Happy 90th, John Ashbery + Roffman's New Ashbery Bio

John Ashbery receiving the National Medal for
the Arts from President Barack Obama, in 2012

Today is the 90th birthday of John Ashbery, one of the most influential American and English-language poets of late 20th and now 21st century literature. Ashbery's career has had its ups--in addition to having won nearly every major award in the United States, he is the only poet, I believe, to have received the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize for a single collection, his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror--and downs, which included critic John Simon famously using Ashbery's own words to trash the poet's second book, The Tennis Court Oath, as "garbage," an assessment that other peer poets like James Dickey agreed with, using different terms.

One might also surmise that from the vantage point of the late 1950s and early 1960s when he began publishing his collection, Ashbery would not have appeared to be the most likely candidate for major status. Among his near-exact contemporaries (born in the 1920s, and including several who were former classmates at Harvard) were quite a few white, mostly straight male poets who began publishing at the same time as him, and in some cases more swiftly achieved critical attention and received most of the major poetry and literary awards. Think Ammons, Blackburn, Bogardus, Creeley, Davison, Dickey, Dorn, Dugan, Gilbert, Ginsberg, Hall, Halpern, Hecht, Hoffman, Hollander, Kinnell, Koch, McClure, Meredith, Merrill, Merwin, Snyder, Whalen, Wilbur, and James Wright. In addition, two poets and close friends who were part of Ashbery's New York School poetic coterie were also poised to become significant figures in the American poetic firmament. (And I have not even mentioned the many white women poets, like Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Ann Sexton, Mona Van Duyn, and Sylvia Plath, as well as poets of color, like African American poets Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Etheridge Knight and James Emanuel, of roughly the exact same generation, or who came of age shortly afterwards, like Amiri Baraka, who also made their mark.)

Yet Ashbery's persistence and distinctive aesthetics have paid off. The Tennis Court Oath, which provoked bafflement at its appearance, is from today's perspective is a visionary text that foresaw the emergence of Language poetry and other contemporary trends. Ashbery's prose poetic foray, Three Poems, while not the first text of its kind, also represented a pointer for texts that followed it. Moreover, as Susan M. Schultz's edited collection The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry noted, one can find his influence across a wide array of English-language poets and poetics, ranging from John Yau, who was his student, to Jorie Graham, to countless contemporary younger poets. The influence also extends beyond the US: as someone quipped to me years ago, how unfortunate to be the English poet John Ash, whose poetry not only shows Ashbery's strong imprint but also whose name itself sounds like a truncated derivation. Contemporary French poetry, as well as Hispanophone poetry, among others, also have taken lessons from Ashbery's approaches to lyric poetry, even as he has kept moving, shifting, and inventing.

To add a personal note, I first heard of John Ashbery when I was in college. In fact, I kept hearing his name--he was winning acclaim for A Wave (1984) by then, and had been on the Harvard Advocate, as I was--but for whatever reason, I did not read any of his poems. Perhaps the hype turned me off. Nor did I take a single class where we read his poetry. Allen Ginsberg's, yes. James Merrill's, yes. (I read these poets, and others like Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Justice, in high school, and had read still others, like Robert Frost, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed, in childhood or on my own.) When I think of the various journals and magazines I was reading, I still happened to miss Ashbery's poetry. A few years later, however, I was working at MIT as an office drone, and regularly visited their humanities library, where every book seemed to stay on the shelves. It was then that I checked out Some Trees (1956), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), and my initial favorite, Rivers and Mountains (1966). It was like little bombs went off in my head; this was a poet I had been waiting to read all my life. As many who know me will attest, I have been a fan of Ashbery's ever since.

Ashbery has now lived long enough to sound utterly contemporary and a few years ago was even named the Poet Laureate of MTV (a fact I once heard another senior poet dismiss by suggesting that Ashbery was already part of the "establishment," and yet I thought as he said that I could count more than a few poets I knew who thought Ashbery was unintelligible, a sham, and really not worthy of all the acclaim or, to their mind, interest by younger poets). He also is recognized as a significant gay poet, and studies like my former undergraduate TA John Shoptaw's On the Outside Looking Out: On John Ashbery's Poetry (1995) have opened up readers' understanding of Ashbery's work, particularly how sexuality marks its poetics, in relation to the larger socioeconomic and political contexts in which Ashbery wrote it. At 90 he continues to write and publish, with his most recent book  and to draw new generations of readers.

***

Earlier this summer, I finished Karin Roffman's rewarding new biography of Ashbery's early life and budding career, The Songs We Know Best (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2017). Roffman's account opens with the story of Ashbery's parents, Chester and Helen Lawrence Ashbery, who lived on a farm in Sodus, in western New York State, and his grandparents, Addie and Henry Lawrence, a physics professor at the University of Rochester, who profoundly encouraged him in his literary pursuits, and moves adroitly through his childhood, when he lost his younger brother, Richard, and later appeared on the national TV show Quiz Kids, showing that he was famous long before truly achieved lasting fame. From childhood on, Ashbery's intellect, his interest in literature, music and visual art, and his queerness, marked him out as different and proved an ongoing source of tension with his father, who favored the more outgoing, athletic Richard. Again and again, we see the portrait of the artist as a young child, his gifts and vision shaped by circumstances and the contexts in which he grew up, and how he adopted strategies of self-concealment that would later develop into what we think of as his adult style. One of Roffman's revelations, based on copious childhood diaries Ashbery kept and later shared with her, was his pre-adolescent fragmentation and abstraction of his queer desire, into poetic entries that read like later Ashbery, to prevent his mother from figuring out what he was describing.

Pursuing this thread, Roffman delves into Ashbery's difficult experiences at the elite, then all-boy's Deerfield School, where a wealthy, troubled classmate who was somewhat obsessed with him stole his poems and sent them to Poetry, where they were published under the classmate's name. When Ashbery later sent the same poems into Poetry, the editors mistook him as the plagiarist. At Deerfield, his distinctive poetic gifts began to flower, but it was at Harvard College, where he fell in with an artistic milieu and began several gay relationships, that he wrote a number of the poems that would fill his first collection, the Yale Younger Poets Series Prize-winning Some Trees (1956), which was selected, with some disaffection and after a convoluted process, by W. H. Auden. Roffman traces out Ashbery's literary influences and the various personal and immediate and broader cultural strands that led to these distinctive, still provocative poems, while also giving an account of how Ashbery negotiated being gay at a time when it was not just still extremely fraught but illegal. Through the Harvard Advocate--which Roffman reveals had a kibosh on gay, Black and Jewish students--he met Kenneth Koch, who remained a friend till the end of Koch's life and, at the very end of Ashbery's senior year, Frank O'Hara, who became his fast, and best friend until O'Hara's early death in 1966. Koch, Ashbery and O'Hara all nurtured each other's avant-garde interests, and O'Hara in particular offered another model for out queerness during the Cold War and the McCarthy era. Roffman ends her account with Ashbery's immersion in New York City's mid-century art world, which he navigated as a young writer bouncing from job to job and then as a graduate student at NYU and Columbia, before his departure for France on a Fulbright.

If I have any quarrels with Roffman's book it would lie in what I felt were his misreadings of the poems, hewing closely to his biography while overlooking what the words themselves say, though this is common in many a literary biography. Roffman's sense of pacing, her skill and judiciousness in weaving facts together, and her eye for telling details make this a valuable text for glimpsing a white, cis-queer, middle-class, male writer's formation in the pre-Stonewall Era. What also comes into focus is the politics of Ashbery's style; the New York School poets were criticized, in part because of flippant comments by O'Hara during the Vietnam War, for their lack of overt politics, but what this book suggests, alongside ones like Shoptaw's Ashbery study On the Outside Looking Out, was that Ashbery's and James Schuyler's--and more overtly, Frank O'Hara's poetry, could be viewed through other lenses as insistently political, especially in how it subverted the conventions of then contemporary American lyric poetry and in its recurrent pursuit of queer--in broad terms--themes and subject matter, as well as its incorporation of wit, camp, and irony. A poem like "The Instruction Manual," Roffman and Shoptaw lead us to see, is not just about reverie, fantasy, and the drudgery of office labor, but also a critique of idealized heteronormativity and an expression, in negative, of what could not be expressed so openly at that moment, same-sexual desire, love, and coupling. If you are a fan of the New York School poets or Ashbery, I recommend Roffman's biography.

Manning Marable (1950-2011)

It saddened me tremendously to learn of Manning Marable's (1950-2011, Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) passing this past weekend from pneumonia after many years of battling sarcoidosis.  Marable had not long ago completed his magnum opus, his huge, deeply researched and richly revelatory biography (including, it has been reported, an outing) of Malcolm X (1925-1965), one of African-America's iconic figures.  The 600-page biography is slated to appear on store shelves tomorrow. I am planning to dive into the Malcolm X biography, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, as soon as I can, so I'll write more about that later, but I did want to point out that Marable was not just a major scholar--he taught history most recently at Columbia University, where he founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and where I met him in person at a conference in the late 1990s--but a lifelong Left activist and Black culture worker, who figured out a way to make this multi-pronged approach to life, scholarship, and political engagement work. Among his many achievements, in addition to teaching at the Cornell University, Fisk University, Colgate University, University of Colorado-Boulder and Ohio State University, he founded the journal Souls; served as chair of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS); served on the Advisory Board of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the Board of Directors for the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN); was active in the 1970s in the New Democratic Movement; and wrote, co-wrote, edited, or co-edited over 20 books, including the one that almost immediately made him famous, 1983's How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1983).

I can attest to the fact that this is a book people who probably have picked up few books of history (outside of school) over the last 30 years actually read, and discussed; I can recall being a 20-something in Cambridge and Boston, and hanging out with politically savvy, cult-nat types, and Marable's arguments were as fluent on their tongues as Marx's or anyone else's. Marable, to the little extent I knew him, was the kind of person who could easily and would have joined us, and chatted and listened to us, schooled us, without ever being pedantic or talking down. Even publishing with Boston's progressive South End Press was a noteworthy step.  Though he didn't know me from the wallpaper at the Columbia conference, he was pleasant, generous, funny, and encouraging, the very model of what I imagined and still hope the best professors would be like. And, I should add, he was not, at least in my experience, homophobic either. With his wife, anthropologist Leith Mullings, and Sophie Spencer-Wood, he published the beautiful volume Freedom: A Photographic Portrait of the African American Struggle (Phaidon, 2002), which offers not only indelible imagery from the long Black American struggle for freedom, but also the editorial expertise of leading scholars. The work represented something I wish more of the best scholars, especially those of color, would aim for: producing works that might allow non-academics to enjoy the fruits of their hard work and brilliance.

One of the things I most admired about him was his willingness to speak out. We don't have a media system that gives voices like his much hearing, but that never stopped him, nor did careerism or fear or indifference or the many other things that do curb people, however necessary--people have to live--these limitations are.  His passing is a great loss for Dr. Mullings and his family, for the history and African-American Studies professions, for African American scholars and thinkers, for politically engaged people on the Left, for Columbia University and his colleagues and students, and for the United States.  My deepest condolences to his family, and please, go buy his biography of Malcolm X if you can afford it.

Review: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice + Griffey's 600th

I know I'm almost done with the school year because I'm able to read quickly (or fairly quickly) once again. Yesterday I finished Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale, 2007), a book I'd originally bought and skimmed primarily to gain background biographical information for my lecture on Gertrude Stein. As these things go, I found a few tidbits that were useful and used them, but I had to set the book aside for so much else--the primary texts, critical works of all types, countless other things that had to be read--so that I wasn't able to return to it until recently. Yesterday that is.

I am, as I've made clear on this blog and as my own work probably demonstrates, a great fan of Stein's. What's clearer to me now more than years ago, when I first encountered her work, is that in the case of her work as opposed to some other authors, the biographical is particularly important. She is also one of the leading paragons of American experimental literature, women's writing, queer literature: in all three cases, the roads leads back to her biography. And so I returned to Malcolm's little volume, whose dust cover has an unfortunate optical illusion that I hope is corrected when the book is printed in paperback format.

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice is a book you could read in only a day or two. Malcolm's main concerns can be split: to illuminate some of the hidden biographical information about Stein that clarifies her work, and to resituate Alice B. Toklas in terms of her and Stein's, and her and Stein's prior biographers', power relationships. In the first case, there is a lot anyone familiar with Stein probably knows: she came from a wealthy immigrant family, she was a pupil of William James's at Harvard, she left Johns Hopkins before taking her medical degree, she lived in Paris with her aesthete brother and cultivated friendships with many of the most imminent artists of that era, she wrote her forbidding but groundbreaking works with attracted a cult of admirers but sold little, she had her financial breakthrough with the relatively straightforward and highly ironic The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she made a succesful lecture tour of the US in the 1930s, she stayed in France long past the period when it would have been safe, which is to say during the German Occupation, she and Alice survived the war, their relationship have lasted decades, and she died in 1946. These are the well-known points, along with her egotism, insufferability at times, and undimmed belief in herself as a "genius" (she was, depending upon whether you accept the term and how you define it), which pushed her to create works that, as Malcolm rightly puts it, appear to have almost no formal predecessors or siblings in literature, unless one takes the works of prior authors and refracts them through a funhouse mirror. (Her importance as a pioneering feminist and challenger of patriarchal language, in addition to her elevation as one of the major Modernists, has now been established in the scholarly literature.) There is also her utter personal and physical magnetism and erotic power, which you learn provoked sexual arousal in Hemingway and others, male and female, and her devotion to Toklas, which Malcolm stresses, although it's also clear that Toklas's devotion to and belief in Stein's genius was crucial to the series of artistic leaps Stein made in the teens, leaps that would confirm her place as a figure whose work has lost none of its power or strangeness a century later.

What Malcolm does reveal that I found new are several aspects of Stein that might be easy to pass over. One is her reactionary political stance, the result of her "rentier" background and perspective, as Malcolm put it, which led her to castigate Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, to dismiss Hitler as a serious threat (she saw him as a "romantic" but not a murderer), and to champion the fascist Francisco Franco. She was a diehard exponent of the by-the-bootstraps, individualist credo, even though she celebrated the fact that she did not work, beyond her writing and entertaining, a day in her life. Another is her complex negotiation of her sexuality--she came to terms early on with her sexual identity and desires, but suppressed the openly queer book, Q.E.D., that would have erupted like an earthquake in American literature had it appeared when she first wrote--and her Jewishness, which she managed to both affirm, especially in personal relations, and efface when it came to her public perspective. Malcolm details how eros-suffused Stein's work truly is, how imbued it is with the narratives of her life-- for she lacked the capacity for narrative invention--many of which revolve around her female friendships and relationships, including the loss of her mother at an early age and a traumatic breakup that is at the center of one of her earliest and best known works, Three Lives. Malcolm points out that all three narratives in that work, including the very famous "Melanctha," which merited praise from Richard Wright, are fictional restagings of Stein's failed relationship. This early broken love rumbles through Stein's work, with odd consequences; passages of the nonsensical syntax of the grueling and impenetrable Stanzas in Meditation becomes clearer when you learn that every instance of the word "May" in the work, whether it referred to Stein's ex May Bookstaver, had to be replaced with "can," even when the resulting phrase or sentence made no sense, by vehement order of Toklas! With regard to the issue of religion, Malcolm notes that in Stein's acclaimed war memoir, Wars I Have Seen, Stein treats the reality of her Jewish background and experiences in Vichy France, and the experiences of French Jews, with indirection, culminating in a passage that at first glance appears to be an eruption straight out of the earlier and Cubist Tender Buttons, but that upon careful rumination, invokes Biblical themes in the face of the persecution that was all around Stein.

The fact that she and Toklas, as Jewish women and lesbians, were able to live in Occupied France without harm leads Malcolm to investigate their protector, Bernard Faÿ, a Catholic royalist gay man and collaborator, whom the book repeatedly underlines was a very nasty character. An anti-Semite, a traitor, a man whose inhuman zeal led directly led to the deaths of hundreds of Freemasons, among others, Faÿ was also an adept of Stein. A devotee, Malcolm says, to the point of obsequiousness. But that obsequy led him to protect to the full extent of his powers two people who very well might not have survived under other circumstances. In fact, the biography makes clear, Stein had the arrogance, or confidence, to turn down an American government offer to escape to Switzerland. She and Toklas did not want to move from their comfortable new home, it was that simple. At the same time, it's clear that, while she had food and heat and no immediate worry of deportation, courtesy of Faÿ, she did feel tremendous fear, which she reflects, in her war memoir not as content, but through formal and rhetorical means. Elision, understatement, and an anxious affect convey the looming threat rather than an overt description of the Germans' brutality. She continued to champion Faÿ until her death, and when he was finally jailed for his many crimes, she worked tireless to free him. Toklas, it turns out, helped him escape, because she too was convinced of his essential goodness. One imagines that if one were not one of these two it was very difficult to dissuade either of them of any of their beliefs.

Back to the question of form, Malcolm goes on to show, in her adroit and jargonless way, how form was often the means through which Stein worked out both personal and aesthetic problems. In the monumental and nearly unreadable The Making of Americans, a work often called a novel though it hardly resembles anything other work bearing that title, Stein after a fashion abandons the effort of writing what might even charitably be labeled realist fiction, and instead focuses on the process of writing itself. This is a well-known post-modern gesture, and she was not the first to do so, but Malcolm notes that in Stein's case, what was later reduced to, in the metafictionists' hands, moments of self-consciousness, structural considerations, an aspect of plot and thematics, becomes the very content and ground of the work itself. It literally goes on for pages and pages about its inability to be written, or rather, Stein's failure of imagination and her inability to produce the novel that she has been striving to write. Malcolm has to chop up the novel into pieces, and manages to get through it twice. After consultation with some major Stein scholars (Edward M. Burns, Ulla Dydo), Malcolm detours into the fascinating case of playwright and Stein researcher Leon Katz, who discovered some of Stein's early notebooks in Yale's library, used them both to write a dissertation that became a landmark in Stein scholarship and also unlocked some of the major mysteries of Stein's life through his interviews with Toklas, yet has never published the edited versions of the notebooks, thus denying several generations of scholars access to a Rosetta Stone of information. Part of what the notebooks reveal is the terrible struggle, the isolation and despair Stein felt at her early inability to produce the very works of genius she expected of herself, her crises in her personal affairs, and the personal, biographical associations that underpin the texts. With this information and her deepened understanding of Stein's method, the links between her life and aesthetics, Malcolm can appreciate the work's true importance and value as the turning-point project that permitted Stein to then write some of her famous, later works.

The work is titled Two Lives, not one, and Alice Toklas's centrality to Stein's career, her success, her mythic stature, and her reputation, is one of the other major strands of the book. Toklas appears to have been a difficult character, fiercely jealous of anyone whose friendship with and attraction to Stein grew too strong (she drove Hemingway, among others, off), and Malcolm reveals that there might even have been an S/M element to their pairing. Supposedly Hemingway even overheard Toklas browbeating Stein, a striking inversion to the impression the two usually gave to others, with Stein the fleshy, radiant monument (her head is compared several times to that of a Roman general, her tan skin celebrated), while Toklas, small, dark, with a prominent mustache, sometimes provoked repulsion in those who met her for the first time. She abetted and afforded her "genius" everything; one of my favorite descriptions is of Stein's writing process. The great author would sit at her desk, and with pen in hand scribble huge, loose words, almost in automatic fashion, across pages, leaving them to be collected and typed, as they dutifully were, always, by Toklas. Malcolm attributes this in part, on Stein's account, to her belief in ideas about birth order and familial tradition. As the baby of her family, she expected to be catered to, no matter what, and in Toklas found a most willing accomplice.

One of the other interesting bits among the many in the text is the story of Toklas's years after Stein's death. Toklas's granitic personality challenged all but the most loyal friends, and yet once befriended, she showed a more gentle and solicitous side. Though she did prepare her famous cookbook, most of her writing channeled into letters which Malcolm describes as showing some flair. Stein's death was particularly brutal on Toklas's finances. The will ended up leaving everything to one of Stein's blood relatives, but offering whatever material holdings remained to be used for Toklas's maintenance, which ultimately meant a vicious act by a greedy Stein in-law that spelled terrible poverty for Toklas at the end of her life. Not only was she thrown out of the apartment where she hoped to live our her last days, but American friends had to come to her rescue again and again. As well, she, far more than Stein, did not want to be identified as Jewish, and even converted to Roman Catholicism , becoming quite devout. Malcolm suggests that she thought that Stein's genius, in the absence of baptism in the one, truth faith, would admit her, in any case, to heaven. Both women adored young men and had little time for women of any sort (including admirers), Toklas even less than Stein. One of Stein's early biographers thought she might somehow circumvent Toklas, but it's clear who had the last laugh. The sum of Malcolm's exploration of Toklas is a far more multilayered portrait than might commonly be considered. It is to her that all who appreciate and honor Stein's work must never forget to pay a bit of tribute and offer gratitude. The sum of the book is to demonstrate how to effectively write a dual biography, and to explore the art's difficulties, its possibilities, while providing what a reader turns to it for in the first place: the indelible story of a life or lives, vivid portraits of a world.

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More baseball, more astounding feats:

Cincinnati Reds star outfielder Ken Griffey hits his 600th career home run tonight, against the Florida Marlins in Dolphin Stadium, Miami (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)