In the London Review of Books, Ange Mlinko takes the opportunity of Frank O’Hara’s recently republished Meditations in an Emergency—O’Hara’s second collection of poetry—to revisit his work as a whole.
A number of the poems from what would become Meditations were submitted to W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poet Prize in 1955. After reading O’Hara’s poems, Auden, who had requested work from both O’Hara and John Ashbery, wrote that “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.” Mlinko needles Auden for this remark:
Such a fine taxonomy of poetic efficacy: chaste, courtly, Anglo-Saxon wonder versus erotic, confrontational, “mere” surprise (a military term from Old French, it derives from the medieval Latin superprehendere, “to seize”). You might ask what an accidental non-logical relation looks like, as opposed to an authentic one, when you are hanging out in a painter’s studio. What if the steam of a porcelain tiger’s hot piss sounds like it’s whispering “Saint-Saëns”? . . . To surprise, to seize. A young style favours conquest – that may also be what the middle-aged Auden was protesting about. But there’s no doubt that O’Hara’s poetry, rather than wearing out its welcome, has continued to conquer audiences.
Fair enough, but I’m with Auden on this one. By “authentic non-logical relations,” I think Auden means comparisons—metaphors, similes, parallelisms—that are made intuitively and that at first seem to have nothing in common at all but which, on a closer reading, say something interesting. It is easy to create metaphors where the vehicle and tenor have nothing in common. Read O’Hara’s Second Avenue, for example, which is by turns, enthralling and numbingly boring. Or there is “A Mexican Guitar,” which was published in Meditations in an Emergency, where we have lines that seem original but turn out to be merely confectionary:
Our shouting knocked over a couple of palm trees
and the gaping sky seemed to reel at our mistakes,
such purple flashing insteps and careers!
which bit with lavish envy the northern soldiers.
Such “purple flashing insteps and careers! / which bit with lavish envy the northern soldiers”? Fun needs no defense, but these aren’t particularly fun, especially when you’ve encountered them after several such lines. There is no surprise, no “conquering,” and I think that this is what Auden was getting at.
But O’Hara hits the mark in other poems. Take “Interior (with Jane),” for example, where we have the stunning line “The sun is weak / and slippery on the ice.” Or there’s “A Rant,” where we have “Don’t stand around / my bedroom making things cry // any more! I’m not going to / thrash the floor or throw any / apples! To hell with the radio, / let it rot!”
O’Hara is clearly indebted to the early Wallace Stevens in Meditations, as Mlinko points out, but his work has other qualities, too. He is a romantic (and Romantic) and a poet of the soul’s dark night. Mlinko is right about the “undertow” in Meditations, which we also find increasingly in his later work:
There’s an undertow to Meditations in an Emergency, and it hides in plain sight at the outset before disappearing into jeux d’esprit. ‘To the Harbourmaster’ is a quiet, wistful, mysterious work – Ashbery read it at O’Hara’s memorial service. It’s the first poem, but printed verso, facing ‘Poem’ (‘The eager note on my door said “Call me”’). Both poems are about the insurmountable distance between ‘I wanted to be sure to reach you’ and ‘the waves which have kept me from reaching you’. Something stands between O’Hara and ‘you’ – the ‘eternal voices’, waves, weather, seasons. ‘It was autumn/by the time I got around the corner.’ The narrator who takes months to respond to his friend’s ‘Call me!’ finds him dead at the end of the poem. Why begin such a bright, brassy opus as Meditations in an Emergency in the minor key, the key of cafard? What – or who – is O’Hara late for?
Pursuing that question lands us, again, in the terrain of Romanticism. As urbane and contemporary as O’Hara may appear, this is really his defence against intrinsic fatalism and desperation, something which surfaces in ‘River’: ‘Whole days would go by, and later their years,/while I thought of nothing but its darkness/drifting like a bridge against the sky’; ‘sometimes in the sunlight my eyes,/walled in water, would glimpse the pathway/to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne.’
O’Hara’s tenderness, Mlinko writes, is often overlooked. I devoted a whole chapter to it in my book on O’Hara. I wrote at the time that:
Love, for O’Hara, is more than a mere metaphor for the artist’s creative act. It is also one of the noblest emotions . . . love is not something that is willed but something that happens to someone. It is the chance converging of two entities (which, in turn, is the result of the world’s constant motion) that makes love both an amazing occurrence and one that is always temporal.
O’Hara’s loneliness and his view of love were connected. As I wrote in a piece at The Atlantic a few years ago on this same topic:
On the one hand, O’Hara believed that it is a “Grace,” as he wrote in “In Memory of My Feelings,” to “live as variously as possible.” On the other hand, he complained in “Poem en Forme de Saw” that “I’m so damned empty.” “I think it’s goodbye to a lot of things,” he wrote to Bill Berkson in 1961, reflecting on the consequences of a life governed by hedonism; “it’s goodbye / to lunch to love to evil things and to the ultimate good.”
O’Hara’s work is complex, if still minor, and to think of him as merely a New York flâneur, Mlinko writes, is to make him into a kind of a meme.
David J. Davis reviews a new translation of the Welsh poem on the annihilation of the Gododdin, a sixth century Celtic tribe in Britain: “At the end of the sixth century, a Celtic British tribe known as the Gododdin met an army of invading Angles at the Battle of Catraeth. The only record of this battle, the Welsh poem Y Gododdin written by the poet Aneirin, details the tragic annihilation of the native army. Catraeth was not a disaster turned to ultimate victory. It is not like the Battle of the Alamo or the Battle of Thermopylae. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes established kingdoms across England until only Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall remained independent. Catraeth was one in a long line of battles that Celtic tribes lost to a long-term migration of Germanic peoples.”
“Woke aesthetics,” William Deresiewicz writes, “are brutally literalistic, a kind of socialist realism for the 21st century. They leave no room for irony or ambiguity (as Kara Walker learned). They make an enemy of the imagination (as Dana Schutz discovered). They reject the notion of artistic freedom. Guston ran afoul, of course, if only posthumously, of the same strictures.”
From the Things-We-Already-Knew desk: “When it comes to getting into the groove on the dancefloor, it really is all about the bass, researchers have found.”
The story of Sandro Botticelli’s illustrations of The Divine Comedy: “He died with his series of 100 drawings, one for each canto, unfinished. Each drawing is scratched into sheepskin roughly the size of a broadsheet newspaper. Botticelli went over the scratchings in pen and left most uncolored. The ink has faded to a light brown. The drawings are wan and at times doodlelike, as if they were studies for the greatest graphic novel ever conceived . . . In Botticelli’s Secret, Luzzi, a professor of comparative literature at Bard College, combines a primer on Dante and his reception in Florence with a short biography of Botticelli and the story of the works’ posthumous physical and reputational journey.”
A less original Casanova: “By definition, adventurers are gamblers and deceivers, with a taste for masquerade. In naming his book Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova, the canny and experienced biographer Leo Damrosch has adopted what could be a high-risk strategy. Potential readers may be deterred by what looks like a conventional narrative on a familiar subject, and indeed Damrosch sticks closely to the chronology as it is supplied by Casanova’s Memoirs (strictly speaking, they’re called Histoire de ma vie). But in fact the new work has a hidden critical agenda. Its subtitle reanimates a formula that seemed dead and gone. Every major incident along the way is contextualized by well-chosen details relating to the wider history and thought of the eighteenth century. Equally, the main title echoes that of many works using the same word or its cognate forms in other European languages, but the expression is given a twist here by the enlargement of its overtones. In modern English the term generally refers to a self-interested and gold-digging careerist, whereas aventurier in French has retained more of its older sense of one who embarks on great quests—it is used, for instance, of explorers and astronauts in children’s books. This richer implication underlies the lively tale that Damrosch tells.”
Oliver Traldi reviews a misinformed book on misinformation: “Yasmin’s occasional forays into philosophy were probably the most maddening. Freshman logic students learn that deduction involves following chains of conditional reasoning and moving from the universal to the particular, while induction involves inferring claims about general patterns from observations of specific instances. But according to Yasmin, the difference between deduction and induction is that ‘deductive thinking relies on facts,’ while ‘inductive reasoning ... relies on evidence.’ This is not even wrong — I don’t know what she could possibly think she means by this. She offers a decent discussion of the notion of ‘credence’ and the way beliefs relate to actions but goes on, ludicrously, to suggest that the Socratic method is ‘about adding your perspective to the facts.’ She misuses the term ‘public good,’ too, asking, ‘Is the news a public good, or is it a commodity?’ to mean, ‘Should everyone have access to the news free of charge?’”
The two poles of German Romanticism can be found in Schiller and Goethe, Andrea Wulf argues in her new book, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self: “Schiller, the most thin-skinned of the Jena bunch, reputedly insisted on composing his works within sniffing distance of a drawer of rotten apples. This story, retold in Wulf’s fourth chapter, was also included in George Henry Lewes’s The Life and Works of Goethe (1855) as a detail that communicates the vital differences between two poetic temperaments: ‘An air that was beneficial to Schiller acted on me like poison,’ Goethe said to Eckermann. ‘I called on him one day; and as I did not find him at home, I seated myself at his writing-table to note down various matters. I had not been seated long before I felt a strange indisposition steal over me, which gradually increased, until at last I nearly fainted. At first I did not know to what cause I should ascribe this wretched and to me unusual state, until I discovered that a dreadful odour issued from a drawer near me. When I opened it, I found to my astonishment that it was full of rotten apples. I immediately went to the window and inhaled the fresh air, by which I was instantly restored.’ The story summarises, a little too conveniently, the opposition of two continental romantic chart-toppers: Goethe, the man who loved open windows and fresh air and lived into his eighties, and Schiller, the man who loved bolted trunks and closed drawers full of mouldy apples and died in his forties. It resembles the distinction that Coleridge, who travelled to Germany in 1798 (although he didn’t make it to Jena) and taught himself the language, perceived between the novelists Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson: the difference, as he saw it, between a healthy outdoor landscape and the stench of a sick room.”