The exiting life of an aesthete
Christopher Hawtree
It cannot be easy to live the rest of one's days with a bullet lodged in the right but- tock. Think how this would have dominat- ed any account of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster. Such misfortune, however, receives but a passing mention in the 550 pages which chronicle Frank O'Hara's brief life. This injury was sus- tained not during his wartime Navy service but — almost par for the course — in the pell-mell Manhattan existence which ani- mates his poetry.
Twelve years on there was a hideous dra- matic logic to his being knocked over in the middle of the night during the summer of '66 out on Fire Island, and taking two ago- nising days to die. How d he keep up the pace of his life? It is a question which must be tempered by the reflection that — what- ever the carousing of his nights — days were occupied by the more sedentary con- cerns of a custodian at the Museum of Modern Art. O'Hara had — has — a fair claim to embody New York during the Fifties, into the Sixties. He shunned mention of a Catholic upbringing in Baltimore, his widowed mother taking to the bottle. Even his spell in the Navy, towards the end of the war, verged on high camp. After all, this was a man for whom a training- documentary was not so much a matter of absorbing its contents as appreciation of the musical soundtrack. As for the posting to Key West, its only excuse for being there is that Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about it'. En route to the Pacific he spent some weeks in San Francisco, a frantic round of galleries, movies, ballet and con- certs. Paradoxically enough, O'Hara was deployed on Shore Patrol to ensure that sailors did not stray into gay bars, and here 'it is born in on me that drunks and I are just naturally attracted'.
Even the South Pacific seems to have been a matter of Ulysses, The Magic Moun- tain and the composing of music (one can only imagine how the war might have turned out if he and Anthony Burgess had been in the same platoon). In the event, there were only a few bombardments, then the Bomb, and, on the day of formal sur- render, O'Hara was struck less by the cere- mony than looking at 'a segment of landscape that would be perfect on a vase or parchment'.
Life was more dramatic among the artists in Manhattan, the Cedar Tavern as acrimonious as any theatre of war. His poetry would never have made him a regu- lar winner in the Literaty Review: not only broken-backed, it does not shirk the beast with two backs, and was written even improvised — in avowed celebration of personal occasions, friends' names to the fore, all amplified by Brad Gooch's com- mentary. Music and art here merge with a succession of lovers — in 1957 O'Hara announced that he would no longer sleep with strangers, only his friends (absent from the Penguin selection is 'Blowing Somebody', later given the more discreet title of 'After Wyatt').
Animated and entertaining, not to say educational as much of this might be, Gooch lacks a light touch or a nifty way with character. Passing figures do not come to life and he takes too seriously a world that has some of Mapp and Lucia about it, with Ginsburg a creditable Georgie. O'Hara and Warhol were wary of each other. Even before his lucrative shoe ads, Warhol drew feet, and one day
asked O'Hara if he could draw his feet. Well aware of the eroticism in the request, O'Hara refused. 'But you let Larry Rivers draw your feet,' complained Warhol . . . 'Well, that's Larry Rivers!' O'Hara exclaimed.
Later, there was
a cocktail party at O'Hara's at which Warhol gave O'Hara an imaginary drawing of the poet's penis, which he crumpled up and threw away in annoyance.
The most unlikely figure in these circles was Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. She receives more comment than another O'Hara obsession, James Dean. Some of Gooch's most interesting pages concern an artist far greater than Warhol — Edward Gorey. O'Hara shared a chaste room with him at Harvard and from him learnt enjoy- ment of such high style as Dame Ivy's — they used a tombstone as a coffee-table and O'Hara described him as 'busy leisured'. The Folio Society would surely double its membership if it commissioned Gorey to illustrate the Ivy Compton- Burnett of his choice.
City Poet is evidence again that, welcome though a paperback selection is, O'Hara, like Kipling, is best read en masse. Differ- ent poems come in and out of focus. There are hidden delights, and he is not as removed from American tradition as might at first appear. Few, for example, have evoked so well the hectic summer city in The Day Lady Died', nor recalled so well that moment at a newsstand and the mem- ory of her singing: And I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the key- board to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing .. .
As for the O'Hara penis, Warhol might not have been working entirely from imagi- nation. In 1954, shortly before a hoodlum disfigured O'Hara's rear, the poet had modelled for Rivers in a portrait inspired by Gericault. It was later shown at a gallery, where a rich collector was intro- duced to O'Hara. Apparently, she turned purple, later explaining, 'Well, you intro- duced me to this man whose portrait with an erection I'd just been looking at.'
Of the painting O'Hara himself wrote, 'presence is / better than absence, if you like excess.' One awaits Sister Wendy's comments.
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