, at his lowest point, Schuyler lived in a series of institutions, flophouses, and residential hotels, drinking throughout the day and relying on so many pills that a friend said, “You could hear them rattling in his pockets.” His hair grew long and matted; after contracting gangrene as a result of diabetes, he had two toes amputated. “Poor Jimmy,” Schuyler’s friend John Ashbery once wrote. “He told me that life had been after him with a sledgehammer.”
Kernan picked a hard story to tell. One problem is that you don’t find much evidence of turmoil in Schuyler’s poems. “Even at his most deranged,” Kernan writes, “he could appear, and perhaps be, calm and rational in his writing.” A definitive diagnosis was difficult to make, in part because of the “cocktail of prescription and illicit drugs.” Poems and sequences written in the hospital—“Mike,” for example, composed during Schuyler’s three weeks at the Vermont State Hospital, and “The Payne Whitney Poems”—refuse, as he wrote, to “tell you all of it,” unlike the confessional poems of his contemporary Robert Lowell. You can’t medicalize his style, the way critics have often sought to connect Lowell’s mania with his grandiose ambition and jagged associative leaps: Schuyler always “makes sense, dammit,” as Ashbery put it. A friend of Schuyler’s described his observational state as “mediumistic”: though it’s clear that he struggled, in Ashbery’s words, to live “daily life as he means to lead it,” his poems are usually set on those days when he won the battle—walking in Vermont under an evening sky “the color of peach ice cream,” say, and “stopping to take a leak on dead leaves / in the woods beside the road.”
Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman. Both modes suggest a search for an original way of existing in time, and both spell trouble for biographical narrative, which depends on linear cause and effect. The short poems are like bright, scattered beads—their titles, indicating merely the date (“3/23/66,” “June 30, 1974”) or the time of day (“Sunset,” “Evening”) or the rudiments of the setting (“At the Beach,” “Evenings in Vermont”), hint at how hard it might be to string a life story through them.
The long poems pose an additional problem for a biographer: in these retrospective works, written in the seventies and eighties, Schuyler became a late-breaking autobiographer. The poet’s reminiscences form the core of several poems that rank among the glories of twentieth-century American literature. In “Hymn to Life,” “The Morning of the Poem,” and “A few days,” as well as in mid-length works such as the magnificent “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,” Schuyler began to pry open the passing moments, inserting memories of his childhood and early adulthood, homages to old love affairs, and New York gossip from the forties and fifties. These poems invent verbal models of movement through time, their own temporal construction also serving as their subject, always nonchalantly expressed. “Today is tomorrow,” he reports, or “Guess I’m ready for lunch: ready as I’ll ever be, that is. / Lunch was good: now to move my bowels.” Their recursive paths make tweezing out the “biography” in their recollective passages especially tricky. “A few days!” Schuyler exclaims soon after he surfaces from one of these long reminiscences. “I / started this poem in August and here it is September / nineteenth.” It seems a shame to iron flat such a beautifully crumpled time line, but biographers know that it’s the nature of the job, alas. Past is past.
“To be children of a broken home is bad news,” Schuyler wrote. “Ask me—six mental hospitals.” If the example of Schuyler and many of his contemporaries is any evidence, though, a broken home is good news for poetry. He was born James Marcus Schuyler in Chicago in 1923, and spent most of his early years in the aptly named Downers Grove, Illinois, where his mother, Margaret Daisy Connor, a former newspaper editor and Washington publicist for the Farmers’ National Council, was restless. In “Snapshot,” Schuyler, looking for evidence of the man he became, revisits “photographs / of me in white dresses, / with a tin pail and shovel, / playing with a little girl” and “laughing / with my eyes shut.” The poem, and the fun, abruptly ends when a painful memory replaces those heirloom photos: “Then we moved / to Washington, D.C.”
There, Schuyler’s mother divorced his father, Marcus, “an enchantingly wonderful man, a heavy, jolly, well-read man,” in his son’s view, but a compulsive gambler who drifted back to the Midwest and died young. Though Schuyler reckoned that he had seen him again perhaps twice, Marcus became, Kernan writes, “an increasingly distant figure, but a correspondingly potent abstraction.” In his place, Schuyler’s “gentle Grandma Ella” arrived from Minnesota, “a granny / a child doesn’t / like to kiss,” Schuyler wrote in “So Good,” “the farm smell / a chill sweet- / ness.” She taught her grandson the names of the birds and the flowers, but he learned on his own the crucial lesson of how to find raunchy sex everywhere in the natural world, as when “you touch the pod” of a touch-me-not bloom and witness “the miraculous ejaculation of the seed.” Indoors, Grandma Ella read aloud from a children’s anthology, “Journeys Through Bookland.” Reading and natural observation seemed to complement each other. These two activities, almost conjoined, made up the substance of most of Schuyler’s best days as an adult.
Then, in what seems nearly a plot contrivance, a cruel stepfather appeared. Margaret Schuyler up and married Berton Ridenour, a construction engineer working on a renovation of the West Wing of the White House. Ridenour was close enough to President Herbert Hoover to score the family an invitation to the White House Easter Egg Roll in 1931. Somewhere there exists a photo of little Jimmy, age seven, playing on the White House lawn. But the stern “old book burner,” as Schuyler later called him, was in mourning for his son, who had drowned at the age of twelve. Kernan wonders whether Ridenour saw his shy, effeminate stepson as his “second chance.” Just as Schuyler was told, around age nine, of a distant family connection to the illustrious Elizabeth Schuyler, the wife of Alexander Hamilton, and “felt he had a name to live up to,” his family renamed him: he enrolled that fall in third grade as James Ridenour. It was not until 1947, at twenty-three, that Schuyler, sensing his vocation and embarking for Europe with his boyfriend, reclaimed his surname.
