“To See and Say Things as They Are”

Also: A life of Émile Zola, Amelia Earhart’s plane, when eating on the go was fun, the pleasures of book collecting, and more.

James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Folder (1955).

I gave a talk at the D.C. Arts Center earlier this year on the use of “observational restraint” in the poetry of Frank O’Hara (and others). O’Hara, of course, liked to camp it up. His poems are full exuberant statements and over-the-top ejaculations. I am thinking of poems like “Today,” which starts like this: “Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful!” Has any modern poet used more exclamation marks than Frank O’Hara?

But as I noted in my talk, O’Hara also uses observational restraint to great effect in poems like “Personal Poem,” “The Day Lady Died,” and “A Step away from Them.” I am convinced that this is one of the defining characteristics of what is sometimes called the “New York School of Poets” (and of all great art).

As further evidence (with respect to the New York School), here is Evan Kindley in The Nation reviewing a new biography of James Schuyler:

On the last day of February in 1954, James Schuyler looked out his window and wrote a poem. He was living with his friend Frank O’Hara, and from their tenement apartment on East 49th Street they had a view of the United Nations headquarters, constructed only a few years earlier. In his poem “February,” Schuyler alluded to the UN building in passing, but his gaze gravitated to more mundane details: “A chimney, breathing a little smoke”; “the boxy trucks roll[ing] up Second Avenue / into the sky”; “a woman who just came to her window / and stands there filling it / jogging her baby in her arms.” “I can’t get over / how it all works in together,” Schuyler marveled, astonished by the casual, random splendor of this scene. The last line of the poem, now also the title of Nathan Kernan’s engrossing new biography of Schuyler, was at once matter-of-fact and awestruck: “It’s a day like any other.”

“Merely to say, to see and say, things / as they are”: This was how Schuyler defined his aspiration as a poet. It sounds humble, but for Schuyler this commitment to empiricism entailed a whole philosophy of form. Schuyler was close with the painter Fairfield Porter, who shared his unflagging devotion to the quotidian. “The truest order is what you find already there, or that will be given if you don’t try for it,” Porter once wrote. “When you arrange, you fail.” Schuyler’s subjects, like Porter’s, were unspectacular—nature, the weather, the quiddities and comforts of domestic life—and his poems, like Porter’s paintings, elegant yet effortless. They home in on things like the way “level light plunges / among the layering boughs of a balsam fir / and enflames its trunk,” or how “air…billows like bedsheets / on a clothesline and the clouds / hang in a traffic jam.” Reading Schuyler, you get the sense of an attentive mind occupying an atmosphere of rare serenity. Little seems to disturb these cozy idylls; the closest we get to dramatic incident is when the poet chases a hornet out of his room or gets up to fix himself more toast.

At a time of political turmoil—O’Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler all made their mark in the 1960s—these poets didn’t go all in on politics. They avoided the sort of grandiose political statements friends and acquaintances were making in their work—aware, it seems to me, that the real (political) power of art is found in its capacity to capture life as it is lived—its momentary joys and everyday sufferings.

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In other news, Timothy Farrington reviews a new biography Émile Zola in The Wall Street Journal:

The Dreyfus Affair has latterly tended to obscure the excellence of Zola’s fiction. As Mr. Lethbridge suggests, the author has been the victim of publicity, others’ and his own. He hawked his philosophy of “naturalism,” a flavor of realism that purported to scientifically document how characters are shaped by their ancestry and environment. He prepped for each novel with site visits and interviews, compiling hundreds of pages of notes. That made it easy to see him as a mere transcriber. Feeding the image of a solitary drudge concerned only with work, he painted the Latin motto “Nulla dies sine linea” (“No day without [writing] a line”) over his fireplace.

Henry James, who knew the man and regarded his work with a mix of revulsion and admiration, snidely remembered him as “fairly bristling with the betrayal that nothing whatever had happened to him in life but to write Les Rougon-Macquart”—his great 20-volume chronicle of a family cursed by heredity, whose overlapping stories yield a panorama of Second Empire society high and—especially—low.

While Zola’s life was hardly packed with incident, Mr. Lethbridge, with the aid of recently published correspondence, refutes James, revealing a “personality of unsuspected complexity” who faced challenges resolutely.

Researchers believe they have found Amelia Earhart’s plane: “A satellite photo may appear to show the remains of Earhart’s plane peeking through the sand on the small, remote and inhospitable island lagoon of Nikumaroro in Kiribati, nearly 1,000 miles from Fiji, according to Richard Pettigrew, the executive director of the nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute in Oregon.” A team from Purdue University will check it out in November. Of course, it is not the first time that Earhart’s plane was thought to be found.

Hamilton Cain reviews a new book on Earhart and George Palmer Putnam: “‘Sex, violent death, and mystery. If your life has one of these things people might be interested. If it has two, now you’re tabloid fodder. If it has three, you’re Amelia Earhart.’ So begins Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s enticing The Aviator and the Showman, a vibrant account of the courtship and union of the famous pilot and her publisher husband whose intrusive management of his wife’s career may have cost her life. Shapiro dexterously untangles the Gordian knot of their entwined passions, shared ambitions and business bottom lines.”

Andrew Ferguson reviews Dave Barry’s Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up: “A long time ago, in a media environment far, far away, an editor walked into my office and dropped a pile of books by Dave Barry on my desk. ‘Here’s an idea,’ he said. ‘Read these and figure out how he does it.’”

Malcolm Guite defends smoking and drinking: “We live in an age when, at least in the affluent West, there is something of an obsession with bodily health, with healthy lifestyles, healthy eating and drinking, and a constant cycle of new diets, regimens, vitamin supplements, and exercise fads. And of course, attendant on these, and fueling their consumer ratings, a rash of hypochondria, self-diagnosis, health scares based on spurious medical blogs, etc. The one thing all these trends, however helpful or harmful, have in common is an essentially mechanistic and reductive account of health or (in the current jargon) ‘wellness’ itself.”

As some of you know, my wife and I recently moved back to Switzerland. We didn’t bring much with us, but we did ship most of our books, though I gave away or sold several hundred. I don’t “collect” books. I buy the ones I need for work and pleasure (which, for me, are mostly the same thing.) But I certainly understand the joys of buying first editions, signed copies, and rare books. Brian Miller writes about a particularly serendipitous acquisition of John D. Winters’s 1963 The Civil War in Louisiana.