Where Have You Been? (8 page)

It was on a morning in Manhattan, the book was
The Morning of the Poem
(typically, I don't know how it came to be in my possession), and the poems that convinced me (it's unusual to remember even this much) were a little sequence of eleven short pieces called “The Payne Whitney Poems.” Payne Whitney, I knew from reading about Robert Lowell, was a New York mental hospital—in the same way I knew from reading Malcolm Lowry's little book
Lunar Caustic
that Bellevue was a New York mental hospital—and here was a clutch of texts fit to set beside that, or Lowell's “Waking in the Blue” or his sequence “Hospital.” Intact records of damage, frail hints at a central neural mystery, words newly out of bandages:

                                  
Arches

of buildings, this building,

frame a stream of windows

framed in white brick. This

building is fireproof; or else

it isn't: the furnishings first

to go: no, the patients. Patients

on Sundays walk in a small garden.

Today some go out on a group

pass. To stroll the streets and shop.

So what else is new? The sky

slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.

A gray in which some smoke stands.

Typical of Schuyler are the adjustments and corrections—like Bishop's, only more sweeping (and yet somehow just as mildly carried out, “no, the patients,” “slowly/swiftly”). Also the small thoughts and whimsical half-experimental notations, before they are countermanded: “This / building is fireproof,” “Today some go out on a group / pass”—this last reminding me unfortunately of someone's altogether more robust sneer (is it Berryman?), “nuts in groups about the room.” There is a clear and real external scene, a view or “subject,” and yet always stronger is one's sense of the poem as being made, like a painting: the quick, nervous applications of paint, and the quick taking of it back. Schuyler is at once a painterly poet, descriptive and objective, and at the same time he uses all the subliminal, microbial quirks of language.

The poem attempts perhaps to find something to affirm, but everywhere there is either fear or envy (of the patients on their exeat) or a crippling feeling of fatuity. Something as “normal” and ordinary as “To stroll the streets and shop” can rarely have sounded as hesitant and borrowed and speculative as it does here. The infinite wistfulness of the infinitive. To know her is to love her. To walk and chew gum. To pass through the eye of a needle and enter heaven. No wonder it takes them straight out of the poem—leaving the speaker with the self-interrogation which, one senses, he has been avoiding as hard as he could. One infers that the speaker, from shame, from weakness, from “shakiness”—a condition referred to in one of the other poems—or perhaps from lifelong aesthetic preference, would prefer to stick to external, middle-distance things. His speech feels like remedial speech, the words sound odd and insecure. Having asked his question—doesn't it sound like a visitor's, easy to ask, hell to reply to, that he's unhappily parroting to himself?—he heroically interposes “The sky,” perhaps so as not to have to offer information about himself. Unluckily, “The sky” sounds like a play on the poet's name, and the predicate may perhaps offer clues about his condition (and I have seen both the following ascribed to Schuyler): the schizophrenic “slowly/swiftly,” or else the bipolar “went blue to gray,” a past verb—more, painful, relearning of language—suggesting the change—which of course the speaker has no hope of quantifying—from depressed, “blue,” to medicated, “gray.” “A gray,” the information carries on, in a rather unlooked-for way, “in which some smoke stands.” The last word, wholly unexpected, makes the poem. Not that one had any doubts about the poem being made—it makes itself throughout—but such an ending, dutiful, dominant, at no stage in the poem seems remotely within its reach. Here is the unlooked-for affirmation, a new physics in which smoke “stands” while windows “stream” and brick is “white” and “fireproof; or else / it isn't.” And of course, platitudinously, “no smoke without fire” and the patients are the first “to go,” and where this one, humorously, has “gone.” “Some.”

What looked like a static scene—a view out the window!—is instead a little drama. The interest of the poem—fully held by the minutely controlled to-and-fro, paint-and-scrape of the sentences, its terrible, casual sensitivity—is in its naked tact and its secret optics. The form of the arch (it is hard to know where to say this) had [the suicide] Kleist's admiration for being kept up by the desire of every individual part of it to fall. “Arches” is the poem of someone with his glasses off, or his brain decoupled, of the infinitely delicate return of matter, manner, humor, humanity. What we call way, Kafka said, is wavering or dithering. The Payne Whitney poems (
pace
Heaney) waver into sense. They take very small steps tremendously irresolutely. At the beginning of “Arches,” the speaker recognizes or discerns nothing (by the end, he sounds wise). Not just that, he seems to be under very low pressure. There is painfully little forward momentum. Most rhetoric is based on repetition; Schuyler uses repetition that is only repetition, that is without rhetoric. The title—ironically—falls into the poem, and the poem shuffles from “buildings” to “building,” from “frame” to “framed,” from “the patients” to “Patients.” It sounds potentially tremendously powerful—if Lowell or someone had written within such parameters, it would have had tremendous power (say, “tops of the moving trees move helter-skelter”)—yet no power accrues to it here. Rather, the miracle is that the frailty, even the lightness of the thing is not impaired. It is someone taking these tiny steps, backward and forward, and not treading on anything, not hurting anything.

However halting, impaired, almost uncommunicative the poem, I still have the perverse sense that the station to which it is tuned, as it were, however low, is merriment. The sentences may be mumbled and reluctant and short and full of wrong turnings, but there is still a kind of low ebb of wit in them—in the macabre speculation, the observation of others like or unlike himself, in the unexpectedly fluent linkage of smoke and fire. It is, in other words, and perhaps again unexpectedly, literary—and I have come to think that Schuyler is everywhere literary. It seems to me not inappropriate to be reminded of other poems and poets by “Arches,” by the other “Payne Whitney Poems,” by Schuyler passim. Thus, “her hair dressed with stark simplicity” (from “Let's All Hear It for Mildred Bailey!”) is Horace; “Buried at Springs” anticipates Bishop's “North Haven,” and there is no shortage of other “Bishop moments,” such as “More litter, less clutter” from “The Master of the Golden Glow” or “The bay agitatedly tries to smooth itself out. / If it were tissue paper it would need damp and an iron,” which then corpses into: “It is a good deal more than damp. / What a lot of water” (“The Edge in the Morning”); “An Almanac” is Brodsky before there was Brodsky—1969—“Shops take down their awnings; / women go south; / few streetlamp leaners; / children run with leaves running at their backs. / In cedar chests sheers and seersuckers displace flannels and wools.” Rilke is a pervasive presence, “men with faces like happy fists” (“Scarlet Tanager”), or the thought in “The best, the very best roses. After learning all their names—Rose / de Rescht, Cornelia, Pax—it is important to forget them” and “When I / Was born, death kissed me. I kissed it back” (both in “Hymn to Life,” which is like a stray Elegy); Frank O'Hara, Schuyler's friend and sometime flatmate, very obviously, greets—I'll keep myself therefore to one example: “Look, Mitterrand baby” (“Simone Signoret”). O'Hara aside, this is not a matter of being influenced—or influential. The quotations are not borrowings but convergences or congruences: they affirm a kind of conventionality that, with all their wacky freedoms, Schuyler's poems also satisfy. It's not that they are touchstones—something I had thought of saying about “Arches,” say—but that they come up to them.

When I began reading Schuyler, I thought it wasn't possible for anyone to occupy so much of O'Hara's territory without looking pallid; then I thought I actually liked it better than O'Hara—less strenuous, less riotous, more depth and stamina in the personality, more like that “something to read in normal circumstances” (Pound) that I generally crave in poetry. After a while, I thought I hadn't liked anyone this much since Lowell; then I had the (for me) heretical thought that perhaps I even liked it better than Lowell. Still, Lowell is part of my picture of Schuyler, who is, I think, or can be, Lowell by other means. This is an inconvenient or irregular thought: a distaste for Robert Lowell and all his works seems to be axiomatic for Schuyler's admirers. There is a reflex opposition to Lowell in O'Hara and the New York School that seems to me only partly just and that I don't think they can take Schuyler with them on. Their view of Lowell seems to be stuck in around 1955—and their rather unsuccessful espousal of Schuyler, who is almost unknown in England and underappreciated in the States, rarely goes beyond perplexity and adulation. A typical sentence is Howard Moss's: “How Schuyler manages to be absolutely truthful and an obsessed romantic at the same time is his secret.” Well, perhaps the critic should have tried harder to get it out of him. Lee Harwood in his afterword to Schuyler's
Last Poems
enthuses about “poems where the poet is not an isolated heroic figure but a social creature enjoying or enduring the ‘ordinary' experiences of life.” Harwood doesn't mention Lowell by name, but it's easy to imagine he's thinking of him in that “isolated heroic figure.” But what is the speaker of “Arches,” if not “an isolated heroic figure”? And how “ordinary” an experience is hospitalization anyway? I read and admire Schuyler with the same part of me that reads and admires Lowell. To make sense of “The Payne Whitney Poems,” I contend that it helps to have read “For Sale,” “Waking in the Blue,” “Mouth of the Hudson,” “Myopia: A Night,” perhaps even—I provoke—“Waking Early Sunday Morning.” Yes, Schuyler has a different register, his words emerge either slower or faster than Lowell's, more sparingly or more drenchingly (in “Arches,” it is slow and spare), but both are in the same business of forging a written voice or making print that sounds. It doesn't seem to me justifiable to set the author of “I keep no rank nor station. / Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small” against the author of “Arches”—not to mention the fact that Elizabeth Bishop was a great admirer of both.

From “The Payne Whitney Poems,” I ranged happily over the rest of
The Morning of the Poem
(1980) and then the
Selected
and
Collected Poems
of 1990 and 1993. Schuyler readers have actually fared rather well since his death, in 1993. Black Sparrow brought out
The Diary of James Schuyler
in 1997 and the
Selected Art Writings
in 1998; in 1999 Slow Dancer published as
Last Poems
those pieces that had been included in the American
Collected
but not the
Selected
; in 2009 William Corbett brought out a
Selected Letters
; and in 2001 the New York Review of Books Classics series adopted a delightful novel of Schuyler's called
Alfred and Guinevere
—his first book, from 1958—with an introduction by his friend John Ashbery.

Schuyler is first and last a poet, but the other books shed interesting light on the poetry. “For readers of his poetry, the idea of the
Diary
of James Schuyler might almost seem like too much of a good thing,” begins Nathan Kernan's introduction—too much because the poems have so much of the particular and the quotidian about them. The
Art Writings
—Schuyler followed Ashbery and O'Hara to
ARTnews
, and wrote for it, off and on, from 1955 to 1978—show a well-tempered, diversely appreciative critic, with an apparently inexhaustible range of ways of saying things (on Alex Katz: “the first in the ‘allegorical' style that showed the painter and his wife Ada and small son striding smiling out of a summer landscape; like the end of a Russian movie when the wheat crop has flourished”) and an unexpectedly fervent commitment to a sort of minor-Ruskin aesthetic that also informs the poems (on Jane Freilicher: “that passion for prettiness that can charge a lyric gift with the greatest potency of beauty”). One thinks of the New York poets as associating with the Abstract Expressionist painters, but a lot of Schuyler's enthusiasms—not to mention his book jackets—tend to be for rather pretty and watery figurative work. O'Hara claimed not to be able to enjoy grass or trees “unless there's a subway handy”; Schuyler was a more wholehearted visitor to Long Island, a longtime resident of Vermont and Maine and upstate, and in many of his New York City poems celebrates a kind of
rus in urbe
pleasantness. The novel, finally—Schuyler wrote a couple of others, one with Ashbery, but I haven't read them—is an extraordinary piece of work, chronicling an uneasy period in the life of a brother and sister, seven-year-old Alfred and eleven-year-old Guinevere. There is no narration beyond “he said” or “she said”; the whole book is kept in speech, occasional letters (Alfred has to dictate his), and Guinevere's monstrously precocious diary entries (“When I take up smoking remember about lemon juice removing stains”). It lives in the frighteningly accurate contrast between the two voices—two ages, two sexes, but also two individuals—and, almost more, in that between written speech and writing (which, to me, is also an area where Schuyler's poetry makes a great showing). Remarkably,
Alfred and Guinevere
was originally published—mistakenly—with illustrations, as a children's book. It can be done—my cool literary eight-year-old read it aloud to me, but we both understood that wasn't properly what it was for.