(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 503 pages.)
We have long hoped for a biography of James Schuyler. Now, thanks to Nathan Kernan, who also gave us The Diary of James Schuyler, we have it. Not only is it worth the wait, but also a biography truly worthy of its subject: his humility and pride in accomplishment, his extraordinary ordinary life.
When I first taught a graduate seminar in The New York School of Poets, Schuyler quickly became known as “the quiet Beatle.” I have come to believe that the comparison isn’t entirely frivolous. In the years since his death, George Harrison has come to be recognized not only as a master guitarist, but as a master lyricist and song writer: his accomplishments meeting those of his greatly esteemed colleagues, Lennon and McCartney. Similarly, James Schuyler’s poetry, with its intense ability to register the minutiae of experience in language, has revealed itself over time as anything but a niche experience.
In fact, the radical integrity of Schuyler’s work has become increasingly evident. And Kernan’s book of his life partakes of that same integrity, detailing his experience with careful deliberateness devoid of the slightest sensationalism or melodrama. It is, like Schuyler himself, supremely civilized. Schuyler’s many physical and emotional divagations and difficulties are described cleanly, their connection to his poems explored in revelatory ways.
I once thought that a biographer must fall in love with his or her subject. (I think this attitude stems from a book of poem-biographies I wrote long ago, called Quartet.) Indeed, there’s a place for the kind of biography that’s about both author and subject. A brilliant example is Colm Toibin’s On Elizabeth Bishop. This is not what we need from a first biography. Instead, we need what Kernan gives us, a biography that explores its subject without direct reference to the biographer's emotions. Its tone and manner match that of the poems: careful in observation, susceptible to delight.
Kernan’s biography answers questions we might not have thought to ask. For example, I, along with others, have long thought that the title “The Crystal Lithium” referred to the mineral discovered as therapeutic for bi-polar disorder, from which Schuyler may have suffered (we learn that his “condition” was variously helpfully and unhelpfully diagnosed). The truth is otherwise. Schuyler loved old postcards, and one of his favorites comes from an old-timey spa, a place for “taking the waters,” one of its buildings featuring the phrase on its architrave. (The postcard is part of the biography’s montage of photographs.) Schuyler’s context for “lithium” was not today’s therapeutic one, though at some much later point the substance briefly found its way into his treatment. “The Crystal Lithium” is simply a wonderfully evocative phrase arrived by postcard from an ordinary, vanished world of genteel leisure.
Throughout, Kernan’s readings of Schuyler’s poems feel not obligatory, but revelatory. His discussion of “The Morning of the Poem” is indicative:
In comparing ‘The Morning of the Poem’ with his letters, Jimmy was right to point to its ‘tone’ as the poem’s distinguishing element. In a sense, beyond all its lively details, anecdotes, and sense impressions in both the present and the past, the intimate, confiding tone of the poem is arguably its subject, a tone that establishes the character of the narrator—Schuyler—as effectively and sympathetically as the characters in his fiction are created by their own words. Like the ‘rose made out of a real rose,’ the tone of voice, which is the poem, is consonant with the words that convey it. (pp. 361-2)
For readers who never, alas, had the chance to be present at a reading by James Schuyler, Kernan conveys the matchless excitement of these rare events, held on days “like any other” that were also red-letter days. As response to a late reading that included Schuyler’s only public presentation of “The Crystal Lithium,” he provides this wonderful perception by Michael Brownstein:
I felt like I was re-entering . . . vanished time . . . legendary time, from before I was around, let’s say the ’40s, 1940’s, the ’50s and the ’30’s and all that. W.H. Auden, that whole thing came to life for me emotionally as a result of the way in which Jimmy was reading . . . I got taken into where he came from and what he represented, which was, I would say, the flowering of early modernism. And even for what influenced him, I could hear it in his voice, even going back into the nineteenth century. . . and it had something to do with the quality of his poetry . . . Jimmy was very civilized. And the civilized quality . . . really came alive in the reading. I felt like I was blessed to be there. I was very moved. (pp.412-13)
Of course, we learn of Schuyler’s sexuality, at the time considered “deviant,” and of the complications, brutalities, and beauties it brought to his life. We learn that his closeness to Fairfield Porter and family and his years-long residence with them was far more than a case of a guest vastly outstaying his welcome. We learn of his friendship with W.H. Auden and his bonding and differences with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch. I write this two days before what would have been John Ashbery’s 98th birthday, now being celebrated in Hudson, New York by friends, admirers, and associates. Were John in a position to comment, surely he would welcome Nathan Kernan’s biography of his dear friend and creative co-conspirator as the best possible birthday gift. [The picture on the right is a portrait of John Ashbery and James Schuyler by Fairfield Porter.]
In the 1980’s, the editor and humorist Veronica Geng, a contributor to The New Yorker for nearly two decades, visited my university. Schuyler was one of the writers she mentioned admiringly. “I always loved seeing Jimmy Schuyler,” she said. “Jimmy Schuyler,” she said again, her voice trailing off.
— Angela Ball
*
Angela, Terence, and the ad hoc committee also recommened Martin Stannard's review of the Schuyler bio, part of which is reproduced here with a link to the rest:
<<It’s the poetry that, for me at least, is what matters most, and as I’ve already mentioned, Kernan is very good on it. This can be seen, for example, in his picking up what may seem like small things, such as linking Schuyler’s father’s newspaper work, and what Kernan describes as “[t]he heterogeneous, collage-like nature of newspapers” to “the dated, daily nature of newspapers . . . reflected in the great many Schuyler poems that bear dates and immortalize particular days”. Or, to take a longer instance, this, on the poem “February”:
With “February,” Jimmy comes to a conscious recognition of the poetic
territory that was his: . . . . free verse put to the service of careful and
fluent observation in real time. “Looking out the window,” yes, but also
acknowledging what he could not see, including feelings and “involuntary
memories.” The effect is not so much descriptive, as one of putting the
reader in the position of making the same discoveries, at the same
time, as the poet. As he wrote, “Often a poem ‘happens’ to the writer
in exactly the same way that it ‘happens’ to someone who reads it.”
Schuyler himself said in an interview that he tried to write poems that were like Fairfield Porter’s paintings. In this connection, Kernan looks at the poem “A Blue Shadow Painting”, which he says
takes as its subject the painting that Fairfield had given him
and reconstitutes, in a sense, the original scene through imagining
the process of its making, while “Under a Storm Washed Sky,”
dated December 8, 1962, in its close attention to the landscape
and in particular the colors of shadows (a noted concern of
Fairfield’s), might also be describing a Porter painting. Or rather
it seems to describe how the scene would be understood through
what a painter could and could not indicate with paint, and by
extension draws attention to the inherently limiting but at the
same time transformative effect of verbal description: “An elm
and its shadow are one. / The twigs of a pear tree are knotted /
and glazed with light. The clothes pole / stands empty of purpose,
a faint green / on its shadowed side. A cloud like a slice of mist /
slides under the sun and the shadows momentarily fade.”
This is all good stuff. And Kernan does not ignore the paradox that has surely struck most every reader and/or admirer of Schuyler, that is, how someone with such evident behavioural issues wrote the poems that he did. After a spell in the Payne Whitney psychiatric hospital – where, incidentally, one of his visitors is Marianne Moore - he writes “Salute”, a wonderful poem, and one with which he would always, in later life, begin his readings. Given the context, Kernan’s remark at this point in the story is spot on: ” With few exceptions, Schuyler’s poetic voice seems a paradigm of calm sanity, in contrast to his intermittent breakdowns, periods of delusional behavior, and sometimes messy, on-the-edge existence.”
Elsewhere [Kernan] says:
Yet even as his personal behavior began to exhibit strains
and oddities, most of his letters, both personal and museum-
related, and his reviews remained—with some exceptions—
lucid and sane. Even at his most deranged, he could appear, and
perhaps be, calm and rational in his writing. There was a discipline
and a sense of performance in writing that he could harness,
making it hard at times for anyone reading his letters . . . to
reconcile their sensible tone with his actual behavior around
the time of writing.
>>>
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