Customer Reviews

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

yet 5 stars! for the unstinting efforts of editor William Corbett who put 13 years into its preparation; for Jimmy's many true friends who were glad to help; for Jimmy himself who was warm and unpretensious, who chose to suppress anything hurtful to others, who endeavored to make each letter a little present enveloping "I care about you," who got through 40 years of creativity with the schizophrenia mallet poised above his head.

I like to read literary persons' (mostly homosexuals') diaries, memoirs, letters, as well as biographies. But a poet of the New York School is not truly appropriate for me because I don't read poetry. And all the New York Schools of this and that, I view as indubitable cornerstones of the nation's arts beginning in the 1950s, but the thought remains: How much of this stuff is really any good, considering that in democratic America every man and woman has the vote and the talent? Who reads it in Britain, Canada, and Australia?

The book has 450 pages of letters and 887, yes 887, footnotes, blessedly succinct. This proliferation of footnotes arises from the fact that Jimmy loved to read all kinds of obscure books, even horticulture. Too, he plows up so many poets, artists, minor publishers, movies, records, etc. The book has a glossary comprising the names of two dozen of his chief correspondents plus explanatory paragraphs.

Of the NY School of Poets, O'Hara, Ashbery, and Koch were Harvard grads. Schuyler (1923-1991) was less fortunate. His parents divorced when he was six. His mother remarried when he was eight, and then had another son. His stepfather, reacting to Jimmy's homosexual aura and obsessive book reading, even tried to thwart the boy's getting a library card. After difficult teen years, Jimmy got a couple of years of college (he was not a good student), some WWII Navy, some Europe, and finally ended up in New York.

1951, when the Letters begin, was noteworthy: Jimmy placed three short stories, met O'Hara and Ashbery, had his first schizophrenic episode and was hospitalized for two months, then began writing his first poems. He was 28.

Jimmy loved to write letters, the longer the better, and to get them. It didn't matter whether there was anything important to communicate: open with an apology about tardiness, note the weather, cover all the maybes of shifting residences and visits and travel plans and get-togethers and poem publishing and money, praise your friend's poems or paintings, remember his or her birthday, close with love to you and yours, write me soon, Love, Jimmy.

Jimmy typed most of his letters, without carbons, so Editor Corbett appreciated their return by all the recipients. Except the executors of O'Hara (died 1966) held onto Schuyler's letters and published them in an independent volume.

Oddly, Jimmy passed more than a decade (1961-1973) living with the artist Fairfield Porter's family in Southampton and Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. They sought to help him in this woods-and-water retreat, for his mental breakdowns continued. His great delight was the daily mailboat to bring him a letter or two and to putter off with his outgoings.

Over the years, prescribed drugs, several psychoanalysts, finally even the church helped Schuyler to get more of a grip mentally. In 1979, several of his supporters installed him in the Chelsea Hotel. Over the years, he had a few extended affairs, and some guys he yearned for. Over the years, he wrote his poems about the simple good things in his existence; some were published by major houses or ephemeral mags, and in 1981 he won a Pulitzer Prize, and finally a Guggenheim Fellowship. In his later 60s, he was uplifted by enthusiastic responses to his several public readings. Then suddenly the stroke, and he died April 12, 1991.

Why did I , midway in these Letters, begin to count the pages until the end? Because there was too much chaff, blandness, repetition. There is lots of alcohol, but where's this gay man's cruising, wallows, flare-ups, crying, well-turned anecdotes, breakdown dramas and recoveries, street drugs? Where's the revelatory remarks about composing his poems? Well, Jimmy is just Jimmy, and he's entitled. He never wrote his letters for posterity.

I also read his Diary, Jan. 1, 1968-Jan. 1, 1991, a close cousin of his Letters. Ever onward, I'm about to read James Schuyler's Letters to Frank O'Hara (paperback 2006).