The Adorable Weakness of James Schuyler

Against the vibe shift

Joan Mitchell, A Few Days (After James Schuyler), 1985.

James Schuyler is the poet for whom I feel the purest love. For the past several years I’ve kept his Collected Poems at my bedside and read in it frequently. The people who knew him seem to have loved him, too: aside from poet and occasional art critic his most consistent career was that of houseguest.¹ He was introverted but capable, I imagine, of great charm; capable as well of being a gigantic pain in the ass. His mental health was precarious: he’d had a rotten childhood, was bipolar, drank too much and popped pills; he suffered frequent nervous breakdowns. One of his celebrated sequences, “The Payne Whitney Poems,” is named for the Upper East Side psychiatric clinic to which he was committed for a time.² Those poems convey much of what I love in Schuyler: even when he was in great pain and at his most vulnerable, his noticing eye and wry humor never desert him:

SLEEP

The friends who come to see you
and the friends who don’t.
The weather in the window.
A pierced ear.
The mounting tension and the spasm.
A paper lace doily on a small plate.
Tangerines.
A day in February: heart
shaped cookies on St Valentine’s.
Like Christopher, a discarded saint.
A tough woman with black hair.
“I got to set my wig straight.”
A gold and silver day begins to wane.
A crescent moon.
Ice on the window.
Give my love to, oh, anybody.

Implicitly the speaker is another “discarded saint,” but the self-pity is kept at bay by the topspin the last line puts on the poet’s loneliness, mixing pathos with hilarity, vulnerability with self-sufficiency. If Schuyler’s dear friend Frank O’Hara wanted his poems to be like phone calls, Schuyler’s are more like letters or postcards—intimacy at one remove. In the slighter poems he can come across as a camp Emily Dickinson, though like her he has an eye for the natural world so keen that ordinary objects seem to levitate. The ordinary, for Schuyler, is shot through with transcendence. And the natural world, for Schuyler, includes the UN Building (“This Dark Apartment”) or “the dulled sparkling mica lights of tar roofs” (“An East Window on Elizabeth Street”), every bit as much as “the yellow dust inside the tulips” (“February”). Everything turns to landscape in his eyes:

One dandelion
a frayed
sun in sun-
light that
lights up the
empurpled
blackberry
leaves.

—”The Walk”

“A Few Days” is the last and shortest of the long meditative poems in Collected Poems, following “Hymn to Life” and “The Morning of the Poem.” It’s essentially an elegy for his mother, who starts the poem alive but is dead by the end of it; the consolations of elegy are provided not by any fantasies of afterlife but by close attention to the ephermeral sweetnesses of life—as the title suggests. It reads too as a self-elegy; from the beginning it seems like he was always saying farewell. Schuyler wrote “A Few Days” while living in the Chelsea Hotel, in a sort of suspended animation—in the poem he presents himself simply and courageously as an invalid, unable to manage his own affairs. His lawyer pays his rent, and a young Eileen Myles manages everything else: breakfast, lunch, laundry, etc. In a brief memoir, Myles writes about what it was like to watch him write, at a time when his mental illness was tightening its grip:

I knew he was very agitated and he seemed like I said very close to having a nervous breakdown. It was that thing of knowing a person to the extent that you can feel their vibe and his was thick with something. Later when I saw the poem he had been writing it seems exquisitely calm, meditative and peaceful even. I wondered if the act of the writing a poem was a kind of balancing for him. Creating a world that would hold the agitation he was feeling even as he was passing through it.

Impossible to know which poem he might have been writing, but 23rd Street does come up in “A Few Days” to underline the precariousness of his perch. A hotel is not a home:

                     People who come here say, "Oooh, you have a
          balcony," as though I
spent my days out there surveying Twenty-third Street:
          Chelsea Sewing Center,
Carla Hair Salon. Twenty-third Street hasn't got much
          going for it, unless
you love the YMCA. I once did.

A reminiscence follows of a sexual encounter he once had when he was living at the Y—another temporary perch that permitted access to the erotic at the expense of anything like security. The ability to “hold the agitation he was feeling even as he was passing through it” is a survival strategy elevated to an ethos. Instead of acting or lashing out, instead of self-destructive behavior (the poem depicts numerous instances not so much of that behavior as of its consequences), Schuyler as poet contains his vulnerability—what Myles calls his “vibe”—and makes it something safe to identify with.

This is not nothing; it is very nearly everything. The “vibe shift” of the present moment is all about uncontained libidinal energy manifesting as cruelty: gleefully, freely expressed hatred of immigrants, of trans and queer people, of disabled people, of women, with real and dire consequences for their health and livelihoods. Each day of the new administration brings new horrors, though nothing speaks of Trump’s contempt for the rule of law more clearly than his pardon of the brownshirts who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. Thousands of agitated, lonely, none-too-stable Americans feel empowered to say and do vile things, and feel like patriots when they do it. Hatred of the weak and the maniac desire to expel that weakness from the body politic is the order of the day.

Americans are in the business of defying limits; that’s our founding myth. And it’s healthy to defy unfounded authority, to break up arbitrary hierarchies, even to “do your own research.” But our so-called thought leaders, the tech broligarchs arrayed on the dais next to Trump, deny all social obligation, rejecting the idea that we owe something to the other people with whom we share the planet. They seek to somehow blow past the limits of our collapsing biosphere, the limits of death itself. It’s no coincidence that they are all geeks and nerds—a tribe to which I once proudly belonged. Their hatred of their own weakness, their lack of cool, their denial of their own mortality, has brought our nation to a pretty pass.

Not a poet in the bunch.

For these bargain-basement Nietzsches, man is something that must be overcome: through cryonics or seasteads or colonizing Mars. I’m not entirely unsympathetic; I too fear death, and recognize that the American impulse to transgress limits has brought benefits as well as liabilities to humanity. Care as a political principle can ossify into layers of over-regulation that makes responding to people’s changing needs more difficult. Trump has no plans to respond to the real needs of people; he will move fast and break things, he may even annex Greenland, but he is capable of building nothing. At best he may liberate entrepreneurial energies that might take a creative form; if they do, it will be in the entire absence of creative guidance from the top. Real creativity will have to come from ordinary people who want to be able to look their neighbors in the eye, and themselves in the mirror.

We do not love weakness in this country; we worship power. We are taught cruelty from the cradle, blaming ourselves or sinister “others” for the consequences of inequitable systems. The possibility of unblame, of compassion for our own and others’ frailties, does not easily occur to us. Against what she called our “culture of contempt,” Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, in her heroic rebuke of Trump and his ghouls, invoked the value of mercy. Mercy saturates every line of Schuyler’s poetry. Mercy begins with self-forgiveness, with not hating the alienated part of oneself—queer or addicted or mentally ill as it may be—following instead the arduous path of the description of love. In Schuyler’s case, that might begin with the erotic reflection I interrupted earlier. Here’s the rest of it:

          I was in the shower
when a hunk walked in. I got a hard-on just like that.
          He dropped his soap
to get a view of it and in no time we were in bed in
          his room. Sure was
a change from West Virginia.

The wry, straightforward account of a YMCA pick-up is typical of Schuyler, whose lines James Meetze has memorably described as “Delicate, careful, witty, and crass.”³ The matter-of-fact eros of Schuyler and O’Hara, who lived in a time far more poisonously saturated with homophobia than today, never fails to move me. You don’t have to be queer to be moved by the courage of their self-acceptance—even if you suspect, as I do, that homophobia must have played some role in their eventual destruction. Both wrote death-haunted poems—forms of pastoral—that also, and not coincidentally, affirm the variousness of life. “A Few Days” seems to idle through Schuyler’s memories, little vignettes of the living and the dead, gossiping, passing the time. Only the ending, which comes abruptly, and in a different form than the rest of the poem, retroactively makes sense of these days and their fewness:

Then one day
the telephone:
it's Hilde:
"Mother passed on
in her sleep
last night. No,
you needn't
come, it's not that
kind of a ceremony.
Fred is seeing
to it all right
now. The last
three months were
pretty grim."
And so I won't be
there to see my Maney
enearthed beside
my stepfather:
once when I was
home a while ago
I said I realized
that in his way he
loved me. "He did
not," my mother said.
"Burton hated you."
The old truth-teller!
She was so proud
in her last dim
years (ninety years
are still
a few days) to be
longest-lived of
the Slaters: for-
getting her mother
was the Slater, she
a Connor:
Margaret Daisy Connor Schuyler Ridenour,
rest well,
the weary journey done.

“The last three months”: those are the few days of the poem, but so are the ninety years of Schuyler’s mother’s life, and the sixty-seven years of Schuyler’s life, and my life, and yours. These lines include an extraordinary moment of mercy: Schuyler’s stepfather, so mean a man that he denied the young Schuyler permission to get a library card, is reimagined as more loving than he was. His mother hilariously corrects him, affirms that Schuyler was hated, a true red-headed stepchild. But the will to forgiveness is still there, encompassing her, too, in mercy. Schuyler could be bitchy, sullen, manic, withdrawn; but when he wrote of Charles Darwin (another piercingly accurate describer of life) that “He seems to have no scores to settle whatever” he might have been speaking of himself.

Fairfield Porter, Portrait of James Schuyler.

Grievance and ressentiment are the great social ills of our time. Schuyler’s hard-won mercy, reflected in his generous acceptance of whatever falls in his line of sight and his care for description over prescription, suggests the path of becoming-human, rather than the path of becoming-machine that once tempted me—the temptation into which Elon Musk, et al, have fallen.⁴ It’s the path of noticing ordinary things, appreciating ephemeral moments, nurturing fragile bonds. It’s the opposite of nihilism. It calls for generosity of spirit, self-forgiveness, and humor over fear, cruelty, and shame.

I close with a slightly uncharacteristic yet wholly appropriate selection from Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, to lift it as a kind of banner against the hateful vibe of right now:

SUFFERING

Its seed is in the college boy whose clothes
tell how the dumb imagine it as rags;
its poisoned breath is on the voice that nags
a child whose mother thinks that its life goes
toward where she found it no relief to weep;
and friends who stop their ears and scale their eyes,
like married ones who wrangle all their lives,
all dream its branches clatter in their sleep:
The fear of suffering burns like the sun,
and everyone turns from it, everyone.

Which is not true.

1. He lived with the family of the painter Fairfield Porter on Great Spruce Island in Maine for more than a decade; Porter’s wife Anne supposedly remarked that “Jimmy came for the weekend and never left.” The hint of resentment is understandable, especially given the fact that Jimmy and her husband were occasional lovers.

2. Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, and Marilyn Monroe were also patients at Payne Whitney, though alas not simultaneously. What a play that would make!

3. From Meetze’s preface to Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, which he co-edited with Simon Pettet.
Plus, the passage serves as a salutary reminder to a certain macho man that his favorite band is queer as fuck.

4. Of course the machine is also human; nothing could be more expressive of the human desire to surpass humanity than AI. I write science-fiction novels about this desire.