Also a Poet

The title of Ada Calhoun’s recent book, Also a Poet, refers to an obituary for the poet and bon vivant Frank O’Hara that appeared in the New York Times carrying that phrase dismissively in its title. At the time of his death—he was struck and killed on a beach on Fire Island late at night by someone driving a dune buggy—O’Hara’s off-the-cuff writing style was not taken seriously by many, and even today he remains somewhat of a cult figure, as far as I can tell. Calhoun herself never met O’Hara, but he was an important figure in her life all the same, because her father, Peter Schjeldahl, a poet and later an influential New Yorker art critic, idealized both O’Hara and the New York art scene in which he flourished as a self-styled later-day Catullus. Schjeldahl, born and raised in Fargo, abandoned his studies at Carleton College and moved to the East Village in Manhattan in pursuit of that lifestyle, and Calhoun’s childhood unfolded in a walk-up apartment surrounded by artists and intellectuals, booze and conversation.

Part of the book’s appeal lies in Calhoun’s descriptions of this scene—a theme she develops more fully in a previous book, St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of Americas Hippest Street. But her new book’s backbone derives from a discovery Calhoun made as an adult while scrounging in the apartment basement for a toy. Opening a cabinet drawer at random, she came upon a collection of cassette tapes with the names of famous and not-so-famous artists on them. 

“What are these?” she asks her father.

”I was going to write a biography of Frank O’Hara,” he replies, “but I never got his sister Maureen, who has the rights to his letters, to cooperate.”

Calhoun, who earns her living as a ghost-writer, decides that she’s fully capable of completing the project her father couldn’t. 

A major strand in the narrative deals with Calhoun's attempts to win the cooperation of O’Hara’s sister Maureen. Meanwhile, details about O’Hara’s life and the New York art scene emerge from the long-forgotten tapes of her father’s interviews with those who were closer to the center of the action at the time than he was. Calhoun soon determines that her father had torpedoed his efforts with Maureen right off the bat by inquiring too pointedly about her brother’s sex life and blatantly asserting that John Ashberry was the better poet—though O’Hara was more important “socially.” A faux pas trifecta, as one of her friends described it. 

Calhoun makes no bones about the fact that she and her father never got along. She admits that partying came more naturally to her parents than parenting, and she feels she never got the attention she deserved, though she has long since resigned herself to the fact. At one point she writes:

In 1983, my father said in an interview: “I think at the root of the critical impulse is some kind of adolescent outrage at growing up and discovering that the world is not nearly what you hoped or thought it might be. And that criticism is then a career of trying to move it over and make it more habitable for one’s sensibility.”

To which Calhoun adds:

That sounds like what we do both as artists and as children: look at our parents, critique them like a work of art, figure out how we can make room for ourselves.

Her hope is that by completing a project that meant a great deal to her father, she’ll finally be able to bask in his approbation for awhile.

A final wrinkle is thrown into the narrative when Schjeldahl is diagnosed with cancer. During a family discussion at the clinic, the doctor proposes various treatments and describes their likely side effects. As Calhoun remembers the scene: 

“I’m a writer,” my father said. “I’m still employed. I want to do whatever will help me keep writing as long as possible. I think chemo might make me too tired. Writing is the most important thing.”

The room was quiet. Across from me, my mother’s eyes were filled with tears. She looked scared....

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You aren’t just a writer!” I said. “You’re also a husband and a father and a grandfather and a friend.”

Sounding exasperated, he said, “What am I supposed to do? Just sit around like a potted plant? I don’t make any sense to myself if I’m not writing.”

Another pause. My mother hadn’t said a word.

Calhoun keeps these various elements not only afloat but also fresh with a thinking-out-loud approach, as she bobs and weaves from interview text to childhood memory to current day pursuit of her publishing project. She recounts a few of her father’s publishing triumphs with pride, and notes his blind spots and self-absorption with honesty, but not rancor. The portraits that Calhoun extracts from the interviews suggest that many of the painters who figure in the narrative—and especially Larry Rivers—were unpleasant. Well, so are many of the paintings themselves. 

The poets more often come off more as thoughtful, decent people. And it’s fun eavesdropping on a conversation between Calhoun and Ron Padgett or Vincent Katz. The author, more prosaic and level-headed than many of the “famous” artists featured here, also makes a good story out of her own coming of age. When she was fourteen, her parents started to leave her in at their apartment in the East Village every summer while they vacationed in the Catskills—a turn of events that she admits to enjoying, for the most part.   

 How does it all end? I’d rather not say. But this passage, which appears two-thirds of the way through the book, may suggest something of its exasperated and endearing flavor.    

My mother says my father opens doors and drawers but never closes them. She’s always following behind him, closing things. She’s been complaining about it for fifty years. Still, she does it, because she doesn’t want to live in a home full of open cabinet doors and gaping drawers. When I found these O’Hara tapes, I saw an open drawer. The past year it’s like I’ve been trying to close it. Or perhaps I am just flinging open more drawers and cabinet doors—searching them for answers to questions about who my father is, who Frank O’Hara was, why people liked Larry Rivers so much, and how I can wring a happy ending out of all this.

 _____________________________

Anyone who reads the New Yorker regularly will have come upon Schjeldahl’s pieces more than once or twice. After finishing his daughter’s book, I was curious to reread a few of them in light of this family portrait. I checked a collection of his reviews called Let’s See out of the library and also a slim volume of poems called White Country. The poems date from 1965, and they’re pretty bad: an uneven mix of political posturing, existential angst, and bohemian party-time frivolity a la Frank O’Hara, tossed off in the spirit of “one thing never leads to the next.”

The art criticism, written between 1998 and 2008, is often brilliant.

Schjeldahl had matured. In the introduction to Let’s See, he describes how poetry gave up on him:

I never had a real subject, only a desperate wish to be somehow glorious. When you lean too hard on anything, it breaks. This happens to all sorts of artists, all the time. I wish them the luck that I had: discovering that what you have been doing for money is what you were meant to do.

I had imagined that the meat of Schjeldahl’s collection would be devoted to recent artists and movements about which I know little or nothing, but quite a few of the pieces describe shows at the Met and other venues of the masters. Near the start of an essay about Vermeer, he reminds us of various theories being floated about the painter’s technique, that adds:

But Vermeer beggars any analysis. There is a discomfort—a prickling itch—in my experience of him. Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look ...Vermeer is blatant and ineffable, like the Sphinx. His appeal is both populist and lofty: as if it mixed Norman Rockwell and the music of the spheres.

Two pages later, after reviewing a biography of the artist, he wraps up his piece:

A skeptical friend of mine surmises that our present Vermeer craze reflects yearnings for legitimacy in today’s lately expanded upper middle class. This makes sense. You might say that Vermeer apotheosizes material prosperity—not that he was ever well-off himself. (If only because of that horde of kids underfoot, his golden visions of bourgeois serenity had to be vicarious.) I think that Vermeer’s ideal was a classless, timeless truth that is returning to the fore in contemporary culture: the essential role that aesthetic pleasure must play in any seriously lived life. Each of us is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision. Ultimately, Vermeer’s appeal is about nothing other than the realization of that gift. Looking at his pictures, we approach the farthest frontiers of a necessary happiness.