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Overview
An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetry
Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "To the Film Industry in Crisis," "In Memory of My Feelings," "Having a Coke with You," and the famous Lunch Poems—so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman.
Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other—an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429929035 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/21/2004 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Joe LeSueur was a decorated soldier when he moved to New York in 1949, at the age of twenty-five. He held jobs as an editor, critic, and screenwriter. He died in 2001 in East Hampton.
Read an Excerpt
DIGRESSIONS ON SOME POEMS BY FRANK O'HARA
A MEMOIRBy JOE LESUEUR
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2003 THE ESTATE OF JOE LESUEURAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0374139806
Chapter One
According to "Four Apartments," Frank and I met on New Year's Eve 1951, at a party John Ashbery gave in his Greenwich Village apartment. Not so, it turns out, and it was John who set me straight-John, who has always been known for his infallible memory and for never being wrong about anything. But I had a more compelling reason for accepting his account of how Frank and I met. For when, in the spring of 1969, not long after my memoir appeared in The World, he sidled up to me at a party downtown and asserted in that cool, confident manner of his, "Joe, you and Frank met earlier that fall at a concert," it was as if he had commanded, "Open, sesame!" Instantly, before he spoke another word, the door to the storehouse of my mind flew open and everything came back to me: my running into John during intermission at a Town Hall concert one Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1951, his introducing me to someone with whom I barely had eye contact, and, just as the warning bell sounded, my introducing them to the person who had come with me-no, we could not have had a conversation, because that, through the years, would have kept the afternoon alive in my memory.
And now, as John continued with his account of the concert, reminding me that it was a program of contemporary American music, I remembered the searing self-consciousness that had swept over me as we were exchanging introductions, my blushing as I was wont to do in those days, usually when I thought I was being admired or scrutinized, but on that occasion for an entirely different reason: I'd come to the concert with a black man who was physically unattractive, which could not have been said of any of the Negroes I went to bed with and was happy to be seen with. Was I aware how heinous it was of me to be ashamed of my companion? You bet, and I reproached myself even as I wondered what John and his friend made of him. Oddly, it didn't occur to me that John, being up on everything, would know him by name: he was Howard Swanson, whose Short Symphony had just won the Music Critics Circle Award, which meant that I, being vain and callow, could have taken pride in being seen with him, no matter that he was unprepossessing.
As for John's friend, as to how he figured in all of this-again, I wasn't thinking; after all, this might be the only time we'd ever see each other, so on top of everything else it was ludicrous to care what he thought. And that wasn't all. As I'd learn in a couple of years, Frank had a predilection for black men that was so great, so inclusive, there was no way he could have entertained the notion that my companion wasn't sortable-or, as tacky queens said back then (the only equivalent for that Gallicism?), "not for streetwear."
No doubt about it, we met at that Town Hall concert in the fall of 1951, and I suppose I should leave it at that-except I can't resist adding a proviso of sorts about another concert, an earlier one, where I may have caught my first glimpse of Frank, a likelihood that came to Frank's and my attention because of, albeit indirectly, an inane line of dialogue spoken by Joan Crawford in a 1941 movie called A Woman's Face. We'd just seen it on The Late Late Show at one of John Button's TV evenings, probably in 1958, and as we were turning in, we began tittering over the line that earlier had John, Jimmy Schuyler, and the two of us roaring with laughter. Conrad Veidt is playing the piano for Joan Crawford-tossing off a Chopin nocturne, if memory serves. "Do you like music?" he inquires, as though the question is one of great subtlety. "Some symphonies," she answers grandly, "and all piano concertos." To us, that was camp of a high order, so I was a little surprised when now, at home, Frank seemed to have changed his mind: he abruptly stopped laughing and allowed, quite seriously, that he knew how the Crawford character felt. "I have yet to hear a piano concerto I don't like," he averred. I had no reason to disbelieve him, works like Paderewski's soupy Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's feeble Fourth being only two of the meretricious essays in the form I'd known him to sigh over. At the moment, however, I thought I knew of one piano concerto he wouldn't like. "What makes you think I haven't heard it?" he shot back when I proposed that possibility. "Because it can't have been played much since its first performance," I told him. "Which you heard," he put in. "Right," I said, "and I'll give you a hint. The pianist was the composer's wife." Frank said, straight off, "That could only have been Joanna Harris." "Very good," I said. "And Roy Harris gave his concerto the silliest title-" "The Pan-American Piano Concerto!" Frank broke in triumphantly. "It was played in Los Angeles in 1946, at the Wilshire-Ebell. And I loved it." "You were there?" I said in astonishment. "Just before my discharge from the navy," he said. "Wasn't Werner Janssen the conductor? He was married to Ann Harding, remember? Funny," he mused, "both of us being there before we knew each other." I thought a moment; I cast my mind back. "I remember seeing a sailor there that night," I said. "It was you, it had to be." Frank looked skeptical. "You were in the balcony," I continued, "three or four rows down from where I was sitting with a girlfriend from high school." He smiled, still unconvinced. "Of course I'd be in the balcony," he said. "It's all I could've afforded." As additional proof, I offered more details that admittedly may have come into my head through the power of suggestion. "You were alone, you arrived late, and you were the only sailor in the house," I told him. "Naturally, I'd be alone," he said. "It was hardly the sort of thing my buddies went to on leave." "I still think I saw you there that night," I insisted.
Whether I did or not seems unimportant to me now, because the picture I hold in my mind's eye, of a slightly built sailor slipping discreetly into his seat as the house lights dim and the conductor strides to the podium, is as vivid and indelible, and therefore as true, as anything I'll be writing about in these pages.
Let us go back to "Four Apartments" and its assertion that I met Frank on New Year's Eve 1951, at a party given by John Ashbery. Paul Goodman said, "There's a poet named Frank O'Hara I think you'll like," and led me across the room to him. And that, of course, was my real introduction to Frank, the one that took. It led somewhere and for that reason became etched in my memory.
At the time, Paul the first intellectual, the first poet, and the first bohemian or nonconformist I ever got to know-was still in my life, still of some importance to me, and the hold he had over me, sporadic in the three years we'd known each other, came to an end once and for all when, by introducing me to Frank, he unwittingly turned me over to him. I don't mean to say I was a pickup with no will of my own, someone who was passed around, nor was I as deferential in my relations with Paul as might be inferred. Yet without question, I was unduly compliant and even submissive with friends I thought of, usually with justification, as superior to me in intelligence and accomplishment. Need it be added that I sought out exceptional people? I had since high school and I continued to do so through college and later, after I went to New York. While reflected glory was obviously what I sought, it could also be said that I was an intellectual climber, one with vague, pretentious notions about becoming a writer-which is to say, my desire to be a writer was not so much an ambition as a fantasy.
When Paul Goodman and I met, or introduced ourselves, under circumstances that might strike some readers as disreputable, I was due to graduate from the University of Southern California in a month and a half. Understandably, it was a period in my life fraught with uncertainty, so that my tendency to be acquiescent and susceptible to influence was more pronounced than ever-surely, an opportune moment for this messianic figure to enter my life. Yet Paul and I wouldn't have gotten together, I wouldn't have been drawn to him in the first place, had it not been for another desire, a desire far more compelling than my addled ambition to be a writer.
A classmate at school put his finger on it. "You're like Madame Bovary, languishing in the provinces," he kidded me, aware of my dissatisfaction with Los Angeles but not realizing his jest was no exaggeration. For just as poor Emma devoured sentimental novels, I was voracious since adolescence for anything that evoked New York-the gargantuan Sunday New York Times and the urbane New Yorker, which I pored over at the public library, and any book that had anything to do with New York. But at an even earlier age, when I was ten or eleven, I was having fantasies about big-city life that stemmed from movies set in Manhattan, most of them glossy M-G-M productions that so often seemed to feature a long-suffering, rags-to-riches Joan Crawford (yes, her again!), with whom I identified for the simple reason that, having read in Photoplay that her real name was Lucille LeSueur, I had become convinced we were related.
Before long, I deemed it my destiny to live in New York; there, and only there, would I find the glamorous and exciting life denied me in Highland Park, South Gate, Huntington Park, and Lynwood, the dreary communities of my childhood and adolescence. Why so many different places? Because my family, hard hit by the Depression, moved every two or three years in search of ever cheaper rentals. And with each move, my dissatisfaction grew along with my dreams of big-city life. But not until I was a senior in college did those dreams loom as an attainable reality-attainable because of the one-way, cross-country Greyhound Bus ticket I bought without telling anyone. I remember carrying it in my wallet; at odd moments, I'd take it out and look at it, simply look at it. It was my ticket to freedom and a new life. Its departure date: one month to the day after graduation.
"But why do you want to go to New York?" my mother cried, taken aback when apprised of my plans. "Let him go," said my father, who didn't care what I did. My mother, whose possessiveness more than matched his indifference, then wanted to know how long I'd be gone and what I'd do for money (yes, she treated me as though I were years younger and had never been away from home). "I've saved enough to see me through the first three or four months," I said evasively. Her litany of misgivings continued, but I stood firm; I had made up my mind.
Or had I? As graduation approached, nagging questions began to weigh on me: Did I have the courage to go someplace where I didn't know anyone? How would I support myself? What would I do? I had no vocation or skills, and I knew that my liberal arts degree was worthless. Plagued by second thoughts, I even entertained the notion that my mother might be right when she said I should stay put and get a job after graduation. But then, she didn't know me, the real me, for she was unaware of my dreams and aspirations, and had no inkling of my secret life, of its dire and shocking nature. So how could she advise me? She couldn't, of course she couldn't. Yet, no matter what I told myself, I became increasingly indecisive; and with time running out, I felt my resolve slipping away.
Enter Paul Goodman. The time: a Saturday night in the spring of 1949. The place: Maxwell's, a saloon right out of a Hollywood Western-roughhewn, unadorned, with a high ceiling, exposed beams, and a rickety-looking staircase. Along with other respectable homosexuals, I was drawn to the place because of the trashy element that thronged its unlovely premises, riffraff of every stripe, an all-male assemblage of hustlers, drifters, rough trade, and transvestites kept in check by an indulgent, potbellied cop who appeared unruffled by his unusual beat. "It's so sordid," I remember purring in appreciation the first time I entered the place with two other thrill seekers from USC, "sordid" being a key word in our lexicon, the standard to which we held our libidinous experiences. But Maxwell's wasn't simply sordid, it was also the best queer bar in all of southern California in the years immediately after the war, not to mention the most notorious dive in the red-light district of downtown Los Angeles.
Socially, too, it was the place to be. I met Christopher Isherwood there one night, but the pandemonium of the place made conversation impossible; it wasn't until a number of years later, through Don Bachardy, that Christopher and I got to know each other. Paul, on the other hand, was unfazed by the turmoil and deafening din of Maxwell's; he singled me out, got me to talking, deftly drew me away from my companions. "You look like you go to college somewhere," he began, and with supreme confidence took it from there, plying me with questions about my studies at USC, where my major was English, and thereafter engaging me in a discussion of the present-day international literary scene, whose principal protagonists, I soon found out, were William Faulkner, Jean Genet, and the very person who was alternately holding forth and seeking my opinion, thereby impressing but not intimidating me.
Our improbable conversation must have gone on for close to an hour, during which I was flattered into thinking that I was as intellectual as I sometimes pretended to be-no doubt the desired effect of my wily interlocutor. I was being taken seriously, I was holding my own with a well-read and articulate writer who might be as important as he claimed. And my new friend was from the city of my dreams!
Suddenly, blinding lights flooded the place as last call was announced over a blaring loudspeaker: it was ten minutes to midnight, closing time for Los Angeles bars in those days. As always, there was an immediate stir in the crowd as frenzied queens clamored for one more drink while others, single-minded about finding a bed partner, tried to score at the last minute. To add to the commotion, a fight broke out when the potbellied cop, now out of patience, herded several troublemakers in the direction of the exit, prodding them with his billy club as if they were cattle, while at the same time, not far from where Paul and I stood, two johns began fighting over Ace, the star hustler of Maxwell's, a sullen youth whose extraordinary endowment was displayed through torn, tight-fitting Levi's. I remember thinking that it was the best night ever at Maxwell's.
Paul looked alarmed; it occurred to me that he'd never before been to a rough place like Maxwell's. "Let's go!" he shouted above the tumult. "Want to have coffee with us?" he added, taking my arm.
Continues...
Excerpted from DIGRESSIONS ON SOME POEMS BY FRANK O'HARA by JOE LESUEUR Copyright © 2003 by THE ESTATE OF JOE LESUEUR
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.