James Schuyler, Alfred and Guinevere, NYRB Classics, 2002. [1958.]
Introduction by John Ashbery (pdf)
One of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, James Schuyler was at the same time a remarkable novelist. Alfred and Guinevere are two children who have been sent by their parents to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. There they puzzle over their parents' absence and their relatives' habits, play games and pranks, make friends and fall out with them, spat and make up. Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention. The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a very sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the often perilous boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.
"The novel…is quite an extraordinary piece of work, chronicling an uneasy period in the life of a brother and sister, seven—year—old Alfred and 11—year—old Guinevere." — Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books
"A delectable little book…A deft and funny creation of a high quality somewhere between the terror—haunted humor of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unself—conscious amusements of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters." — Commonweal
"Schuyler, who died in 1991, was a noted poet, however this book is not written in 'poetic prose'—he employs a simple style, without imagery or complexities. But every page displays a poet’s sensibility in the fresh and inventive ways Schuyler has his child narrators use and misuse language.Alfred and Guinevere is a small treasure, and its restoration to print is to be commended." — Phillip Routh, Rain Taxi Review of Books
Poet John Ashbery introduces this slim novel by his late friend Schuyler (1923–91), a fellow poet of the so-called New York School, a style characterized by its breezy now-ness, its do-this-then-that narration, and its use of seemingly simple language. When Schuyler published his odd little book in 1958, he had yet to make his name as a poet, and it’s in that connection Ashbery finds the most value to his friend’s tale of two bickering children, which Ashbery reads biographically. Kirkus (March 15, 1958, p. 246) was intrigued by the brother and sister and their various skirmishes, misadventures, and mishaps. With impressive foresight, we praised Schuyler for the very qualities Ashbery celebrates with hindsight: the tape-recording–like accuracy of language “so sure” and “so clear.” Readers annoyed by the poet’s often puerile verse may find his childlike prose redeeming. - Kirkus Reviews
"You can hear it now — for, in dialogue form, (except when Guinevere Gates is writing in her diary) here are the skirmishes, the misadventures and mishaps, and the troubles that she and her younger brother Alfred get into in their city home…" — Kirkus Reviews
I had not heard of James Schuyler’s debut novel, Alfred and Guinevere, which was out of print for almost fifty years, before I spotted rather a lovely NYRB edition in the Modern Classics section of my local library. I was immediately entranced by its rather charming blurb, and the strength of the reviews which adorn its back cover. Kenneth Koch calls the novel ‘witty, truthful, simple, lively, and musical’. Schuyler, best known for his poetry, is heralded as a ‘remarkable novelist’.
In his introduction to the volume, John Ashbery writes: ‘The reader discovers that beneath the book’s apparently guileless surface lies a sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.’ Ashbery believes that Schuyler ‘writes about the past with tenderness and humor’, the result of which is ‘a timelessly idyllic comedy of manners, where English models are inflected by 1930s small-town life in America, as seen through the gauze filters of the movies and children’s literature.’
Alfred and Guinevere are a pair of young siblings, who are sent to spent the summer with their grandmother, Mrs Miller, in the country, after their father travels on a business trip to Europe and their mother is preoccupied with subletting their New York apartment before joining him. Of the plot of Alfred and Guinevere, Ashbery states that it is ‘insistently ambiguous, lacking in resolution’, with the “grownups” ‘barely characters, barely anything but names.’
There are elements of violence throughout Alfred and Guinevere; Alfred is beaten by his father quite often, and the siblings discover the corpse of a murdered ‘colored’ man in the park. Regardless, the novel is often filled with childish, but rather lovely conversations, in which the siblings endeavour to make sense of the world in which they live, and their parents’ abandonment of them. Schuyler pinpoints children’s voices marvellously; in fact, it is the real strength of the book. When in hospital after having his appendix removed, for instance, Alfred tells another patient: ‘”I have one sister named Guinevere who can draw and do back bends.”‘
The novel is told entirely through ‘snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere’s diary’. The novel proper begins with a series of fanciful stories told by the children, of what they believe their adult lives will be like. Guinevere fancies herself as ‘one of the leading woman big spenders of her day’, and Alfred see himself becoming a ‘great hunter’ and polar explorer. Guinevere tends to be quite precocious, but Alfred is endearing from the start. The relationship depicted between the siblings is surprisingly complex at times; Guinevere says: ‘”It’s so difficult, learning how to behave. We got along like cats and dogs until he almost died having his appendix out. It makes him more grown up sometimes.”‘ In a later passage, she writes: ‘Last night Alfred put an egg in my bed. I almost broke it getting in. I know he did not think of it all by himself and I will fix both of them. So far I have been very smart and not said anything. He kept looking at me at breakfast. I just smiled and asked him how he felt and if he got a good night’s sleep and so on. He is getting scared.’
Whilst Alfred and Guinevere is rather a fragmented book, the reader does end up learning a lot about both children, and how they feel about one another. Alfred provides bursts of amusement, and the differences between the children allow Schuyler to present rather a fascinating character study. There is some semblance of plot, but those who prefer action-packed novels would probably feel a little disappointed by Schuyler’s debut. I enjoyed the approach overall, and would have liked a little more substance to pull me in further at times; the novel was not quite as good as I was expecting after reading Ashbery’s introduction, but it is a memorable and well written tome nonetheless. - https://theliterarysisters.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/alfred-and-guinevere-by-james-schuyler/
There is something rather wonderful about choosing and reading a book while knowing very little about it. I knew nothing at all about James Schuyler or his 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere when I picked it up in Hay on Wye last year – all I knew was that I loved NYRB Classics (and this one, from 2001, shows just how timeless their designs are – looking beautifully fresh 14 years later. Even though I can’t find out what the painting is). Not being a poetry buff, I didn’t realise that that was the arena in which Schuyler made his name – but I do now know that he had a knack with words that was rather extraordinary.
The eponymous Alfred and Guinevere are children who are sent to stay with their grandparents. Most of this slim novel is given in their dialogue, excerpts from Guinevere’s diary, and letters that she writes. The novella probably says their ages, but I must have flown past that section. Guinevere is the elder; Alfred is pretty unschooled in reading and writing.
Undoubtedly the greatest achievement in this novel is Schuyler’s ability to capture the cadences of children’s conversation, particularly the back-and-forth of sibling arguments, which leap from battle to truce to battle, weaving in long-standing disagreements, I-know-something-you-don’t-know novelties, and (most beautifully captured of all) snatches stolen from the conversation of adults around them, and novels the children probably shouldn’t be reading. This is a trick Schuyler uses throughout: they borrow idioms and metaphors that sound extremely out of kilter with their childish bickering, because – of course – that is exactly what children do do. Perhaps particularly those who feel adrift from the adults around them, and uncertain of the events that have occurred (more on that soon). Here’s an example from a letter Betty writes to Guinevere, her erstwhile friend:
Dear Guinevere,Thanks for the note. It is a shame boys make so much trouble and go around tattle-taling and spoiling intimate friendships. Of course your knocking me down like that made a permanent wound in my feelings which is slow to heal but it is not you at bottom I blame it is them. It was not me or Lois who told her mother or my mother what my mother told your mother she said you said. It was Stanley who told his mother and she told the other mothers. So you see how it goes.It is a shame what happens but I guess you have to take it as it comes and not spoil your life with vain regrets.More in sadness than in hate,Elizabeth Carolanne House
And there is this…
“You’re scared to walk across the bridge and look. I can tell you’re scared when you try to look like Mother.””I’ll run away and leave you in the gathering gloom at the mercy of reckless drivers and we’ll see who’s scared.””I’ll throw myself in the gutter and get sick and die, then you’ll be sorry.””No I won’t. I’ll go to your funeral and say, ‘Doesn’t he look sweet in his coffin,’ and cry, then everybody will feel sorry for me and give me things. I’ll wear a black dress with black accessories and a hat with a black veil. Black is very becoming and makes you look older. Then I’ll take your insurance money and go on a trip and meet a dark, interesting stranger.”
Lest you think that this is a cutesy book, I should say that – behind the well-observed dialogue – there is an indistinct darkness. I suppose Guinevere’s macabre callousness might already dismiss ideas of Brady Bunch levels of cuteness, but there is a much darker subtext. The children briefly discuss having found a dead body. At one very poignant moment, Guinevere blurts out “I’m sorry Daddy hit you”, but it is not explored further than that. Schuyler gives just enough shade to make clear that all is not sunny.
But, at the same time, this is a very funny book. It is the sort of humour that stems almost entirely from acute observation – and that, if coupled with a slight (slight) heightened tone, is probably the thing I find most amusing. In only 126 pages, Schuyler combines humour and darkness in a really exceptional way.
Alfred and Guinevere is deceptively quick and simple. But, oh, there is an awful lot going on – not least an authorial restraint and style that I heartily applaud. If I had to pick any other novel that it reminded me of, I would pick another NYRB beauty – Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi. - StuckinaBook
https://www.stuckinabook.com/alfred-and-guinevere-by-james-schuyler/
James Schuyler, What's for Dinner?, NYRB Classics, 2011.
read it at Google Books
James Schuyler's utterly original What's for Dinner? features a cast of characters who appear to have escaped from a Norman Rockwell painting to run amok. In tones that are variously droll, deadpan, and lyrical, Schuyler tells a story that revolves around three small-town American households. The Delehanteys are an old-fashioned Catholic family whose twin teenage boys are getting completely out of hand, no matter that their father is hardly one to spare the rod. Childless Norris and Lottie Taylor have been happily married for years, even as Lottie has been slowly drinking herself to death. Mag, a recent widow, is on the prowl for love. Retreating to an institution to dry out, Lottie finds herself caught up in a curious comedy of group therapy manners. At the same time, however, she begins an ascent from the depths of despair—illuminated with the odd grace and humor that readers of Schuyler's masterful poetry know so well—to a new understanding, that will turn her into an improbable redeemer within an unlikely world.
What's for Dinner? is among the most delightful and unusual works of American literature. Charming and dark, off-kilter but pedestrian, mercurial yet matter-of-fact, Schuyler's novel is an alluring invention that captures both the fragility and the tenacity of ordinary life.
"James Schuyler’s sublimely sad and funny novel, What’s for Dinner? looks back at Cranford and Madame Bovary and forward to present—day dysfunctional households like those of”Desperate Housewives.” It’s wonderful to have it back in print." — John Ashbery
"A quietly scarifying, very funny, and wonderfully compassionate novel." — Stephen Spender
"What’s for Dinner? is a comedy of manners all about alcoholism, insanity, adultery, drugs, moderate incest, and death. [It is] a great gift to the reader." —Alice Notley
I will confess to a highly ambivalent response when it comes to novels that are written by authors who, for the most part, are poets. I am not a poetry reader, so that bias is admitted up front. Most often, I find that the language gets in the way of the novel — Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault would be a good example. And then, just when I am getting ready to give up on poet-novelists, along comes something like Patrick Lane’s Red Dog, Red Dog and I realize I would be doing myself a tremendous disservice if I became so arbitrary.
My poetry knowledge is so slim that I did not know James Schuyler was an outstanding poet when I ordered What’s For Dinner? — a recommendation from leroyhunter in a comment on L. J Davis’ A Meaningful Life was what put me on to the book. It was, leroy said, ” a study of suburban mores [with] a pleasant sharpness that is reminiscent of Davis”. That is as good a description as you could ask for — there are echoes of both Richard Yates Revolutionary Road and Mad Men, the television show, but more than anything else there is an exploration of New York suburbia in the 1970s.
To fill in the background that I did not have: Schuyler is indeed a major American poet of the New York school with a score or so of published volumes to his credit. He was also W.H. Auden’s amanuensis, among other things. And he was a significant playwright; both the poetic and stage-writing talents come to play in this book.
Consider the opening, where we meet Mary C. Taylor and her husband Norris in their living room:
It was a lovely light living room. Or it would have been, had not a previous owner found quick-growing conifer seedlings an irresistible bargain. When the sun set, a few red beams would struggle in, disclosing in their passage the dust of which the air at times seems largely composed. Mary C. Taylor — the laughing Charlotte of the class of 19** — found the sweet mood brought on by contemplation of the spick-and-spanness in which her husband Norris perused and, presumably, memorized the evening paper, soured.Lottie and Norris are childless; they have replaced the rigors of child-rearing with collecting (and dusting) knick-knacks and, in Lottie’s case, a dependence on the vodka bottle that will eventually see her checked into a rehab centre.
“It seems to me all I do is dust this room.” She put on the bridge lamp at her elbow, in hopes of fighting light with light.
“It isn’t dust, it’s pollen.” Norris was never so absorbed as not to leave a trickle of attention running.
The Delehanteys, by contrast, are a Catholic family with two teen-age, twin sons, who tend to dominate their attention. Father Bruce sees himself as a strict disciplinerian, monitoring and directing (mainly on the negative side) the boys’ musical, athletic and scholastic careers. Alas, like most parental intervention, his efforts are being overtaken by reality and the twins are growing up with the same kinds of distractions (say soft drugs) that most teenagers run into.
Family three in the book actually isn’t a family it is a widow, Mag. Her husband’s death was pretty much a surprise and Mag is not yet ready to give up her life to widow’s weeds.
That’s the framework for one half of the narrative of the book. The three family units interact with each other — sort of. Dinners are hosted, bridge is played and hanky-panky does develop.
As the novel unfolds, Schuyler also spends a fair bit of time exploring the institution where Lottie has been confined, which has an entirely separate community of characters.
That cast is large enough (and very well developed, I must say) that I won’t even try to list them. What is significant about this thread of the book, however, is that it is where Schuyler the playwright comes into play (sorry about the pun). Almost all of these sections, which alternate with the suburban life ones, are done completely in dialogue. The patients go through family and occupational therapy (stitching moccasins, braiding belts and “painting” and “potting”) but most of the non-dialogue parts read like stage directions; the story and relationships between characters comes in the dialogue. An example from early in the process:
Group was in session, and Dr Kearney looked bored. “All right, Bertha,” he said, “you’ve made yourself the center of attention long enough. We’ve all heard your stories of marijuana, music and LSD. You’ve convinced us that you were a real swinger, and you swung yourself right in here.”As that excerpt illustrates, there is a somewhat painful slowness to this thread of the book but, to the author’s credit, it does eventually acquire a rhythm of its own, in contrast to the equally slow (but differently developed) world outside the institution. Like Yates (and Mad Men), part of what Schuyler is exploring is the inherent boredom of suburbia and life outside the institution is not that different from life inside it.
“You never talk about your problems, I’ve noticed,” Lottie said, “the things behind your actions. That might be more interesting and helpful. To all of us, not just yourself.”
“My only problem,” Bertha said, “is that I have a family. They’re nice, but they bug me.”
“Bug you?” Mrs. Brice said.
“They let me do anything I want, but all the time I can tell they secretly disapprove. They don’t know what to make of me , but I know what to make of them. Spineless. Nice, but spineless.”
“We haven’t heard much from you, Mrs Judson,” Dr Kearney said.
“I never did talk much,” Mrs. Judson said.
“That’s true,” Sam Judson said. “Ethel was never much of a talker. She shows her feelings in other ways.”
“In other ways?” Norris said. “I’d be interested to hear an example.”
I don’t think What’s For Dinner? is a great book, but it definitely is a worthwhile one — exactly the kind of volume that the NYRB should be ensuring stays in print. I am sure that, if you are a poetry reader, Schuyler’s poetry is a better investment of your time, but then I am not a poetry reader. In its own way, this novel captures the same kind of stasis that drives Yates’ Revolutionary Road and explores what kinds of outcomes that suburban stasis produces — with somewhat less disastrous consequences. Written in 1978, it captures that “bust” era — the liberation of the 1960s is now a fact, it has left some damage in its wake. In its own way, that has contributed as much to the modern world as the revolution of the sixties did — it is more than worthwhile to investigate how it looked at the time. -
https://kevinfromcanada.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/whats-for-dinner-by-james-schuyler/
Helene is restless:
leaving soon. And what then
will I do with myself? Some-
one is watching morning
TV. I’m not reduced to that
yet. I wish one could press
snowflakes in a book like flowers.”
James Schuyler, “The Morning of the Poem”leaving soon. And what then
will I do with myself? Some-
one is watching morning
TV. I’m not reduced to that
yet. I wish one could press
snowflakes in a book like flowers.”
The novel “What’s For Dinner?” is a unique off-kilter quirky comedy of manners about us poor souls who live in suburbia. The novel was written by a poet, James Schuyler, and it has a captivating rhythm all its own.
For readers like me who are always on the lookout for something different and interesting, this novel is near perfect. Although “What’s for Dinner” can be considered a comedy, it is a comedy with a dark biting underside.
New Yorker James Schuyler was a manic depressive for most of his adult life and spent years in psychoanalysis and group therapy. In “What’s For Dinner?” he puts his group therapy experience to good use since much of the novel takes place during group therapy sessions. A lot of the novel is the dialogue between these group members. Group therapy talk has the potential for being very boring, but here the characters are so colorful and interesting that we care about what each character says. The talk in the group sessions covers such weighty matters as alcoholism, adultery, drugs, insanity, and death in an offhand conversational manner. Dialogue is surely one of Schuyler’s strong suits.
“Mrs. Judson,” Lottie said, “I wish you would tell me one thing that I’ve done to offend you. Or anyone else here, for that matter.”
“How could you offend me?” Mrs. Judson said. “I’m above that.”
“Yet you behave toward me as though I had. I’m not trying to provoke you – I think you will feel better if you get some of what’s bothering you off your chest.”
“I’ll thank you to leave my chest out of it.”
“Very well,” Lottie said. “I’ve tried.”
These are just ordinary people who might have stepped out of a TV sitcom. Being ordinary does not mean these same people can’t also be stubborn and capricious. Some make tremendous progress in the group, and some don’t. Also the family members of those in the group have their own things going on and their own sets of problems just like in real life. The entire story is told with a certain elan, a kind spirit, that keeps the reader smiling the entire way. This novel has caused me to be interested in James Schuyler. I want to read more of his poetry and also his other novel which has been republished by NYRB, “Alfred and Guinevere”.
Once again New York Book Review (NYRB) has republished a book that puts the adjective ‘novel’ into the noun ‘novel’. I looked up the adjective ‘novel’ and found the following meaning: ‘different from anything seen or known before”. “What’s For Dinner?” certainly fits that definition.
“Your poems,”
a clunkhead said, “have grown
more open.” I don’t want to be open,
merely to say, to see and say, things
as they are.
a clunkhead said, “have grown
more open.” I don’t want to be open,
merely to say, to see and say, things
as they are.
James Schuyler, “Dec 28, 1974”
- https://anokatony.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/whats-for-dinner-by-james-schuyler/
James Schuyler, Collected Poems, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993.
borrow it here
The definitive edition of the poet's work, taken from the pages of the poet's published collections, includes
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
Wallace Stevens
Reading James Schuyler's Collected Poems this summer, just out this June, is better than vacationing at the shore, or mountain retreat; in fact it is better than anywhere one could imagine. There, or rather here in his book, one visits with the imagination of a great poet whose art transforms us as it informs our relationship within our surroundings only to discover words are the landscape in which we want most to go. Modesty, fortunately, is not one of Mr. Schuyler's virtues and the world he artfully presents, as we are keenly aware in every line, is neither his nor ours, even when the recognition of the real in his observations is so stunning we can only acquiesce.
Objects are never as real in life as they appear in Schuyler's poems. One might say Schuyler is an objective surrealist interpolating flat reportage with hyper-descriptive elements.
The lilac leaves. The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wool:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there. . . .
(from "Hymn to Life," pg. 223)
It's as though his "outside" is the reading of an afterimage flashed upon the optic nerve creating a neurasthenic tableau whose colors shift, and in this polarization or synesthesia we find world and ourselves impressed (nailed down, taken aboard) in his process. In this activity – the need to capture – Schuyler is an ecstatic, perhaps even a religious thinker, though he is neither overtly moral nor pious. In these visions of excess, Schuyler is never a tourist. He is, however, profoundly genuine in his arduous humility to get it right.
There almost has to be a heaven! so there could be
a place for Bruno Walter
who never needed the cry of a baton.
Immortality –
in a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy
Magnavox from which a forte
drops like a used Brillo Pad?
(from "A Man in Blue'" pg. 17)
(from "A Man in Blue'" pg. 17)
And wonderfully, for us, in our significant need for refreshment which he quietly indulges, getting it right means he can run on to "camp" where fun "is something more than beer and skittles, and the something more is a whole lot better than beer and skittles!" But his sense of whimsy, like that of John Ashbery, can also reveal that life in a funhouse is anything but fun. The nonsense in his poems can sometimes peek through to expose nature (and social orders alike) as empowered, terrifying and indifferent.
When Schuyler reviewed his lifetime friend Fairfield Porter's work in Art News in 1967 he wrote: "The quotidian image is transfigured to pure paint." Replace "language" for "paint" and the same can be said of the transfiguration Schuyler enacts within his own medium. The title of the review "Immediacy Is the Message" is telling as well, as Schuyler is the master of the quick take. However it is more complicated than "first thought best thought," for Schuyler is a known fiddler and would sometimes take up to a year tinkering with a poem – getting it right. The surface of his poems has only an illusion of immediate and effortless description. His poems, like ethnographic accounts, read from a subject-position both inside and outside of the human activities and "weather" they track. And although a case can be made that he himself was an outsider, we continually find ourselves adopted within the natural and normative social intricacies he records as familiar. We know that James Schuyler suffered profoundly in his adult life, he was hospitalized several times for schizophrenia and in many ways, I feel, his work is that of a solitaire, recording the light outside a window – guest room, hospital room etc. You don't have to go digging. It's in the poems. His vivid rendering of the world is born out of a necessity to cohere, not merely for embellishment but as an act of sanity. Yet he is not simply inventing a locus for himself in his poems. The act is, in fact, far more sophisticated – it is description as event. An event which includes potentially everyone: the ominous cabby, a nurse, a failed lover from high school, a newspaper boy, friends and family alike. All have a place within Schuyler's "camp," which remains complicated and thick. The event of the poem is a promise of salvation divested within the infinite possibility of forms.
In his book of essays "The Interpretation of Culture" the anthropologist Clifford Geertz illuminates the role of ethnography as "thick description." In Schuyler's case, we might substitute poet for ethnographer in the following quote: "What the [poet] is in fact faced with is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render: incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, censusing households, [describing them] not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior." Indeed, his entire opus is full of "transient examples of shaped behavior," never "conventionalized graphs of sound." Ethnography is not so far off, considering the subject matter of Schuyler's poems, especially the long poems. Take almost any passage:
When Schuyler reviewed his lifetime friend Fairfield Porter's work in Art News in 1967 he wrote: "The quotidian image is transfigured to pure paint." Replace "language" for "paint" and the same can be said of the transfiguration Schuyler enacts within his own medium. The title of the review "Immediacy Is the Message" is telling as well, as Schuyler is the master of the quick take. However it is more complicated than "first thought best thought," for Schuyler is a known fiddler and would sometimes take up to a year tinkering with a poem – getting it right. The surface of his poems has only an illusion of immediate and effortless description. His poems, like ethnographic accounts, read from a subject-position both inside and outside of the human activities and "weather" they track. And although a case can be made that he himself was an outsider, we continually find ourselves adopted within the natural and normative social intricacies he records as familiar. We know that James Schuyler suffered profoundly in his adult life, he was hospitalized several times for schizophrenia and in many ways, I feel, his work is that of a solitaire, recording the light outside a window – guest room, hospital room etc. You don't have to go digging. It's in the poems. His vivid rendering of the world is born out of a necessity to cohere, not merely for embellishment but as an act of sanity. Yet he is not simply inventing a locus for himself in his poems. The act is, in fact, far more sophisticated – it is description as event. An event which includes potentially everyone: the ominous cabby, a nurse, a failed lover from high school, a newspaper boy, friends and family alike. All have a place within Schuyler's "camp," which remains complicated and thick. The event of the poem is a promise of salvation divested within the infinite possibility of forms.
In his book of essays "The Interpretation of Culture" the anthropologist Clifford Geertz illuminates the role of ethnography as "thick description." In Schuyler's case, we might substitute poet for ethnographer in the following quote: "What the [poet] is in fact faced with is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render: incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, censusing households, [describing them] not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior." Indeed, his entire opus is full of "transient examples of shaped behavior," never "conventionalized graphs of sound." Ethnography is not so far off, considering the subject matter of Schuyler's poems, especially the long poems. Take almost any passage:
. . . I think with longing of my years in
Southampton, leaf-turning
trips to cool Vermont. Things should get better as you
grow older, but that
is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to handle.
Here it is
the Labor Day weekend and all my friends are out of town:
just me and some
millions of others, to whom I have not yet been introduced.
A walk in the
streets is not the same as a walk on the beach, by
preference, a beach
emptied by winter winds. A few days, and friends will
trickle back to
town. Dinner parties, my favorite form of entertainment.
Though in these
inflationary times you're lucky to get chicken in
place of steak.
What I save on meals I spend on taxis. Lately a lot
of cabs have
signs: NO SMOKING, PLEASE, or NO SMOKING DRIVER ALLERGIC.
A quiet smoke in
a taxi is my idea of bliss. Yes, everything gets more
restricted, less free.
(from "A Few Days" pg 361)
Not unlike Whitman, Schuyler believed that "a freedom which excludes is less than free." ("Immediacy Is the Message"), and he has invented a form wherein we are free to come and go as we partake of the terms of its telling. His technique to create an open field was never more telling than when, in an important gesture near the end of his life, Schuyler came out in 1988 to give his first public reading. The line outside of the DIA Foundation was four abreast and was over a block long comprised of life-long devotees and younger readers. In short all the various clans turned out to participate in the masterful space of that event.
I can't imagine anyone not being completely thrilled to own this edition of the Collected Poems. The cover is a portrait of Mr. Schuyler, reading in his room at the Chelsea Hotel, by Darragh Park (who, along with Raymond Foye and Thomas Carey is an editor of this volume). My only complaint is that I was also hoping to find fugitive poems from his career. The good news is that the present volume is replete with 90 pages of "Last Poems," which are remarkable. It is hard to pick favorites as they are all first rate and as good as anything he has written – outrageous, unconventional, particular, angry, disappointed, kind and knowing. A significant treat. The long poem "Hymn to Life" is presented here for the first time with its glorious long lines unbroken, which to my mind does make a difference. Also all of the poems from "The Home Book" are included. The most striking aspect of reading through the Collected Poems is the variousness of his craft, from short staccato lines to luxurious run-on sentences. The entire book creates an almost seamless vision of life as it is and as we see ourselves in it from a distance. To reread Schuyler's poems is a rehearsal for an event we need always to possess – the promise of artistic excellence.
I can't imagine anyone not being completely thrilled to own this edition of the Collected Poems. The cover is a portrait of Mr. Schuyler, reading in his room at the Chelsea Hotel, by Darragh Park (who, along with Raymond Foye and Thomas Carey is an editor of this volume). My only complaint is that I was also hoping to find fugitive poems from his career. The good news is that the present volume is replete with 90 pages of "Last Poems," which are remarkable. It is hard to pick favorites as they are all first rate and as good as anything he has written – outrageous, unconventional, particular, angry, disappointed, kind and knowing. A significant treat. The long poem "Hymn to Life" is presented here for the first time with its glorious long lines unbroken, which to my mind does make a difference. Also all of the poems from "The Home Book" are included. The most striking aspect of reading through the Collected Poems is the variousness of his craft, from short staccato lines to luxurious run-on sentences. The entire book creates an almost seamless vision of life as it is and as we see ourselves in it from a distance. To reread Schuyler's poems is a rehearsal for an event we need always to possess – the promise of artistic excellence.
Peter Gizzi – from Lingo, August, 1993
https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/schuyler/schuyler_gizzi_collected_review.html
James Schuyler,
The search for ways to contain the evanescence, fragility and ephemeral beauty of the moment has preoccupied lyric poets from Catullus and Herrick to James Schuyler. For Schuyler, indeed, discovering and glowing in the ineffable contingency of the moment was both theme and goal. Nowhere in his work is this more true than in that marvelous celebration of the miracle of impermanence, his remarkable Diary, here made available in full for the first time."The Diary", editor Nathan Kernan has noted, "is a work of art; it is, in a large sense, a poem. Stylistically it is of a piece with Schuyler's poems: it is cut from the same cloth, or is, in places, the cloth from which the poems were cut... The Diary's peculiar combination of fragment, meticulous description, literary allusion, commonplace book and remembrance is beautiful in its own right, and very much a window into the mind that wrote the poems".Nathan Kernan's extremely thoughtful, scrupulous and informed editing provides this long-awaited volume a scholarly care it deserves. Kernan's editorial glosses and biographical sketches on the cast of characters, placing Schuyler in a rich social context of poets, artists and friends, provide what amounts to a handy thumbnail history of the New York School.
“As beautiful a morning as ever was, as though the two days wind had blown something away and left — not spring, by any means: a kind of russet flash in this swept clean clarity. The plane tree looks as though it’s shedding its flakes and scabs of bark in the interest of a new nakedness, its upper trunk like a sinewy throat. Only the clipped privet, in which a few twig-colored leaves still lurk, has a dusty priggish look. Only at this hour of the morning does the sun shine into the garage and pick out the bright, artificial lacquer blue of Lizzie’s bike.”
— James Schuyler, March 5, 1971, 7 a.m.
James Schuyler, Selected Art Writings, Black Sparrow Press, 1998.
read it at Google Books
Art Criticism. Following THE DIARY OF JAMES SCHUYLER (declared by the New York Times a "treasure"), Black Sparrow has published SELECTED ART WIRITNGS OF JAMES SCHUYLER. Edited by poet Simon Petit, this book presents Schuyler's essays and articles composed mostly for the influential trade periodical Art News during his tenure as associate editor (1957-1962). A vivid composite portrait of the New York art scene of that time, this selection includes pieces on such artists as Gorky, Pollock, Rothko, Kline, Frankenthaler, Rivers, Rauschenberg and, of course, Fairfield Porter. Many articles are illustrated with photographs of the work. "The selection and the precise arrangement of the notices and reviews that comprise SELECTED ART WRITINGS represent a final draft of a project begun and sustained with the active engagement fo the author" -- Simon Pettet. "A violet-blue, the border of the glass over the pieta, emerges as an echo, as though if you squeezed a leaf hard enough a little sky blue would ooze out. The whole thing has the musical look of a clock." ("Joe Brainard: Quotes and Notes"). As John Ashbery has said, Schuyler is simply "the best we have."
Schuyler observed in the late 1950s: "In New York, the art world is a painter's world; writers and musicians are in the boat, but they don't steer," and indeed, the New York School of Poets?John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and Schuyler?never achieved the epochal significance of their namesake, the New York School of Painters (including Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning). But the poets participated in the artistic ferment of the period: O'Hara, who served as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was an art critic; Ashbery and Schuyler, whose poetry won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, wrote about the visual arts as well. This volume of reviews and essays, completed largely from 1957 to 1962 for the magazine Art News, is somewhat disappointing. Absent a contextualizing foreword, the writing, which in its exuberance and associative logic differs from a mid-century critic's typically cool, analytic prose, is neither erudite nor polished. Because Schuyler was drawn to figurative artists (he lived with the painter Fairfield Porter and his family for 11 years), the bulk of his protracted attention goes to lesser-known artists such as Jane Freilicher. Jasper Johns's early iconic images receive barely two sentences, and Jules Olitiski's color-field canvases receive no mention at all. Where Schuyler's frequently luminous prose excels is in his descriptions of color, and in his longer essays on Franz Kline and Porter. The book is not well served by the illustrations, which frequently display photographs of the artists rather than examples of their work. Still, if taken on a poet's terms, this introduction to a group of artists overlooked by history comes as a pleasant surprise. - Publishers Weekly
Just the Thing, Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-91, Ed. by William Corbett, Turtle Point Press, 2009.
"An extraordinarily rich and compelling book, a wonder . . . the perfect companion to [Schuyler's] brilliant and memorable poems."―Paul Auster
"James Schuyler's letters are all of a piece. . . . They have his virtues: wit, humor, intelligent observations about writing, writers, painting, and painters expressed off-handedly, bits of brilliant description of nature and weather, and a sense of the world lived in, sharply observed, and lovingly accepted for all that it is. All of a piece but with Schuyler's voice adjusted to different friends, pitched to their particular wavelengths. And, of course, his voice changes over the years as he ages and his correspondents extend beyond his contemporaries to younger friends." ―William Corbett, from the Introduction
The most accessible of the New York School of poets proves to be a delightful letter writer, as this breezy stream of correspondence over 40 years attests. Highlights are his regular bulletins to fellow poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch (Frank O'Hara and W.H. Auden are sadly missing). Schuyler's letters are primarily a means of keeping in touch, garnished with gossip, film and theater recommendations and other amusements. He does, of course, find time to comment archly on contemporary poetry, give solid editorial criticism, preview his own verse (including the unpublished "A Blue Shadow Painting") and collaborate with Ashbery on their satiric novel, A Nest of Ninnies. In addition to the city's poetry scene, Schuyler moved in the Manhattan art world, American expatriate cliques in Italy and gay New York. Keeping up with Schuyler's wide interests, gregariousness and penchant for name dropping, editor Corbett supplies hundreds of footnotes. There are, however, gaps in the record, starting at the time of Schuyler's nervous breakdown in 1961 and recurring over his final two decades as he struggled with mental illness. But Schuyler, unlike a friend who wanted all his letters burned, wrote to amuse his correspondents, not confess to posterity; he never worried, like that friend, about leaving behind what he called "a whited sepulcher" for himself. - Publishers Weekly
James Schuyler wrote picture-poems. As often as not, and in his shorter pieces especially, the poet is to be found at his window. The window might look out on Manhattan, or on to the beach at Great Spruce Island, Maine, or from a house in Southampton, Long Island, or from Payne Whitney Hospital, New York; but wherever it is set, the poem will invariably find the poet sitting, observing the events that fall within his field of vision, framing the view. So in "February", there's
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They're just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can't get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
And so there you have it, Schuyler's view, rolled out as naturally as if you were sitting there yourself, as naturally as if the poem were a painting, by Bonnard say, or by Fairfield Porter, or by Jane Freilicher (one of his favourite artists). It's as if he sat down one afternoon and looked out over the top of the tulips, on to the trucks on Second Avenue, and across to the woman jogging her baby, and the poem, like the view, just sort of presented itself, as if the world was waiting to be carried over into words.
Except, of course, that's not what it's like. Those "boxy trucks" are not, as the poet might like to think for a moment, rolling into the sky. "They're just," as he quietly corrects himself, "going over the hill". And the green leaves of the tulips are perhaps like "grass light on flesh", but perhaps they are also like the "green-copper steeple". Or perhaps they are like both of these, or like neither of them quite. Schuyler allows all of the possibilities. And then, speaking of the view, "he can't get over / how it all works in together", which is understandable; views have that effect on people. But how is this working in together like "a woman who just came to her window"? Maybe, actually, it isn't.
And so it goes on: the more one looks at the poem the more it starts to break up slightly, and the more this most natural of situations begins to feel uncertain. The poem's setting and subject is "February": it's "the day", as Schuyler informs us, "before March first". So that's February 28, then. Or is it 29th? And being at the end of the month, just how reliably February is this scene anyway? And the green of the tulip stems: is it, as the poem suggests, like "One green wave in the violet sea", or is it "like the UN building on big evenings"? The more one reads, in other words, the more the poem's coherence begins to resolve back into its individual elements. And then it really is a wonder that it all works in together, because what the poem starts to resemble is not a landscape but a collage, with individual words, like individual things, being accorded their own particular weight and separate identity - being like one another and also radically different.
Or as Schuyler put it in a letter to an admirer named Nancy Batie: "I like an art where disparate elements form an entity. De Kooning's work, which I greatly admire, has less to do with it than that of Kurt Schwitters, whose collages are made of commercial bits and 'found' pieces but which always compose a whole, striking for its completeness."
Most of Schuyler's letters, at least most of the letters William Corbett has carefully recovered and then selected - this is a book for which Schuyler-lovers will be duly grateful - are to the writers and painters with whom the poet was friends, and who gravitated around New York in the second half of the 20th century: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Joe Brainard, Anne Dunn, Freilicher, Alex Katz, Harry Mathews, among others. The letters begin in the early 50s - Schuyler writing to Fairfield Porter from Europe - and end three months before his death in 1991 in New York. The bulk, though, were written between 1961 and 1972, when Schuyler lived with the Porters in Southampton, Long Island, and at their summer home on their island off the coast of Maine, Fairfield Porter having taken him in following the first of his numerous mental breakdowns. Island-living seems to have lent a romance to letter writing. As he explained to Brainard from New York in 1985: "the letter-writing impulse seems to have left me. A lot of it is due to not going to the island any more: somehow it was a wonderful place to receive mail ... And there's something especially enchanting about letters that have to come by mailboat, their arrival announced by the toot of a nautical horn."
Socially stranded, Schuyler put in his letters the stuff that otherwise he might well have said in person. In any one letter, then, he reports on his weight, which fluctuates, but mostly goes upwards; the weather - though one might have hoped for more weather, the poems being among the best in the language on the nuances and qualifications of climate; his visitors, whom, as one does, he both welcomes and then bitches up; on his shopping, his lack of money, his viewing, and his reading -which was wide-ranging and completely untroubled by genre or category (he especially liked works on horticulture and experimental novels). What the letters resemble, in other words, are diary entries - Schuyler was also a beautiful diarist - but, as the poems have an undeniable diaristic quality, so the letters also resemble the poems; or they anticipate them, or sometimes they work out of them, in their switches between elements, in the fluency in which disparate items are formed momentarily into an entity.
They go quiet on two subjects: the tragically early death, in 1966, of Frank O'Hara, and on Schuyler's own serial mental health problems. He refers briefly to O'Hara's death in a handful of letters of the time, but never so as really to pass his feelings on. And while occasionally letters of the 70s and 80s are clearly written out of madness, if he recounts his breakdowns the report is strictly limited to practicalities: how his friends took him to hospital, what drugs he was prescribed, how, later, he managed to get out. This is largely a question of tone. The letters are arch at times, quite often camp: Schuyler entertains his friends (who are also in some way, of course, his rivals) as he would have done in person. The verbal energy is high. He is emotionally precise. The thinking is rapid. Any given letter is a performance.
John Ashbery and James Schuyler, A Nest of Ninnies, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008.
read it at Google Books
The Tosti sisters of Paris, France, have come to the small, upstate New York village of Kelton for a change of pace. But when the pair enters the lives of Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, her brother Marshall, and Fabia and Victor, another sister and brother who are as bumbling as they are overindulged, it is certain that Kelton will never again be the same unassuming place.
The denizens of Kelton, New York - a bedroom community some fifty miles from Manhattan - are a well-heeled bunch who spend an awful lot of time playing rummy. There is Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, and her complacent brother Marshall, who doesn't like his friends to confide in him. There are the bumbling and overindulged Fabia and Victor, another sibling duo, and their friend Irving, a meek mama's boy. Into their cloistered lives come Claire and Nadia Tosti, two sisters from Paris, whose take-charge tactics stir the winds of enterprise, romance, and change. Through them, Alice is led to a swarthy Italian who helps her orchestrate a successful restaurant business. Irving pairs up with Claire, finally winning freedom from his eccentric, cat-loving mother. Victor embraces Nadia and the antiques trade, while Fabia discovers a potential romance with Victor's French pen pal. Only Marshall finds himself eluded by love, a predicament that will lead him from the snug environs of Kelton to the crude energies of the Midwest. In bistros, galleries, bars, and theaters, the protagonists eat, drink, criticize each other, and debate the worlds of art, music, literature, life, and love.
"Destined to become a minor classic." --W. H. Auden
"Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about A Nest of Ninnies is that the two poets have dissolved their own personalities and merged so entirely into a common style that it can be said that the book's author is neither Ashbery nor Schuyler but a third entity fashioned in the process of collaboration." --David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde
"The best comic novel I've read since Lolita." --F. W. Dupree
James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance. It was July 1952 and we were being given a lift back to New York from East Hampton, N.Y. where we had spent the weekend as guests of the musical comedy librettist John Latouche. Latouche planned to make a short movie starring us and our friend Jane Freilicher called “Presenting Jane,” from a scenario by Schuyler. A few scenes had just been shot, including a scene of Jane walking on water (actually a submerged dock on Georgica Pond); the film was never finished though Schuyler’s script recently surfaced and is going to be published soon. Now we were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat.
Since neither Jimmy nor I knew the Starrs very well, we at first contented ourselves with observing the exurban landscape along the old Sunrise Highway (this was before construction of the now infamous Long Island Expressway). Growing bored, Jimmy said, “Why don’t we write a novel?” And how do we do that, I asked. “It’s easy—you write the first line,” was his reply. This was rather typical of him—getting a brilliant idea and then conscripting someone else to realize it. Not to be outmaneuvered, I contributed a three-word sentence: “Alice was tired.”
And we were off, on a project that would keep us entertained for months and years to come. Jimmy immediately created another character, Marshall, Alice’s petulant brother. Passing through the village of Smithtown, we noticed an archetypal suburban white house with green shutters that we decided would be the home of our protagonists. After returning to New York he and I would meet regularly, sometimes several times a week, to work on the “novel.” It never occurred to us that it would one day be published and people would read it—at the time we were unknown and unpublished young poets with no apparent potential audience. But we had fun, accumulating characters and incidents, usually with a few drinks for stimulation.
This went on irregularly over the next three years, until I unexpectedly received a Fulbright scholarship to France, where I basically remained for the next ten years, except for the winter of ’57–’58 when I was back in New York, taking graduate courses in French literature at NYU and teaching beginning French at their Bronx campus (now Bronx Community College). Schuyler and I shared an apartment that winter, and worked on the novel sporadically. The fact that the apartment was a sixth-floor walk-up whose rent was $57 a month may have contributed to the relatively affluent lifestyles we bestowed on our characters.
The following June I returned to France, supposedly just for the summer, but ended up staying five years without a return visit to the U.S.—again, my income was the determining factor here, along with my refusal at the time to travel by air. Jimmy and I tried a few times to continue Nest via correspondence, but this didn’t work. It seemed we needed to be in each other’s presence in order to write it.
I finally moved back to the U.S. for good at the end of 1965. By that time I had a publisher, Holt, and a sympathetic editor, Arthur Cohen. He eventually asked the question that editors of poets often get around to: “Have you ever thought of writing a novel?” I remembered Jimmy’s and my collaboration, which by this time we seldom thought of, and described it to Arthur, who was interested. This proved the stimulus we needed, and we began working on it again in earnest, finishing it, to our satisfaction at least, in about six months. We decided to bend our own rules a little to achieve this: instead of just alternating sentences, we allowed ourselves to keep writing solo for as long we wished—whole paragraphs even. Arthur liked the end result, and it was published in the spring of 1968 by Dutton, where he was now employed.
There were some good reviews, notably one by Auden in the Times Book Review—one of his main reasons for liking the book was the fact that there were no sex scenes, which might also be one reason why it didn’t leap onto the best-seller lists. There were also some not so good reviews. After a few months the edition was pulped without our getting a chance to buy remaindered copies—a practice I have since discovered isn’t all that uncommon in the publishing world.
I suppose the book would have proved problematic for an editor to describe to the sales force. First there’s the lack not only of sex but even of much of a plot. In the early sections we had ambled along, addressing each other through our ninny characters (the title comes from an Elizabethan sottiserie I had noticed in a bookseller’s catalogue): After all, we began it simply to entertain ourselves. Once the prospect of publication arose, we continued to do so, hoping others might be amused too. That has apparently happened, since the book has been reprinted three times, not counting the present edition. One of these editions was British; a German translation (Ein Haufen Idioten) has also appeared and a Spanish one is forthcoming.
What we were also attempting, perhaps without knowing it, was to recreate the 1930s world of our childhoods, spent in two small towns of western New York state. The radio programs (especially “Vic and Sade” and “Easy Aces,” which offered mildly astringent parodies of American life, small-town and urban, respectively), the magazines (Life and Good Housekeeping), the glitter of downtown, the movie marquees that changed two or three times a week,—these were the ephemera that surfaced while we wrote, and which might require footnoting. Who now remembers Milton Cross, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin, or the operetta diva Martha Eggert (though the latter, now in her nineties, has recently published a book of memoirs)? Maybe someone will remember them again. Or, as Virgil wrote, “Perhaps some day it will be a joy to remember even this.” - John Ashbery
Interview with James Schuyler
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