GLR September-October 2025

A Poet Who Made the Ordinary Pop

W HEN YOUNG Jimmy Schuyler told his mother that he was gay, she re sponded: “Just because you like Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t mean you have to do all those things.” He began doing “all those things” as soon as he could, starting at about age seventeen. While serving on a destroyer in World War II, he went AWOL and was then medically disqualified owing

love poems for other men have a certain Isherwoodian distance to them, as though he is watching himself in a mirror. His work has a lighter touch and smoother flow than that of his close friend John Ashbery. Poetry of a given period can remind us of social norms unique to the time. Ker nan notes that Schuyler’s poetry showed a thematic “interest in radio as a communal flow of information” among the gay writers

A LAN C ONTRERAS

A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan Farrar, Straus and Giroux 475 pages, $35.

he knew, who often heard the same programs. Most of these poets and artists—the so-called “New York School”—did not have televisions in the late 1950s. (We tend to forget the milieu in which people worked in earlier times.) One unique aspect of Schuyler’s work and that of other New York-based gay writers of the 1950s is how connected it was to the world of art, also undergoing some vigorous expansion at the time. Schuyler knew the young Willem de Kooning and sometimes read aloud to the married Fairfield Porter, who used Schuyler as an occasional painting subject and had a close and probably intimate relationship with him. The book includes an insert of well-chosen art and photos from Schuyler’s life, in cluding art by Porter and images of Schuyler with Ashbery, Kallman, Samuel Barber, George Balanchine, and others.

to his acknowledged homosexuality. With A Day Like Any Other , Nathan Kernan has produced a splendid biography of James Schuyler (1923–1991), a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet who occupied a prominent place in the New York School in the postwar era. In the late 1940s, Schuyler left his bumpy youth behind and emerged into the gay social scene in New York and Europe, liv ing for a time with partner Bill Aalto in Italy. When poets W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman visited in 1948, Schuyler was briefly Auden’s secretary, typing such famous poems as “In Praise of Limestone.” Other visitors included Truman Capote and his partner Jack Dunphy, who went shopping and returned with a record of Mickey Rooney singing “Treat Me Rough.” This could have been Schuyler’s theme song, as his relation ships, beginning with the violent Aalto, often involved rough sex, and the rest of his life was not much smoother. Schuyler’s middle years involved constantly shifting rela tionships and casual sex (James McCourt noted him as a “shuf fling” shape in his forties at the Everard Baths) and expanding social connections, including such delights as seeing James Merrill wearing his maid’s dress and headgear at a Halloween party. These connections resulted in a double duo: Schuyler and his friend, poet Frank O’Hara, rolling around with the famous piano duettists Arthur Gold (briefly Schuyler’s partner) and Robert Fizdale. This new eight-handed entity was reflected in Schuyler’s poem “Grand Duo,” nominally inspired by a Schu bert piano piece but an apt personal remembrance. He had emotional and physical collapses on a regular basis. Schuyler’s capacity for friendship was substantial, but his life long theme was puppy-needs-care. He was subject to periods of depression, with various side effects including drinking, overeating, and near-catatonic withdrawal. At one point Mer rill, who admired his poetry, arranged through a mutual friend for Schuyler to see Dr. Thomas Detre, who had treated Merrill some years earlier in Rome and was then practicing in Con necticut. Without help from his many patient and tolerant friends (in particular Fairfield Porter’s housing and Kenward Elmslie’s money), he would probably have been found dead at a young age. Schuyler’s poetry, used as illustrative examples in the book, is observant and reactive to situations, scenes, and objects. His Alan Contreras, a frequent G&LR contributor, is a writer and higher education consultant who lives in Eugene, Oregon. 34

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