The Intimate, Habitable Poetics of Frank O'hara

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SUBVERTING PROPRIETY: THE INTIMATE, HABITABLE POETICS

OF FRANK O’HARA

Kent Lewis Boyer

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Charles Hatfield, Chair

______Nils Roemer

______Daniel Wickberg

______Michael Wilson

Kent Lewis Boyer

To my number one supporter, my dad, Guy H. Boyer (1928-2019)

SUBVERTING PROPRIETY: THE INTIMATE, HABITABLE POETICS

OF FRANK O’HARA

KENT LEWIS BOYER, BS, MLS, DC

DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

The University of Texas at Dallas

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

HUMANITIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

May 2020

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would not have embarked on the journey leading to this PhD if not for the encouragement of my dear friend, Dr. Dianne Goode, whose excellent course in Modern Art I took during my master’s degree curriculum at Southern Methodist University. A huge thank-you to Dr. Charles

Hatfield, who has been a helpful and supportive chairperson throughout the writing process, and always provided me with the precise challenge I needed to improve my writing. I am grateful to the Edith O’Donnell Institute for Art History for the Fellowship that allowed me to finish this work. Finally, I have been fortunate to encounter colleagues who became friends on this journey; my “scholars’ lunch” friends: Dr. Sharron Conrad (who beat us all), Shelly Bell, Lynette Ott, Jeff

Landrum, Tricia Stout, Fatemeh Tashekori, Eman Al-Habashneh, Karl SenGupta, and my TA buddy, Natacha Guyot. Thanks to all of you for your support and friendship!

March 2020

SUBVERTING PROPRIETY: THE INTIMATE, HABITABLE POETICS

OF FRANK O’HARA

Kent Lewis Boyer, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2020

ABSTRACT

Supervising Professor: Charles Hatfield, Chair

My dissertation investigates the impact of the poetic texts of Frank O’Hara, particularly working to situate him as a war poet, a resistor of societal pressures and dominant political ideologies, and a poet who defied conventions of what it meant to be a man in mid-century America. Studying

O’Hara’s 800 published poems to reveal his attitudes and conclusions about these important issues, I contrast O’Hara’s poetic content with theoretical constructs from queer theory and the theories of institutional domination of marginalized peoples, with historical documents, and cultural and intellectual history relative to his lifetime. O’Hara’s poetry about war, Cold War politics, and the mid-century crisis of masculinity have heretofore not been systematically studied in a historical context that is focused on O’Hara’s poetry resulting from his life experience as a Navy sailor or as a homosexual man. Historians agree that World War II emboldened homosexual men to live in full view after the War, despite there having been an urban homosexual subculture in New York and other cities for decades. While other authors also historicize O’Hara’s poetry, few have dealt in any depth with his World War II service, his love of Russian culture, or his resistance to the prevailing political doctrines of his time. However,

read in this way, O’Hara’s poetry becomes a compelling voice of resistance to the aftermath of

World War II and the early Cold War period. I utilize the theoretical work of queer theorist Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick, particularly her work on paranoid and reparative reading of literature for queer readers, and suggests that her work be expanded to include reparative writing as well. In addition, the theories of the methods of everyday survival for marginalized peoples suffering from institutional dominance studied by Michel de Certeau are shown to be validated in

O’Hara’s poetry. I then review the attitudes and policies of the World War II United States military with regard to the homosexual man, providing biographical context for 18-year-old

Navy enlistee Frank O’Hara. A review of the post-war poetry O’Hara wrote about the war in undergraduate and graduate school follows. I assert that his war experience created a political framework for O’Hara’s life that provided rich subject matter for the remainder of his life.

O’Hara’s propensity for a love of Russian culture during an historical time when Russia was the avowed enemy of America follows, underscoring that his attitudes about gender and race were political impediments in mid-century America. O’Hara’s life choices, as a homosexual American man, are next contrasted with those life choices, stressors, and obligations of the “organization man,” who faced a decade of personal crisis as American gender roles were in extreme flux and redefinition. My Epilogue looks at O’Hara’s continuing influence on queer poetry in a poem by contemporary poet Tommy Pico. Pico’s use of the poetic form O’Hara invented, the “I-do-this,

I-do-that” poem, enhanced by 21st century social media posts, reveals an ongoing significance of

the ground-breaking work O’Hara produced some six decades ago.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

ABSTRACT ...... vi

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE DISSERTATION ...... 1 1.1 Early O’Hara Criticism ...... 5 1.2 Dissertation Terminology ...... 13 1.3 Chapter Organization ...... 14

CHAPTER 2 EVERYDAY POETRY AS A TACTIC TO COUNTER INSTITUTIONAL DOMINANCE ...... 18 2.1 Sedgwick’s Paranoid and Reparative Reading Theory ...... 27 2.2 De Certeau and Everyday Resistance to Institutional Dominance ...... 36 2.3 Goodman’s Essay on “Advance-Guard Writing” ...... 44 2.4 Autobiographical Poetry or Fiction? ...... 45 2.5 Lack of Interest in Publishing ...... 49 2.6 Coterie Poetry: Art and Life Compressed? ...... 59 2.7 A Flaneur and the City ...... 74 2.8 The Post-War Urban Homosexual Community ...... 93 2.9 Mid-Century American Attitudes about Homosexuality ...... 96 2.10 O’Hara and the Female Muse ...... 102 2.11 Poems About Homosexuality and Camp Humor ...... 106

CHAPTER 3 LIVING INAUTHENTICALLY: THE WARTIME ACTIVATION OF A GAY POET...... 118 3.1 O’Hara the War Poet ...... 118 3.2 World War II and the Homosexual “Problem” ...... 123 3.3 Frank O’Hara’s Navy Experience and War Poetry ...... 138 3.4 O’Hara’s Post-War Decision to Live Fully as a Homosexual Man ...... 143 3.5 O’Hara Biographical War Poetry ...... 146 3.6 Diversity, Inclusion, and the Utopian Community ...... 167 3.7 Moral Misgivings About War ...... 177

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3.8 Harvard on the G.I. Bill ...... 194 3.9 O’Hara’s Move to New York ...... 200

CHAPTER 4 COLD WAR POETRY: THE COMPLEXITIES OF RUSSIA, RACE, AND GENDER ...... 206 4.1 America’s Cold War Strategy ...... 208 4.2 Poetry Subverting Mid-Century Politics ...... 212 4.3 O’Hara the Russophile ...... 215 4.4 The Museum of Modern Art and America’s “Cultural Warfare” ...... 223 4.5 O’Hara’s Russophile Poetry ...... 234 4.6 America Constantly on the Brink of War: Homosexuality and Patriotism ...... 241 4.7 O’Hara and the Entanglement of Race ...... 251 4.8 Sexual Orientation as a Cold War Political Liability ...... 270 4.9 The Lavender Scare ...... 274 4.10 Gender as a Political Weapon ...... 281

CHAPTER 5 AN INDOMITABLE REBEL IN THE DECADE OF THE CRISIS OF MASCULINITY ...... 285 5.1 O’Hara’s Avant-Garde Community ...... 286 5.2 Mid-Century Public Attitudes About Homosexuality ...... 290 5.3 The Decade of the Crisis of Masculinity ...... 297 5.4 Frank O’Hara, the Anti-Organization Man ...... 300 5.5 Frank O’Hara and Mid-Century Male Health Concerns ...... 306 5.6 Mid-Century Aspiration for Normalcy ...... 311 5.7 Homosexuals as a Minority Class ...... 313 5.8 The Performance of the Middle-Class ...... 317 5.9 O’Hara, Double Entendre, and Sex ...... 320 5.10 The Romanticization of Dying Young ...... 326 5.11 O’Hara’s Love of New York ...... 330 5.12 Creating a Character: “Frank O’Hara” and His Friends ...... 340

CHAPTER 6 EPILOGUE: THE SOCIAL MEDIA POETRY OF TOMMY PICO ...... 350

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 365

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 396

CURRICULUM VITAE ...... 397

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO THE DISSERTATION

My dissertation works to purposefully re-contextualize the poetry of mid-century New York poet, Frank O’Hara, in terms of his texts’ complex, yet prosaic, and subversive attitudes toward the oppressive social pressures of early Cold War America. Although O’Hara’s poetry is well known for its celebration of his emblematic urban, liberal, often homosexual New York arts community, relatively few scholars have investigated how the life portrayed in his poetry came to be his - a life and body of poetry demonstrably opposing the ignoble Cold War American paranoias of the time. I intend to explore that theme in this dissertation. While O’Hara wrote poetry from the late 1940s until his death in 1966, the majority of his mature work was written during the 1950s. During this period, it is important to recall that homosexuality was criminalized by the state, pathologized by mental health professionals, demonized by the church, reproached by the Republican’s “lavender scare,” and “exposed” by the government loyalty oaths that ruined reputations and lives. Despite all these disincentives to do so, O’Hara’s poetry is full of references about his homosexuality and he lived forthrightly as a homosexual man.

The poetic form O’Hara invented – which he named the “I-do-this-I-do-that” poem - was about his daily internal dialogue and city walking activities as a flaneur: he records thoughts, he lunches, he shops, he weekends, he has sex, he goes to the movies, he drinks and parties. He cares nothing about the concerns of typical mid-century men with their anxieties about cars, grey flannel suits, a house in the suburbs, patios, barbeques, dishwashers, status-seeking, or corporate promotions. In O’Hara’s carefully curated version of mid-century American masculinity, he does not get a corporate job, marry, move to the suburbs, or have two children and a dog. Instead, he

lives with a roommate in numerous walk-ups in an urban community of artist friends who substitute for family. This substitute family provides him access to an unconventional family: to friends’ children, to the beach, to company on holidays, and to parties, parties seemingly all the time; they therefore become the everyday content of his poetry. In this dissertation, I’m interested with why that is, and in discovering that, I offer a clearer vision of the ways in which

O’Hara made use of his innovative literary form as a mode of resistance against the dominant normative mid-century America social pressures – particularly those of masculinity.

O’Hara’s new poetic form often resembles twenty-first century social media posts: his poetry consists of his internal thoughts about sights as he walks around the city, what he eats for lunch, the errands he runs, his friends, their house parties, and commentary on current events often seen in newspaper headlines. By elevating the ordinary and everyday into a literary art form with his numerous, often unedited and non-metric poems, he actively forecasts a similar predilection for the familiar and commonplace in other art forms. For example, a decade later, in much the same way as O’Hara had with poetry, visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana, Andy

Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, successfully exalted the common and familiar into visual fine art.

Additionally, O’Hara’s poetic work so thoroughly reflects his life and experience that, taken as a whole, it forms an O’Hara-produced documentary - a carefully composed running narrative of the New York art scene during the early Cold War. It is this aspect of his poetic that attracted early critics; however, these scholars gave little to no credence to the importance of O’Hara’s sexual orientation, and therefore saw no evidence of his reversal of societal political domination.

I argue that using his everyday “social media-like” poetry is, in fact, a revolt against a society that saw homosexuality as anathema – either a perversion of normality or a mental illness. An

understanding of the genesis of O’Hara’s performance of masculinity and the hysteria of the times with regard to homosexuality is necessarily provided for the reader to ascertain and appreciate the content of O’Hara’s poetry and the role he played in the early liberation of gay literature. Previous homosexual poets had used coded language to speak to their gay readers while, at the same time, being able to maintain a veil for the rest of their readers. O’Hara belongs to the first generation of poets (with Ginsberg, Corso, Olsen, and others) who refuse to do so. 1

While recent scholarship finds increased interest in his sexual orientation, many scholars still focus more on poems about O’Hara’s coterie of friends, his relationships with lovers, and his active flaneur-like social life, rather than his political reversals. Yet, in 1948, when O’Hara was not yet 22 years old, he wrote in his diary,

I want to move toward a complexity which makes life within the work and which

does not (necessarily, although it may) resemble life as most people seem to think

it is lived. If I am successful this should not need to be received as exotic or

phantastic (sic) . . . Ritual is bestowed on a work of art by its audience -

participants as a response to the work’s power and content, it is not put in, or

made use of, by the author. For the reader to be involved in ritual is for him to

say, ‘This work is an experience of something which I would rather receive

through this artistic medium than through the direct apprehension of the thing

itself.’2

1 These post-war poems, while not coded, do potentially continue to read differently to a homosexual audience than they do to a heterosexual one. O’Hara’s work continues, decades later, to function as reparative reading to marginalized people who live without the benefit of the cultural hegemony of a hetero-normative sexual orientation. This feature of the reading of O’Hara is ever-present for those who utilize literature in Sedgwick’s paranoid / reparative manner. 2 Early Writing 102, 103, emphasis mine.

In this passage, dreaming about the poetry he would produce, O’Hara conflates his future work

with Aristotelian philosophy of theater – an experiential ritual between the audience and players.

He is thinking specifically about his future readers’ reaction to his work, into which he plans to

breathe life. While he writes about this art/life intentionality as a “complexity,” early critics saw

his poetry as just the opposite – too simple to be taken seriously – pop, bubble-gum, and

illegitimate. His refusal to concentrate on the universal human themes, the grand, or the sublime

is part of the reason for this criticism, but, in fact, for O’Hara, musings about the city, his love

for friends, and the joy he finds in aesthetics, is the expression of the sublime for him. This section of his diary may be the most prescient commentary he ever wrote about his poetry, and it is astonishing that it was written entirely as an aspiration by an undergraduate junior. With this ambition for his work, O’Hara signaled his understanding the path that art was on in his generation; Genter suggests these painters and writers be categorized as the “romantic moderns”

– the generation that argued in their work that “any commitment to aesthetics went hand-in-hand with a commitment to rejuvenating life.”3 In this category, Genter places Ginsberg, Kerouac,

Burroughs, Mailer, Bellow, Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko. I enthusiastically add O’Hara to his list.

Frank O’Hara’s post-Navy homosexual life was never hidden, making him a member of the first generation of poets to write directly about homosexuality without coded language.4 The fact

that he didn’t hide his homosexuality meant that his poems are often about homosexual desire,

sex acts, inner thoughts, friends, the city, parties - in short, they are about this – and every –

3 Genter 8. 4 In this, he is joined by poets and authors such as James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, and others.

aspect of his life. Every aspect but one – curiously, O’Hara didn’t write about his career as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, a career that demanded more and more of his time as the years went by. The poems about his sexual orientation mention going to latrines to find sex, body parts, masturbation, childhood bullying, and epithets like “faggot” directed toward him by strangers, but are also surrounded by every other aspect of daily living. By focusing on his personal everyday performance of masculinity, and rarely writing with an expectation or desire to be published, O’Hara’s poetic therefore gains both lucidity and strength as an alternative way to be a man in the two decades after World War II, decades which correspond both with the early

Cold War period, and also with the first two decades of the formation of revitalized, modern, urban, partially clandestine homosexual communities in American cities. By using the everyday as his subject matter, by writing for and about his friends, and by unashamedly describing his world – his social life, pop culture, his consumerism, his love of art, and his homosexuality – often with camp humor – and knowing that a desire to publish his poetry would require self- censorship, O’Hara created an original form of poetic expression.5

1.1 Early O’Hara Criticism

O’Hara’s work was focused on his very personal and unique experience, and was often denigrated as coterie poetry because of the dizzying number of unexplained first names and personal references it contained. Often written on his lunch hour, for friends’ birthdays, or for bon voyage parties, critics believed the poems should summarily be dismissed as unserious. I

5 De Certeau’s works on The Practice of Everyday Life (see Chapter 2) help to inform my ideas about the fortitude found in finding disruption in the everyday. O’Hara’s poetic is an illustration of this strength.

argue just the opposite in this dissertation; that by focusing on his everyday life, O’Hara’s poetic gains lucidity and strength as a look at another way (albeit an unapproved way) to perform masculinity in the two decades after World War II.6

Early O’Hara criticism focused almost exclusively on the coterie nature of the poems and argued that his often-un-edited occasional poetry should be considered perhaps fun, but not bona fide poetry. The adjective “coterie,” in fact, implies a “clique,” work done for a small group of friends to amuse them. It carries a negative, cavalier, almost contemptuous, connotation when applied to O’Hara’s body of work. Further, O’Hara’s disdain for scholarly criticism and his disinterest in publishing both work to support these early claims that his poetry shouldn’t be taken seriously.7 What I mean to say here is that there were a number of reasons that critics leaned the way they did when it came to early reviews of the handful O’Hara’s poetry that was published during his lifetime.

There were, however, two critics who noticed immediately that O’Hara was doing something revolutionary and, in fact, had effectively created his own poetic form. In her first review of The

Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Helen Vendler wrote, “Such a radical and dismissive logic

[found in O’Hara’s poems] flouts the whole male world and its relentless demand for ideologies, causes, and systems of significance.” ⁠8 Insisting that O’Hara should be taken seriously in her early observations, Vendler got close to the heart of what I will engage with and expand in this

6 Critics have, in the past, applied the term “coterie” to O’Hara’s poetry as a denigration, implying it was cliquish, exclusive, and unserious. The word, however, seems a good way to describe O’Hara and his group of intimates, and I use it that way throughout my dissertation: O’Hara and his coterie of friends. 7 Seiler believes that the fact that the Hopwood Award carried no publishing award also supports this belief. See Seiler 813. 8 Vendler, “The Virtues of the Alterable,” 9. Helen Vendler’s article was one of the first on O’Hara’s posthumously published work.

dissertation: that by working in this small and personal scale, recording actual daily life events

and observations, O’Hara presents his personal poetic as an alternative to the mid-century

monolithic American cultural constructions so evident in the early Cold War period. She noticed

something in his writing that confused gender roles and refused to conform to convention.

Vendler was right to declare O’Hara had invented a new form with his poetry, but typical of the

year in which she wrote, 1972, she didn’t fully engage with his homosexual biography and

therefore missed the real revolutionary subversion of his work.

Vendler compared O’Hara’s work to a Polaroid snapshot – a quick reflection momentarily

saved and then tossed in a drawer for some future time.9 Despite the fact that she said herself that she wasn’t quite sure what made O’Hara’s poetry special; she notes that writing about something just because it happened seems to be a novel and noteworthy poetic practice. I believe she was on the right track with her Polaroid reference, and I want to explore both that “quick reflection momentarily saved” and her observation that O’Hara’s logic “flouts the whole male world” as a means of entry into O’Hara’s poetry in this dissertation. Vendler was the first to notice that

O’Hara’s poems refused to view his world the way men were supposed to view it, which is a key observation - even if she didn’t follow up on it.

Another early critic, Marjorie Perloff, is single-handedly responsible for O’Hara being taken seriously as a poet in the early days of scholarship on him, having written the first book about his poetry: Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters in 1977. Perloff noticed O’Hara’s close circle of painter friends and worked to compare his poetry to their action painting – serendipitous,

9 “The Virtues of the Alterable” 6.

unedited, and non-representational – an action rather than an object. I also think her reading has merit, particularly as O’Hara himself talks about the process or performance of the creation of art as a factor in both the work of his Abstract Expressionist friends and his work as well.

Nevertheless, the comparison can only be carried so far due to the fact that O’Hara was really doing something else with his poems – they are, for the most part, fully representational, for example, as contrasted with the Abstract Expressionists’ paintings.

In 1979, Bruce Boone was one of the first homosexual scholars to write about O’Hara’s sexuality and what it contributed to his poetry. Boone’s article comes after the earliest O’Hara criticism by Vendler, Perloff, and a few others. In a scholarly attempt to set the record straight about what O’Hara was doing, and why his poems read differently from earlier homosexual poets, say, Crane or Auden, Boone’s article investigates the earlier frequent practice of writing in coded language by homosexual authors, a practice that O’Hara rarely resorted to. It’s important to explain the difference: O’Hara’s carefully composing his poems to read as if they are his life, when in fact, he’s curating a life in them, but this is not the same as traditional coded homosexual poems. In previous poets’ poem about homosexuality or sex, the code refers to alternative words for homosexual sex, or other homosexuals – code words that other homosexuals would understand, but words that carried also a plausible deniability for one’s other vast audience. It is because the actual words themselves are unspeakable, and the acts they represent were considered obscene, that this coded language ever existed. O’Hara’s curation is different – he’s not hiding homosexuality from us as he writes about it – he is laying it right out there in his work. Boone also insisted that criticism of O’Hara which didn’t reference his homosexuality was incomplete, pointing directly at Vendler and Perloff. Surely, O’Hara wrote

very candidly about his sexual orientation, body parts and functions, which, taken alone, would make it subversive. However, Boone’s point is that not only was open homosexuality an active resistance to society, but O’Hara’s views on Russia, war in general, patriotism, American foreign policy, capitalism, and masculinity expectations also made his poetry revolutionary.

How early critics like Vendler and Perloff missed O’Hara’s pugnacious homosexuality and politically charged poetry is certainly more a sign of the times in which they wrote or a discomfort with the subject, than any desire or intention on O’Hara’s part to code his work.

William Watkin, however, claims that early critical erasure of O’Hara’s homosexuality was more than just a cultural blindness or oversight: he believes that early critics, and even George Allen,

O’Hara’s posthumous editor, actively sought to edit the more obvious homosexual poems from the available (published) O’Hara canon. He calls these editing and critical choices “retroactive attempts at canon-making,” and goes on to write:

It comes as no surprise that these retroactive attempts at canon-making are the

result of the desire on the part of the critics partly to make O’Hara into the type of

care-free, aleatory poet that it is felt is needed within the American poetic

tradition, but also to make him fit into their memory of him. The appearance of

Poems Retrieved revealed a tendency on Allen’s part to [finally, six years after

The Collected Poems] consider exoteric the more explicit poems relating to

O’Hara’s homosexuality, but more generally reveals a will-to-canon, if you like,

which is identifiable as a desire to excerpt from the huge number of poems

O’Hara produced in a short period to produce a poet who can be both manageably

portable and also more easily assumed into academia which might otherwise

frown on the number of apparent “throw-away” or “staffage” poems contained

within his total output. This seems to me to go against the type of poet O’Hara

was much more than the Collected Poems, for it suggests a discourse of hits and

misses.10

I find this expose of apparent attitudes and motivations entirely plausible, especially considering

O’Hara was deceased and couldn’t respond to either criticism or editorial choices. I believe that

Allen acted with impunity and good intentions; he wrote that he struggled over which poems to include, ultimately deciding six years after Collected Poems, to publish everything he had collected. No doubt this decision was made in tandem with O’Hara’s friends and his sister,

Maureen, the executrix of his estate. And yet, it is an intriguing thought to consider how much societal disgust for homosexuality – still very present in the 1970s when O’Hara was posthumously published – played in the choices of poems brought to the surface by critical review and inclusion in the O’Hara books. In a strange way it seems, even after death, O’Hara was plagued by societal pressures that condemned him because of his sexuality.

It is no surprise, however, that criticism during his lifetime, and for the two decades that followed, mostly ignored O’Hara’s sexual preference. To be fair, writing about homosexuality in the 1960s and early 1970s, in any field except psychiatry, would have likely been poorly received.11 O’Hara, however, belongs to a pioneering era of queer writers to which Foucault

refers when he notes, “homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand its legitimacy

10 Watkin 124, 125. 11 Boone was, himself, a homosexual scholar, and insisted in his article that O’Hara’s sexual orientation (previously mostly ignored) was at the center of his poetry.

or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged.”12 Boone refers to this historical phenomenon when he states

that O’Hara’s sexuality and the early Cold War period “collide in his work.”13 His argument is

critical, and one on which this dissertation expands. Rather than the coded language of a century

of previous homosexual authors, O’Hara instead writes very brazenly about his sexual

orientation; I propose that this feature of his writing is precisely one of the features that makes it

subversive – and why O’Hara understood that much of his work was unpublishable at the time he

was writing.14 The aesthetic corner O’Hara turned with his work, regardless of when it was published or underwent literary criticism, is exactly the phenomenon Heather Love writes about when she insists, “for those alive to the fragility of power, there are many opportunities to turn situations of domination to advantage.”15 O’Hara certainly was aware of the “fragility of queer power” insofar as he witnessed it first hand during his Navy service, and that experience awakened him to the heteronormative domination of the times, a domination he had no intention of perpetuating with a secret life or coded poetry. Michael Mattix’s 2011 book, Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of Saying “I,” which argues that O’Hara’s “poetic of self” is, in fact, its strength rather than a weakness, supports and bolsters my argument that O’Hara’s unusual personal journal poetic style, read against the backdrop of the mid-century hysteria about masculinity, works to highlight an alternative way to express the American (masculine) experience.

12 Foucault 101. 13 Boone 65. 14 British and American homosexual poets and authors had long written in code when writing about subjects that were considered unpublishable by the mainstream publishing distribution chain. Poets who wrote for other homosexuals using coded language included Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and W.H. Auden, among many others. 15 Love 2.

Lytle Shaw’s 2006 book, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, also investigates the

prominent coterie component in O’Hara’s work, but not in the same sense as the early criticism

that feared the work would be read as light or unserious. Shaw sees O’Hara’s coterie references

as evidence of what he calls membership in “privileged circles devoted to covert political or

literary activity.”16 Shaw is correct to refer to these privileged circles (aesthetic political

outliers), and I argue that this “membership” personalizes and gives life to every homosexual

man’s everyday challenge to subvert the official version of the monolithic American male; it is

the precisely the beginnings of this “covert political” literary activity I will investigate in this

chapter and the next. 17

In recent years, many critics have, of course, focused their criticism specifically on O’Hara’s

homosexuality in attempts to understand his poetry as queer literature. 18 In 1952, sociologist

Edward Sagarin (anonymously writing as Donald Webster Cory) wrote:

Historians of the American scene have even been deluded into believing that the

compete cloak of silence [about homosexuality in American literature] existed

because there was no homosexuality at the time, and they denounced those who

interpret in this manner the writings of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and

Henry James . . .19

Sagarin makes a seminal point here that perhaps O’Hara and his generation were among the first

16 Shaw 21. 17 Shaw 21. It should be noted, however, that most non-normative and marginalized groups would hardly describe themselves as “privileged” as they spend decades fighting for civil rights. 18 Boone was the first to suggest this in 1979, but recent scholars Crain, Epstein, Mattix, and Hazel Smith have expanded this field of inquiry. 19 From a speech to the International Committee for Sexual Equality, September 1952, in Ridinger 31. Sagarin, an academic sociologist, wrote anonymously about homosexuality to protect his standing in academic circles.

writers to remove the code from around their descriptions of non-normative sexual orientation

and the subculture they inhabited, but that in no way indicates that homosexuals hadn’t existed –

or written – before them.

1.2 Dissertation Terminology

A brief word on the terms I’ve chosen to use in the dissertation. I use the term “homosexual”

throughout this dissertation, despite the fact that it becomes somewhat cumbersome and seems

dated; I do this because it was the commonly used “official” term during O’Hara’s lifetime to

describe men who had sex with men. The adjective “gay,” which originally meant simply

carefree or cheerful, was eventually co-opted by homosexuals as their preferred term for

describing same-sex sexual orientation, but not until around the mid-1960s, near the end of

O’Hara’s life. Indeed, for several decades, from perhaps the 1930s, “gay” could have either

meaning and the word was, in fact, sometimes used as coded language by homosexuals. O’Hara

died in 1966, before the beginning of the modern “gay liberation” movement, and as such was

just at the cusp of the vocabulary change.20 Sedgwick has written extensively about the use of terminology in field of queer theory, and I take her position herein. In Epistemology of the

Closet, published in 1990, she writes about the topic of terminology:

A note on terminology. There is, I believe, no satisfactory rule for choosing

between the usages “homosexual” and “gay,” outside of a post-Stonewall context

[1969] where “gay” must be preferable since it is the explicit choice of a large

20 The Stonewall Inn riots are a commonly used marker for the beginning of the modern “gay liberation” movement. The riots occurred in 1969, three years after O’Hara’s death.

number of the people to whom it refers. Until recently [this was written in 1990] it

seemed that “homosexual,” though it severely risked anachronism in any

application before the late nineteenth century, was still somehow less temporally

circumscribed than “gay,” perhaps because it sounded more official, not to say

diagnostic. That aura of timelessness about the word has, however, faded

rapidly—less because of the word’s manifest inadequacy to the cognitive and

behavioral maps of the centuries before its coining, than because the sources of its

authority for the century after have seemed increasingly tendentious and dated.

Thus “homosexual” and “gay” seem more and more to be terms applicable to

distinct, nonoverlapping periods in the history of a phenomenon for which there

then remains no overarching label.21

1.3 Chapter Organization

I have segmented the dissertation into chapters which focus on each of these aspects of

O’Hara’s work. In Chapter 2: Everyday Poetry as a Tactic to Counter Institutionalized

Dominance, I am primarily interested in exploring the content of O’Hara’s non-metric free verse as it upends expectations for poetic content in mid-century America. Why is it that he chooses to write about insignificant internal thoughts, social events with his friends, or birthday poems, rather than more typical poetic subjects such as nature, the sublime, or thoughts on the human condition? Further, why does he choose not to pursue publication of his poetry, and does that

21 Epistemology 16, 17. I also avoid using the term “homophobic” to describe anti-homosexual tendencies, words, or actions. It is ahistorical for the era about which I write. See Wickberg.

refusal play a part in the content of his work? O’Hara writes very explicitly about body parts and functions, and about homosexual desire and sex. He is among the first generation of poets to be so explicit, and I’m interested in why that was. In this chapter, I examine both early and contemporary criticism of O’Hara’s poems, the vast majority of which were only published posthumously after his untimely accidental death in 1966 at age 40. My thesis in this chapter is that O’Hara’s sexual orientation is critical for understanding his artistic decisions and that to ignore such a central identity-producing element misses the point of his poems and existence completely. I also investigate the theoretical work of Michel de Certeau, who wrote about the everyday tactics marginalized people use to resist institutional domination. Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick’s queer theories about the use of literature in queer identity formation also inform my claims. As a homosexual, O’Hara’s person, his self, was anathema to America throughout his lifetime. He became aware of this in no uncertain terms during the war, and, once he was in college, vowed never to be subject to such criticism again. Much of his poetry, then is oppositional, defiant, resistant to the conservative society in which he lived. Without taking his sexual orientation into account, it’s impossible to see what he was working to comment upon and overcome personally.

Chapter 3: Living Inauthentically: The Wartime Activation of a Gay Poet is critical to my discussion of O’Hara’s post-war life and work because it examines his memories of the experience of serving in the Navy in World War II against the intensely anti-homosexual military policies and attitudes he and other homosexuals endured. My claim in this chapter is that this service experience, like for many men, is what formed the mature man, Frank O’Hara. Drawing from hundreds of poems written after the war when O’Hara was an undergraduate at Harvard

(1946 – 1950) and a graduate student at Michigan (1950 – 1951), I carefully lay out my claim that his wartime service was the key factor in his choice to live as a homosexual man and write genuine poetry, despite the fact that much of it would have been unpublishable in the 1950s and

1960s because of its raw homosexual content.

In Chapter 4: Cold War Poetry: The Complexities of Russia, Race, and Gender, I complete my look at O’Hara’s politicization as a young man in the midst of the early Cold War, and his views on war, America, American foreign policy, and on Russia – the despised enemy of

America during this era. O’Hara had been a serious piano student as a boy and learned to love

Russian classical music with his father. This aesthetic romance followed him into his years as a literature major in college, where he added Russian poets to his list of personal favorites.

Viewing Russian cultural contributions such as ballet, poetry, novels, and classical music,

O’Hara refused to participate in the Russia-baiting of the Cold War and wrote many poems about the absurdity of it all. The era in which O’Hara wrote was racked with political angst about both race and sexual orientation and his awareness that both had become political capital used for opportunism informed much of his poetry – and his world view.

Chapter 5: An Indomitable Rebel in the Decade of the Crisis of Masculinity examines the mature writing of Frank O’Hara as it interacts with the domestic and gender-role oddities of the

1950s, which has been called the Decade of the Crisis of Masculinity. In this chapter, I am interested in investigating both the cultural historical background of the crisis and how it can be recognized in American lives and whether the crisis touched homosexual men like O’Hara. How is the Crisis of Masculinity tied with homosexuality? What is the cultural history of the early

Cold War period with respect to homosexuality? In what ways does O’Hara subvert societal pressures using his poetry?

Finally, in Chapter 6, the Epilogue, I examine the poetry of a contemporary New York poet,

Tommy Pico, in conversation with Frank O’Hara and the style he created. Pico, also a homosexual New York poet, continues O’Hara’s development of the flaneur-poet style. He carries O’Hara’s mid-century developments into the 21st century with his long-form poets consisting of an SMS message and his candid sexual texts.

Frank O’Hara’s poetry is still engendering scholarship and finding new readers fully six decades after much of it was written. It contains a magical quality that both allows a glimpse of the American mid-century, and yet, at the same time, feels remarkably current and new. With the rise of social media at the turn of the 21st century, O’Hara’s work found yet another new reference point, as a predecessor of Facebook posts or tweets. O’Hara served as a mentor to a new generation of poets for a few years before he died, but his mentorship has continued now through two additional generations of poets, a trend I fully expect will continue.

CHAPTER 2

EVERYDAY POETRY AS A TACTIC TO COUNTER INSTITUTIONAL DOMINANCE

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce my dissertation thesis which envisions Frank

O’Hara as a subversive writer whose poetry is resistant to the society in which he lived.

It is my contention that O’Hara’s tendency to resist cultural pressures in his poetry comes from societal alienation caused by his open homosexuality. Raised in an Irish Catholic family in a suburb of Boston, O’Hara came early to the study of, and love for, aesthetics – he was a pianist and classical music enthusiast as a boy, and found, in addition, a love for literature and visual art while in high school. A bully broke his nose when he was a boy, and as a small and somewhat effeminate boy and young man, he likely suffered other taunts as he was growing up. The summer after high school graduation, at age 18, he enlisted in the strongly anti-homosexual Navy and served from 1944 to 1946, ending his service in the South Pacific. He kept to himself during service, occasionally attending concerts or museums when he was on leave. Books kept him company, and he writes particularly about reading and re-reading James Joyce during his service.

After his discharge, O’Hara was among the first-generation college students to use the G.I. Bill when he matriculated at Harvard in the Fall semester of 1946. Serendipitously, he soon met

Edward Gorey, who was a much more demonstrative and open homosexual than O’Hara at the time, and the two of them became fast friends.22 Early on, O’Hara switched his major from music to literature, later meeting poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch; all three quickly became lifelong friends. Upon graduation in 1950, O’Hara moved to the University of Michigan

22 Gorey became well-known as a writer, illustrator, and cartoonist.

in Ann Arbor to earn on an M. A. in English Literature; at the time, a graduate degree that consisted of an academic year and a summer. Gorey, Ashbery, and Koch moved to New York, where they became friends with other young poets and emerging visual artists in the vibrant

Greenwich Village art scene. In the fall of 1951, O’Hara joined his friends in New York and began his abbreviated fifteen-year adulthood.

I claim in this dissertation that, despite the lack of an angry, anarchistic poetic voice, O’Hara should be viewed as a subversive poet – a man who was moved to write critically about the society surrounding him – a society that most forcefully did not approve of his sexual orientation. The early Cold War period in America was not a particularly hospitable place for

O’Hara or any homosexual. As a homosexual man, O’Hara violated American precepts about masculinity, and America wanted him to hide, to feel shame, to keep his secret under wraps.

However, once he was discharged from the Navy, O’Hara refused to do any of those things.

Instead, the world with which he enveloped himself was one which would provide nurture: a cosmopolitan world, which in some ways, represented the first post-gender, post-racial generation in American history. O’Hara also eschewed the nuclear family, the unit on which the

American myth rhetoric was built, for a family-of-choice – a close group of arts producers – who substituted for his biological family. This feature of his life, too, was outside societal expectations. On this subject, Lytle Shaw notes that O’Hara:

sought to create a context for writing in which the fluid subject and gender

positions he valued could take on a socially embedded set of meanings. . . . it

[O’Hara’s poetry] position[s] constructed, afamilial relationships as an alternative

to more organic structures of community like the family and the nation: selves

become legible within social frameworks that seek to explain the self and its

feelings. . . . Here the artistic grounds of O’Hara’s literary world—especially his

connections to other artists and poets in the East Village and at MoMA—

constitute such afamilial “social frameworks.” 23

Shaw indicates that these afamilial relationships are built around aesthetics, and I agree, however, a more important baseline feature of O’Hara’s family-of-choice was gender-related. The homosexual men in the coterie of friends unconsciously paired with either single women, or with the wives of heterosexual men. More than one of the married men (including Larry Rivers and

Fairfield Porter) in the group had sexual dalliances with one or more of the homosexual men.24

There were also numerous heterosexual romances, both among single persons and extra-marital affairs. The coterie of friends somehow absorbed these multiple gendered relationships and remained intact, providing the afamilial social framework for one another as Shaw has described.

O’Hara’s poetry was subversive, but not revolutionary in tone like his contemporary poets and friends, the Beats. O’Hara nevertheless resisted many of the mid-century societal pressures by asserting choices counter to cultural expectations with regard to interlocking societal expectations and norms - the performance of masculinity, Cold War rhetoric and patriotism, capitalism and consumerism, and the so-called American dream. The combination of his quiet resistance, camp humor, and every day, run-of-the-mill “life” poems has challenged both categorization and literary criticism for decades. Certainly, O’Hara’s poetry is funny, full of

23 Shaw 113, 114. 24 See Gooch, LeSueur, and Curtis for details of the complicated marital, sexual, and non-sexual relationships among these painters and poets.

ironic observation, and often deliberately obtuse. While these qualities are significant and interesting, I am more focused in this dissertation on their intersection with gender, sexual orientation, and cultural and political hegemony. Peter Stoneley has also taken this approach when he writes about contemporary scholarship on O’Hara which has historicized the mid- century era into gendered roles – some of which were permitted and others which were not.

Stoneley explains his interest in this approach:

Recent studies have historicized this aggressive separating out of licit and illicit

identities, and the writing, such as O'Hara's, that responds to it. Andrew Epstein,

for instance, places O'Hara and others within the context of the Cold War. He

reads the poets of the era in relation to a McCarthyistic culture of paranoia,

surveillance, and containment, in which homosexuality and un-American

tendencies were seen as continuous with each other and as dangerous for the

nation. Michael Davidson is similarly keen to observe a national-paternal

oppression in the mid-century United States. 25

I believe that this historicist approach yields the most accurate view of what O’Hara was working to achieve in his poetry, and that by ignoring the societal pressures faced by O’Hara and other homosexuals during the early Cold War period, early critics of O’Hara’s work missed the most important aspect of his work. William Watkin understood the importance of this approach, and wrote about it in his book, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde:

25 Stoneley 499. See also Epstein 40-45, and Davidson 115.

Clearly it is possible, as Gooch, has done, to read the Collected Poems as a

biographical document which is always at the same time a cultural document due

to the apparent total integration of O’Hara both into the cultural milieu of the time

and also ultimately into his poems. This can then lead onto the kind of politicized

re-readings of his work . . . but here I would rather use it in another fashion. Just

as is I will show that the geographic spaces of America and Europe allow a subtle

politicization of the avant-garde poetics . . . so I would rather use the milieu and

the biography of O’Hara not so much in straight forward historicist terms by

rather first and foremost as tropes whose cultural and temporal specificity invests

them always with an ideological edge which is a key to introducing materialism

back into hermeneutic challenge of the Collected Poems.26

The ideological edge that Watkins describes, is, however, just the “political re-reading” I wish to perform here. I agree with Watkin that Gooch (and LeSueur, for that matter) believe that

O’Hara’s Collected Poems – most of them carefully dated – taken as a whole, form a biography of their author. However, that point of view takes each of the poems as truthful, and I don’t believe they should be read that way. On the one hand, O’Hara’s poetry is, indeed, autobiographical in that he writes about a character named Frank O’Hara’s daily life. However, I read O’Hara’s daily life poetry as highly curated and selectively presented in much the same way as a years-long Facebook archive would read. There are important distinctions that must be considered when reading these poems, including what was included in the composition, what

26 Watkin 129.

was left out, what actually happened or was seen, what is artifice, and so on. I employ the work of de Certeau and Sedgwick to help make those numerous distinctions when looking at O’Hara’s work. I believe combining elements of a historicist approach as well as reading O’Hara’s poetry as political and carefully curated and packaged for readers’ consumption results in a clearer picture of what O’Hara achieved.

I have decided in this dissertation to work to contextualize O’Hara’s poems in the historical era in which they were written, in order to help substantiate my claim that O’Hara should be read as a resistor whose poetry works to subvert the political power structures of the American mid- century. Rather than poetic structure, genre, or style, however, I am interested primarily in the content and tone of O’Hara’s work, and the discovery of what those elements reveal about his judgement on the environment and attitudes with which he lived. While it seeks to resist various societal expectations, O’Hara’s poetry does so in an everyday, quiet fashion, and, as a result, reads almost like journal or a collection of internal thoughts and dialogues rather than an iconoclastic manifesto. The immediacy of his mostly unedited poems – what he saw on the street, or a newspaper headline, or the teller at the bank – have somehow retained their sparkle seven decades later.

Read with an eye for observations on power and domination, my claim is that O’Hara’s poetry takes on a clearly political tone. His work can be classified as avant-garde in many regards; looking at his content, but also his non-metrical, freeform, open-field structure, one sees a clear line of ancestry from the early twentieth century modernist writers. O’Hara’s poems, read from a twenty-first century viewpoint, however, often resemble social media posts, with all the attendant bias motivation to only record those events, people, or things that add to ones’ social

hegemony. His poems read as believable, but not always completely true. O’Hara does this quite expertly: when he’s happy, he wants readers to see how happy he is, when he’s “blue,” he hopes readers feel sorry for him or commiserate, when he’s writing vulgarly, he hopes to shock viewers with his perversity. His writing was usually about the moment – he was dedicated in his writing to record contemporaneous inner thoughts as well as events, time, happenings – as they occurred.

Rare is the O’Hara poem about the past or about memories or regrets. Those reflective moments of every life do not seem to encourage him to write. O’Hara’s poetry can be revelatory, but it is never typical confessional genre poetry, a style that was popular at the time he was writing, but that he and his friends abhorred. He writes colloquially, only occasionally inserting a cultural or literary reference that readers might not know. Given that he was writing primarily for himself and his artist friends, most of his readers would have understood his culture references. O’Hara’s work often portrays a social butterfly, hilariously funny, campy, enamored with pop culture, living for weekends, parties, and lunch hours.

Maggie Nelson works to untangle genres when she writes about the New York School Poets in general:

Many advocates of New York School writing champion the fact that it tends to be

autobiographical while avoiding the confessional, as if the latter should be

avoided like the plague, or as if the borders between the two were ever clear-cut.

There are potentially interesting distinctions to be made here, but I think it a

mistake to police their borders too vigorously.27

27 Nelson 88, 89.

I generally agree with Nelson’s point here, with this caveat: in the case of O’Hara’s poetry, I

believe the genre term autobiographical is somewhat misleading as I outline in great detail

throughout this chapter. Yes, the events and conversations in his poems have been present in his

life, but “autobiographical” implies, in my mind, a kind of truth-telling that I believe is not at all

what O’Hara was working towards. A 21st century corollary would be to publish someone’s

Facebook page as an autobiography; a text I suggest is simply too curated, too exhibitionistic to be called an autobiography.

Nevertheless, my claim throughout the dissertation, is that this politicization of O’Hara is always tied up, for him as it was for mid-century America as a whole, with the performance of masculinity. Micah Mattix, who wrote an article entitled, “Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems: 21st

Century Poetry Written in 1964” notes that, in his poems, O’Hara, “recreates the poet’s experience of the world. He addresses others in order to combat a sense of loneliness, sharing his gossipy, sometimes snarky take of modern life, his unfiltered enthusiasm, and his boredom in a direct, conversational tone.”28 While I don’t sense loneliness in O’Hara’s poetry to the extent

Mattix writes about, I agree this is exactly how O’Hara poems read – as his “experience of the world.” However, I would add to Mattix’s description, that O’Hara’s poetry, while about his life, is additionally always about resisting social pressures, and that it is particularly the male

American experience that O’Hara writes about. Therefore, O’Hara’s life poetry does not describe a masculinity the military would have approved of or expected, or the masculinity of the

28 “O’Hara’s Lunch Poems” n.p.

American domestic suburban organization man, but instead is a deliberate reversal – expressed as a highly individualized urban communal homosexual masculinity.

The everyday thoughts and events that populate O’Hara’s poetry interest me because I claim they hold an important key to why his poetry has stood the test of time, and how it speaks as a unique cultural reference to the two decades following the War. I am interested specifically in two aspects of the O’Hara biography: first, in how the life we know so much about became his, but, second, and just as important, how he used poetry to nourish himself and his friends. In a letter to his new friend, painter Jane Freilicher, written right before he moved to New York,

O’Hara said, “you could fit the people I write for into your john, all at the same time without raising an eyebrow.”29 His audience, in one sense, never changed – he was writing primarily for an audience no bigger than his (albeit large) group of friends. O’Hara could be egotistical about his talent, but that ego didn’t include chasing awards, or even pursuing the normal distribution chains for publishing poetry. Many of his early poems, for example, were distributed by mimeographed sheets sold for a dollar when a painter friend was lucky enough to get an art exhibition at Tibor Nagy Gallery or one of the other emerging artist galleries popping up all over downtown. This was, in fact, exactly how O’Hara’s reputation as a poet grew, and this unlikely underground distribution method seemed to satisfy him as much as his art exhibition writing for

ArtNews in the early years of his habitation in New York. “And don’t worry about your lineage / poetic or natural,” he wrote once, apparently unconcerned if he would ever be compared to a

Whitman or Auden.30 What is it that O’Hara was accomplishing with these poems? In the next

29 6 June 1951 letter in Poems Retrieved xv. 30 Collected Poems 307.

few pages, I’ll look at two critical theorists who I find particularly useful in analyzing O’Hara’s

poetic impulse: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michel de Certeau.

2.1 Sedgwick’s Paranoid and Reparative Reading Theory

In Sedgwick’s queer theory about the use of literature, from her copious writing about the

social construct of homosexuality, she holds that literature provides what she called “paranoid”

readings or “reparative” readings, particularly during queer identity formation in teens.31

Sedgwick noticed that homosexuals, particularly teens, chose and read literature by looking for clues and allegorical meanings to positively assist them in identity formation. These readings she called “reparative” readings. Sedgwick’s groundbreaking framework describes two ways for a queer reader to approach such literature: a paranoid reading and/or reparative one, based upon the reader’s frame of mind, the circumstances surrounding the reading, and the reader’s desired outcome. In addition, she wrote, certain types of literature also favor one category over another.

Sedgwick identifies camp as one type of reparative reading, but argues that there are certainly others – perhaps not yet named. I claim here that for O’Hara, the writing process was also reparative, and for his younger homosexual readers, the literature he wrote formed a reparative experience for them.32 My claim here is that, in addition to camp - the one type of reparative reading genre Sedgwick noticed, O’Hara’s work adds “the everyday” as an additional type. This is, therefore, an important link between Sedgwick’s work and that of de Certeau.

31 Despite the fact that Sedgwick was writing about teen identity formation, she wrote during a historical period in which teens had begun to explore their sexual identity; O’Hara and his generation would have come to this identity step later than their teen years – as college students in O’Hara’s case; regardless, whenever someone realizes they don’t fit into the normative sexual category, this identity process occurs, albeit for some it could be much later in life. 32 This would certainly be true of the younger poets O’Hara mentored at the end of his life – Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, etc.

A paranoid reading, writes Sedgwick, is one that requires the “hermeneutics of suspicion” to

ascertain the coded messages. It is watchful and wary in nature; to the extent that it occurs, it is

as a result of the paranoia surrounding homosexuals in everyday life: the same societal paranoia

that had required earlier generations of homosexual authors to write in coded literature in the

first place.33 This is a learned behavior resulting from the anti-homosexual norms and

expectations in society which won’t permit expressions of homosexuality to appear in print. The

paranoid reading references points consisting of secrets, suspicion, and the burden of double and

triple meanings. The desire to create a utopian community where differences of many kinds,

including race, sexual orientation, and the like, are trivialized and/or celebrated is a common

desire for homosexuals and other marginalized groups; using literature to do this work is also

common. Sedgwick noted, “The desire of a reparative impulse . . . is additive and accretive. Its

fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it

wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object [in O’Hara’s case, literature celebrating his

‘taboo utopian collective’] that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”34

Sedgwick’s description of a reparative reading is one in which homosexuals are able to expand their intake of certain types of literature to subsequently utilize it to earn identification and pleasure. A reparative reading allows the reader to let his guard and suspicions down and experience a brotherhood of community with the characters, thereby lifting the burden of being excoriated for one’s sexual orientation, even if only temporarily. Queer theorist Jeffrey P. Dennis

33 The reader should keep in mind that Sedgwick was writing after the so-called “gay liberation” movement began when she describes this paranoia. Society was far more paranoid about homosexuality during O’Hara’s lifetime. 34 Novel Gazing 27, 28 emphasis mine.

refers to the same phenomenon as “becoming a queer reader” when he writes: “I will contend

that those men and boys deprived of an LGBT subculture (as are virtually all children and

adolescents) must always construct our masculinity in this way, by becoming ‘queer readers,’

forcefully dragging from media texts the possibility of love.” 35 The ability to move from a paranoid reading of recognition to a reparative reading is an identity step in building a sustainable life for a homosexual by adding to his understanding that his future can be different – better - than his past or present. It is a remarkably effective self-empowerment strategy, although homosexuals often come into these readings completely unwittingly, learning as they read to look for a discovery of a private message or a secretly shared badge of identity, precisely what

Sedgwick is describing, and what many of O’Hara’s poems accomplish. I find Sedgwick’s descriptions remarkably similar to both what O’Hara was doing with his poetry when writing it, as well as similar in the response of his readers. Dennis refers to this reparative quality in storytelling as “good beyond hope.”36

Andrew Epstein also writes about O’Hara’s use of camp as a survival mechanism in his book, Beautiful Enemies:

O’Hara’s preoccupation with change and the protean nature of the self can be

seen as a strategy he uses in order to endure in a culture of violent homophobia

and homogeneity – as Mutlu Konuk Blasing observes, O’Hara’s ‘imperative to

35 Dennis 208. 36 Dennis 208. Indeed, the reparative nature of O’Hara’s poetry at times presents a challenge for those interested in writing historically about literature. It is absolutely true that Sedgewick’s observation about reparative reading conflicts in important ways with a purely historical reading of a particular text. Reparative reading infuses new life continually for the reader attuned to it because of the way the reader is using the text to gain the strength to exist in a society that de-values them. What results is a method, not necessarily only for viewing the society in which the text was written, but a method for also using that text to understand the contemporary society that still issues institutionalized dominance over marginalized people.

change is less an essential or a historical value than a defensive response to a state

of emergency; indeed, it signifies less a freedom than a necessity . . . To resist a

reified identity is necessary for survival—as a gay man, for example.’37

While I agree with Sedgwick, Epstein, and Blasing about the homosexual man’s use of camp as protective, I also think it served another function in O’Hara’s life – his sense of humor – his camp personality - was an important trait as a community builder. His desire to build a community – a family-of-choice – caused him to hone a wicked, campy sense of humor as a way of making friends, particularly when he first moved to New York and wanted to associate with the hyper-masculine first-generation Abstract Expressionist male painters. Dan Chiasson’s interesting essay for The New Yorker, “Frank O’Hara’s Notorious B.I.G.,” shares a similar sentiment:

O’Hara’s first real accomplishment was his personality, which became famous

long before his poems did. But his personality was always a brilliant contrivance,

practically a work of art: improvised, self-revising, full of feints . . . Someone

with O’Hara’s presence could afford to regard the writing of poetry as a

secondary act, a transcript of personality.38

“Contrivance” is a good way to think about the life that O’Hara both created, and then immortalized in his poetry. It was his life, yes, but it didn’t happen by chance – he created it, and then used it – his creation, as Chiasson suggests, to write poetry. This is a subtle difference from seeing his work as autobiographical, but an important one.

37 Beautiful Enemies 45. 38 Allesandri n.p.

O’Hara’s poems utilize camp dialogue and characters to develop this reparative response, but

go far beyond camp and coded messages in also offering to homosexual readers a reparative

experience built around the discovery of everyday identity, community, and personal power.39

Dhaenens, Biltereyst, and Van Bauwel, queer film scholars, write about why coming to literature

in a reparative way is so essential for gay identity formation. They describe a viewpoint that sees

American cultural hegemony – the dominant worldview, the cultural norm – by its very nature,

stripping homosexuals of personal power. Queer reading, then, with its resistance to

heteronormative hegemony, can restore a sense of personal power as a feature of the reparative

influence.40 Heather Love currently works on these theoretical constructs as defined by

Sedgwick. She writes, “Sedgwick in her work explicitly sought to clear intellectual and affective

space for others - to grant permission.”41 Isn’t this what O’Hara’s poetic also does? He works to normalize the homosexual gaze, homosexual sex, friendships based around aesthetics, and the critical nature of community in one’s life. The permission Love refers to, in O’Hara’s case, served a dual role – first, for him in the writing and then subsequently for whomever reads his poetry with a reparative hope.

In addition to permission-granting, many of O’Hara’s poems use a dialectical form, in which he talks to himself, he has an unnamed narrator talk to another unnamed character, and occasionally, he talks to a character named Frank O’Hara. Regardless of who is talking to whom

39 It is important that the reader understand the distinction between homosexual authors writing in double entendre versus writing in code. Double entendre is meant to be obvious, with a false innocence about the risqué meaning. Homosexual code was more opaque – meant to communicate to one’s homosexual audience, while at the same time maintaining plausible deniability for non-homosexual readers. 40 Krijnen 79-92. 41 “Truth and Consequences” 235.

(it’s often quite unclear), these poems further illustrate a theory Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noticed

particularly in queer writing and wrote about in her book Epistemology of the Closet. She notices

on re-reading an earlier version of her book that a characteristic she terms, “insistent

perspectivism” is often present when reading queer literature. The concept relates to her theories on “paranoid reading / reparative reading,” which I discussed above. However, insistent perspectivism, which is also often found in O’Hara’s poetry, Sedgwick has defined this way:

Another aspect of Epistemology of the Closet that stands out on rereading is its

insistent perspectivism. Along with the ready use of the first person, this may

have been something learned from 1970s feminist writing: that concerning social

relation, the questions of who’s speaking, to whom? Who wants to know, and

what for? What do these answers do? are not only politically conscientious but

crucially productive. And where the topic is sexual knowledge itself, such

questions go to the heart of what is discovered as much as to the process of

inquiry.42

For marginalized people, to whom one is talking makes all the difference in how honest or open it is safe for one to be in conversation. Sedgwick’s theory of insistent perspectivism requires constant monitoring with regard to whom one is speaking (or writing) to, and what that person will do with the information. This paranoia is a required part of writing or reading for anyone who is not a part of the hegemonic societal norm. O’Hara seems to have intuited this during his

42 Epistemology xv.

lifetime; this intuition led him to be very cautious (some might say, paranoid) about publishing his poetry to an audience beyond his trusted friends.

What ideological function do O’Hara’s poems perform? His language is colloquial on purpose, making his poems very accessible. However, they work on various levels, so that often he says he’s writing about one thing, but in reality, he’s writing about another subject entirely.

An example of this parallelism is this poem, ostensibly about how dirty New York is:

Is it dirty does it look dirty that's what you think of in the city does it just seem dirty that's what you think of in the city you don't refuse to breathe do you 43

Awkwardly entitled, “Song,” the first stanza of the poem reads nothing like a song, so O’Hara is already playing with readers’ anticipation merely with his title. Nevertheless, the topic of the poem is urban grime – or is it? This stanza sets up a familiarity with the reader – hasn’t everyone who takes public transportation and lives in a high-density urban city had the thought while going through their day about how dirty their surroundings are? Trash cans, street clutter, detritus in the subway, dirty cabs – it is a democratizing stanza. The final line, however, gives the reader a sense that this author has an edge to him – he’s impudent, a wiseacre: “you don’t refuse to breathe do you,” he asks, which is akin to saying, stop griping about it – it won’t hurt you. The poem continues:

someone comes along with a very bad character he seems attractive, is he really, yes. very he's attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes 44

43 Collected Poems 327. 44 Collected Poems 327.

This stanza brings the surprise – the subject suddenly changes and the reader wonders if they’ve misunderstood. We now seem to be conversing about a new romantic interest – “someone comes along.” And on top of that, the poet is a man, but he’s also writing about a man, so this is not only a subject turn but a display of unexpected pronouns. It’s natural for O’Hara, of course, he is attracted to men as a homosexual. Reeling us in again, he refers to the “someone” turning out to be the ubiquitous “bad boy” attraction – a delinquent, a malefactor, a cool but angry young man - a subject many young single people would be able to relate to. “He seems attractive” he writes, and then, in a bit of dialogue, repeats himself: “is he really?” “yes. very.” This someone is as attractive as he is bad. “Is it?” asks the other; “yes,” replies our narrator. There are no question marks despite these embedded questions in several lines. It’s obvious he’s in conversation, if even with himself.

that's what you think of in the city run your finger along your no-moss mind that's not a thought that's soot 45

The penultimate stanza returns us to the original idea of dirt in the city by repeating his line from the first stanza, “that’s what you think of in the city.” However, now the reader thinks maybe we’re talking about a “dirty” someone, rather than a “dirty” city. Suddenly, O’Hara turns again, asking the other character to “run your finger along your no-moss mind,” a command. Do this.

Before the reader perhaps realizes what the narrator has asked, he makes the point of the stanza:

“that’s not a thought that’s soot.” Are you, reader, capable of having dirty thoughts? Can your

45 Collected Poems 327.

thoughts be as dirty as the city is dirty with soot? And in the context of a same-sex relationship with a “bad boy” type, what other images does this conjure up? Finally:

and you take a lot of dirt off someone is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly you don't refuse to breathe do you 46

“And you take a lot of dirt off someone” refers again to the bad boy in a relationship – the someone with bad character. Any reader who has had a relationship like this understands immediately what he’s talking about: the someone who takes advantage of you, who cheats on you, who lies to you, whatever the specifics. By this stanza in the poem, O’Hara has shown the reader that homosexual relationships have the same potential traps as heterosexual ones – this poem brings the two together. The second line preforms another surprise – is it, or is it not true, according to this poem, that his character is less bad as you “take a lot of dirt off someone?” In other words, if you don’t object about the abuse, will it continue? “It improves constantly,” he writes – although we all know it doesn’t. Finally, repeated from the first stanza, “you don't refuse to breathe do you.”47 The third and final surprise – “breathe” as in breathe the dirty city? Or are we talking about physical closeness with a romantic partner, breathing, smelling, scent?

What O’Hara accomplishes in this poem is to equate romantic attraction, especially with someone who will hurt you, with the dirt in the city. He’s riffing on the city, but he’s talking about sex. Is it dirty? Of course the city is dirty - it’s filthy. Then why do we all want to live here? Well, he says, let me compare it to being sexually attracted to a bad boy - why do I always fall in love with people of bad character? Same thing, isn’t it? He’s also managed to convince a

46 Collected Poems 327. 47 Collected Poems 327.

heterosexual reader who has had a similar experience that it’s the same, gay or straight. There are

reversals, surprises, and wry humor with a wink.

Reading O’Hara as a political poet helps unlock the key to his poetic discovery: that how we

each perform our internal identity in an effort to be “seen,” through our clothing, accessories,

speech, body expressions, and our daily lives, is something worth writing about. O’Hara’s

conscious choice to elevate his everyday activities by recording them follows a tradition that

other marginalized people had been doing for centuries, and French scholar and historian of

everyday life Michel de Certeau studied extensively in the decades after O’Hara’s life.

2.2 De Certeau and Everyday Resistance to Institutional Dominance

In his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau claims that the most significant form

of resistance to institutional dominance - governmental, religious, cultural - is found in the tactics

of the everyday. He describes the tactics of common people for keeping or reclaiming their

autonomy from pervasive societal forces of institutions, governments, and even culture. He

writes poetically about the everyday, elevating it as if it was the most important part of life. In

Volume 2 of his book, he wrote, “Everyday life is what we are given every day (or what is willed

to us), what presses us, even oppresses us, because there does exist an oppression of the

present.”48 What de Certeau means here is that there is a commonality of human experience about the everyday. However, the everyday business of life is not the same for everyone. For some, despite that their everyday life may not announce it, there are oppressions, whether dealt by the state or another institution, or merely by the circumstances of one’s birth, place of

48 Volume 2 3.

residence, gender, sexual orientation, or even by the secrets one carries day to day. These are the

“tactics of the everyday” that fascinated de Certeau. He wrote, “Everyday life is what holds us intimately, from the inside. . . . What interests the historian of everyday life is the invisible.”49

de Certeau describes his interest in these behaviors as an operational logic, “whose models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive.”50 What he means by this is that marginalized people have, for thousands of years, and continuing today, to find small, almost inconspicuous, displays of resistance even when they are without the power to overcome their particular domination itself.

This description can be used to understand aspects of the early Cold War period when homosexual men sought ways to thrive – even just to survive – that were transformative, rather than simply a camouflage. Taken together, these small practices begin to form a culture, and in the 1950s, it can be seen in the revitalized urban gay culture. In de Certeau’s example of

American Indian culture, he concludes that, “these ‘ways of operating’ constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production.”51

In addition, de Certeau insists that power is negotiated in what he calls, “the place of free play and creativity,” a metaphorical place certainly applicable to artists and writers. O’Hara, for example, was very tactically using his surroundings to write poetry – using it creatively to create art. O’Hara was saying, “here’s how I’m defining myself in relationship to you,” followed

49 Volume 2 3. 50 Everyday Life xi. 51 Everyday Life xiv.

immediately by soliciting a reader response – whether that be disgust, shock, laughter, or camaraderie. de Certeau writes that the reader, “insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation; he poaches on it, is transported into it.”52 The reader then is free to use the text for his own life, translating it into what the reader is feeling, thus transforming a private existence into a public one.

de Certeau’s critical theory about the strength against domination found in everyday life directly connects Frank O’Hara’s poetry to the early Cold War period. Not only that, but it is the same ingredient that makes the poetry so readable today. For O’Hara was not just a consumer of culture, though he was definitely that, but he also was a producer of culture. He created his life and poetry by refusing boundaries and expectations about what a successful American masculine life looked like, going beyond those strict boundaries to embrace a particular life, which, for him, allowed his poetry to soar above the societal pressures that wished him invisible, erased. The groups de Certeau studied to sharpen his theory were common people – not writers, poets, or painters like O’Hara and his friends. de Certeau called those he studied, “unrecognized producers,” and wrote that as such, “poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers produce through their signifying practices . . .” 53 Note the Marxist language in his description – he sees these populations as both consumers of these operational tactics, but also producers, as the tactics produce a result in their lives. I believe writing poetry was exactly this for O’Hara – it was a production of a result that worked as what de Certeau would call a mode of operation for him. In other words, he used his

52 Everyday Life xxi. 53 Everyday Life xviii.

time to write poetry as a signifying practice. It cost him time, but it was also consumed by his

readers, a group that he worked seemingly hard to keep small and intimate. And both – the writer

and the reader - found the work empowering.

How did Frank O’Hara use his poetry about daily life to uncover freedom and power from

the dominant, heteronormative society that found him to be a pervert, or mentally ill? de Certeau

observed non-dominant groups, “use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which

they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it. The strength of their

difference lay in the procedures of ‘consumption.’”54 He noted that users make “innumerable and infinitesimal transformation of and within the dominant culture economy in order to adapt it to their own interests.”55 Like de Certeau’s study subjects, O’Hara worked within the realm of culture in order to achieve his freedom from institutionalized domination, and by that I mean he both consumed and produced culture as a tactic for freedom. de Certeau wrote about “culture” specifically:

Like law (one if its models), culture articulates conflicts and alternately

legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force. It develops in an atmosphere

of tensions, and often of violence, for which it provides symbolic balances,

contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary. The

tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the

strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices.56

54 Everyday Life xiii. 55 Everyday Life xiv. 56 Everyday Life xvii.

O’Hara once wrote in an essay about his friend, painter Larry Rivers, that he believed Rivers’

paintings were “very much a diary of his experience,” and that O’Hara found Rivers to be

“ambitious to save these experiences.” 57 He goes on to write that Rivers work made him

(O’Hara) want “to be more keenly interested while I’m still alive.”58 This is the phenomenon de

Certeau describes the uses of free play and creativity to make tiny transformations of dominant

culture to adapt it to their own interests. O’Hara might have been writing about his own artistic

practice in the essay above – his work and Rivers’ work both had very similar production and

consumption goals.

The tactics or “ways of operating” de Certeau described in his work showed that dominated

people found ways in their everyday lives to modify their responses to the domination. He wrote

that, “many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are

tactical in character,” referring to his previous definition of the “tactics of the everyday.”59 The theorist might have been looking at a book of O’Hara’s poems when he wrote his list of these tactics – it is one and the same with O’Hara’s poetic subjects. de Certeau goes on to write that these tactical strategies to resist domination make a text what he calls, “habitable.” Read his example:

This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms

another person’s property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient.

Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and

57 Collected Poems 514. 58 Collected Poems 515. 59 Everyday Life xix.

memories; . . . as do pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their

desires and goals.60

In a very similar manner, O’Hara’s poems become habitable, particularly by his coterie of friends, but also by all readers who read him reparatively. Readers walk the streets of Manhattan with him, they feel the sting of the slur “faggot” spat at them, the joy at dancing in a gay bar, the love and attention of his friends – this concept of habitable text worked for O’Hara as he produced it, but it also works decades later for his readers. de Certeau wrote that “these ‘ways of operating’ constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users re-appropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production.”61 For marginalized communities of avant-

garde artists and poets like O’Hara, re-appropriating the streets of Manhattan in the mid-century

to overcome institutionalized domination is exactly the thesis de Certeau is working here.

Watkin writes that not only do O’Hara’s poems often celebrate a biographical occasion for

him or one of his friends – birthdays, anniversaries, bon voyage parties – but the settings of

O’Hara’s poems are, in fact, also culturally significant. Uptown, where O’Hara worked, was

inhabited by the consumers and approvers of culture – the art collectors, museums, and galleries.

However, the downtown crowd, where O’Hara socialized and lived, was the location of the

producers of culture, the avant-garde themselves. Watkin continues with his point:

the settings of each O’Hara poem are as culturally encoded as the occasions are

biographically encoded. The uptown and downtown areas are not only clearly

marked out as two separate but interrelated bourgeois environments, the

60 Everyday Life xxi. 61 Everyday Life xiv.

downtowners being the innovators and producers and the uptowners the reifiers

and consumers, but the spatial signifiers are significant in a way that up and down

only really can be in such a physically and socially vertical city.62

This thought connects with de Certeau’s theoretical construct that the walkable city is habitable in ways that preserve freedom and reverse dominion. Nevertheless, the two locations in the city are, in many ways, dependent on one another. The complexities of that dependence are the negotiable tactics of operation de Certeau writes about.

O’Hara and many of the homosexual men returning from World War II who intended to live authentic sexual lives preferred to settle in urban communities rather than return home to smaller cities or rural areas. Living in a city involves walking and public transportation, and de Certeau also found that city dwellers, such as O’Hara and his friends, used patterns of walking the city as a tactic:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at

which visibility begins. They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the

city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins

of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it.63

This final de Certeau tenet turns our attention to O’Hara as a poet-flaneur. The urban “text” to

which de Certeau refers is that map, created by the footsteps of the walker, of places that are

62 Watkin 129. 63 Everyday Life 93.

hostile to him and places that are hospitable, and a formula for how to navigate between the

two.64 Witness this in this section from an O’Hara poem:

Tonight you probably walked over here from Bethune Street down Greenwich Avenue with its sneaky little bars and the Women’s De- tention House, across 8th Street, but the acres of books and pillows and shoes and illuminating lampshades, past Cooper Union where we heard the piece by Mortie Feldman with “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in it and the Sagamore’s terrific “coffee and, Andy,” meaning “with a cheese Danish”— did you spit on your index fingers and rub the CEDAR’S neon circle for luck? did you give a kind thought, hurrying, to Alger Hiss?65

This poem is an example of the “urban text” to which de Certeau refers, having been worn into the sidewalks of the Village by O’Hara and his friends. The warmth, the familiarity, the predictability, not only of all these places, but of the safe path they create to get from one place to another is precisely what O’Hara was describing in these poems. de Certeau wrote, “the neighborhood can be considered as the progressive privatization of public space.”66 de Certeau’s

work also includes elements I find particularly useful when studying both the motivations and

the effects of O’Hara’s poetry – particularly his writing about urban life. de Certeau wrote, “The

city, in the strongest sense, is ‘poeticized’ by the subject: the subject has refabricated it for his or

her own use by undoing the constraints of the urban apparatus and, as a consumer of space,

imposes his or her own law on the external order of the city.”67 O’Hara, his friends, and

64 See the Epilogue of this dissertation for a 21st century poem by Tommy Pico that exemplifies this. 65 Collected Poems 265. 66 Vol 2 11. This tenet is also on full view in the urban poetry of 21st century poet, Tommy Pico. I’ve chosen one of his walking poems for use in the Epilogue of this dissertation. 67 Vol 2 13.

particularly his poems, literally created a space - a number of blocks - where he and his friends lived, worked, and played; thus making that space a safe zone for themselves, far removed from

the hostile anti-homosexual criticism of the rest of the country. Thus, the very “poeticizing” work de

Certeau describes, O’Hara accomplished in his poetry.

2.3 Goodman’s Essay on “Advance-Guard Writing”

Another writer – a contemporaneous one – significantly affected O’Hara’s view of the utopic life he invested himself in creating. A young Frank O’Hara, just moving to New York to join his friends in August 1950, age 24, came across an essay by one of his favorite authors – Paul

Goodman – that literally became a life roadmap for he and his friends, all of whom were emerging artists. Writing in the Kenyon Review about what he titled “Advance-Guard Writing,

1900 – 1950,” author and poet Paul Goodman not only analyzed the role of avant-garde literature from the first half of the century, but also foretold with great visionary detail what literature and art of the next decade would look like. When his article was published in the summer of 1951,

O’Hara was just moving to New York from Ann Arbor, having just earned an M.A. in English.

Goodman couldn’t have described more accurately what O’Hara and the New York School were about to do, had he been writing in 1970, looking backward, rather than 1951 when the New

York School poets were just becoming acquainted. His article said:

The essential present-day advance-guard is the physical reestablishment of

community. This is to solve the crisis of alienation in the simple way: the persons

are estranged from themselves, from one another, and from their artist; he takes

the initiative precisely by putting his arms around them and drawing them

together. In literary terms this means: to write for them about them personally. . . .

But such personal writing about the audience itself can occur only in a small

community of acquaintances, where everybody knows everybody and understands

what is at stake; in our estranged society, it is objected, just such intimate

community is lacking. Of course it is lacking! The point is that the advance-guard

action helps create such community, starting with the artist's primary friends. The

community comes to exist by having its culture; the artist makes this culture.68

Goodman attributes the necessity of community building to the very nature of avant-garde writing. He wrote that, reviled at first by the status-quo (the “garde”), all avant-garde artistic and literary individuals tend to form these communities for their very survival. In the wake of the alienation, paranoia, state-sponsored suspicion, and the conformity-celebrating post-war era, the desire for camaraderie makes even more sense than, perhaps, in any previous period. O’Hara was so enthused when he read Goodman’s article, that he pointed the article out to friends, encouraging them to pick it up and read it. He then set out to adapt Goodman’s description of community as his plan for life.

2.4 Autobiographical Poetry or Fiction?

In complex ways I will describe in this dissertation, while O’Hara’s poetry, at first glance, appears to compress his life and art, potentially placing it firmly among other post-war American literature which did just that, I don’t think his poetry actually does perform this literary compression. I claim instead that O’Hara carefully curated and exhibited a life in his work, but it wasn’t his actual life – it was a projected one. The fact that he did this using actual events,

68 Goodman 375, 376.

people, and places is indeed confusing and unintelligible at times, but I think that feature is purposeful and ultimately successful. O’Hara was, by career, a curator of exhibitions at MoMA and skilled at selecting art that fit together to tell a certain story. This, I believe, is also what he did with his poetry. My claim about this topic is counter to many who have written about

O’Hara’s “autobiographical” poems that they find so “true” as to suggest that, in aggregate, they formulate both a history of the New York avant-garde from 1950 to 1966 and an autobiography.

In effect, scholars have proposed that O’Hara’s poetry is, in fact, a total collapse of life and art, and mirrors one of the more prominent features of mid-century American literature. O’Hara seems to have understood that his life and work bore these contradictions. He wrote:

The sad thing about life is that I need money to write poetry and If I am a good poet nobody will care how I got it and If I’m a bad poet nobody will know how I got it69

One of the curious features of O’Hara’s poetry that leads me to my counter-conclusion is gained when one considers all 800 published poems by O’Hara as a whole. Somewhat surprisingly, while he earned a living as an exhibition curator at the Museum of Modern Art

(MoMA) from the time he was 29 years old, in 1955, until his death at age 40 in 1966, he never directly mentions the Museum or his work in a poem. O’Hara was the only member of his group of friends who held a regular long-term 9 to 5 job. O’Hara considered himself a poet, but he compartmentalized that aspect of his life and identity separately from earning a living, which he did by writing about art and curating exhibitions. Not only did his poetry not depend upon his

69 Collected Poems 323.

museum life, but his job at MoMA didn’t bleed over into his poetry.70 A few mentions of “work”

– getting up for work, going back to work after lunch – exist in his poetry, but he never mentions exhibitions, selecting work, writing catalogs, all the things that occupied him, more or less, for his entire adult career. This fact begs the question – what is meant by “life” in a statement about the collapse of life and art? When one talks about “life,” is one talking about a person’s free time

- his social life - or his career? Or both? I find elements of the critical theory of snapshot photography useful later in the chapter to help understand this aspect of O’Hara’s subject choices.

In addition to his lack of mention of his 9 to 5 job, O’Hara also refused other practices common to poets – he rarely edited his poems, didn’t make carbon copies, and often didn’t show them to anyone – instead, doing exactly as Vendler imagined, often throwing them in a drawer like a Polaroid, forgotten. This fact suggests another question about life and art compression:

When one talks about art, is one talking about work meant to be seen by others or just the work itself? Is a poem typed quickly in one sitting and put in a drawer – perhaps never read by anyone

– considered art? I argue that the sum of all these questions indicate a lack of collapse of life and art, evident primarily in these two ways: although O’Hara claims repeatedly that he is a poet, he drags his feet when editors want to publish him, and, although he writes frequently about his everyday life, he doesn’t mention his actual career at MoMA in his poems. These conclusions lead me to believe that O’Hara’s act of writing, in effect, was his personal method of resisting

70 Additionally, while O’Hara was resistant to the binary Cold War hatred of Russia, and to America’s warmongering, his job at MoMA was to curate exhibitions that were sent into the world as a part of America’s cultural warfare against Communism. I write more about this in subsequent chapters.

social pressures that attempted to erase him, rather than an attempt to write a poetic autobiography. Because he wrote primarily for his friends, because his poetry is about snapshots of his life, and because he chose not to write about his “job,” I believe we should read his poetry as something other than that life / art collapse so common in others’ postwar literature. His was something new, something that gave life rather than merely commenting on it. The commercialization of his poetry seemed vulnerable and vulgar to him; releasing it into the world beyond his coterie of friends was not comfortable for him.

By the time O’Hara had found his mature poetic voice, he had already written numerous times that he found professional and academic critics boorish and elitist, and he had decided that, for him, the existing capitalist American publication and distribution channels were not something he wanted to aspire to. These attitudes, however, in no way prevented him from pursuing the life of a poet, which is a provocative thought on its own. His life was otherwise a cohesive one, meaning that his museum work often featured his friends’ work, he often wrote poems, essays, books, and catalogs about his friends and their work, but, uniquely, he kept his poetry untarnished by his workaday life. In addition, his self-esteem as a poet was apparently unrelated to his paucity of publication, another important fact about him. So unconcerned was he about cataloguing or keeping a record of his poetic output, when the first posthumous collection of his work appeared in 1971, O’Hara’s friend and fellow poet, John Ashbery, wrote in the

“Introduction:” “That The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara should turn out to be a volume of

the present dimensions will surprise those who knew him, and would have surprised Frank even

more.” 71

2.5 Lack of Interest in Publishing

In order to fully explore why that was, first I want to present evidence of what O’Hara did publish, and when. I am interested in seeing his disinterest in publishing as one of his refusals – one of the ways in which O’Hara subverts the expectations of his times – and therefore, I’m interested in specifically in the totality of his publishing during his life. When I say he wasn’t particularly interested in publishing, I primarily mean two specific things: first, he didn’t try to earn a living writing poetry, and second, with a few notable exceptions, O’Hara didn’t seek publishers out – his ego didn’t require being published regularly or frequently. While a detailed record of his publishing history is beyond the scope of my dissertation, a general sense of what was published, and where, as compared to his output, is essential to support the claims I make.

Ashbery wrote about this peculiarity in O’Hara’s practice this way: “Frank O’Hara’s concept of the poem [is that it is] . . . the chronicle of the creative act that produces it.” 72 Indeed, this is the idiosyncrasy that Marjorie Perloff’s book on O’Hara, Poet Among Painters, explored; Perloff noticed this similarity between the Abstract Expressionist painters who were O’Hara’s friends, and the immediacy and motion of his poetry.73 Given the prolific writing he did, particularly

throughout the 1950s, the availability of his poetry to an audience was relatively sparse. This

71 Collected Poems vii. To everyone’s surprise, two more, albeit somewhat smaller, volumes followed Collected Poems in 1977, bringing the total number of published O’Hara poems to over 800. 72 Collected Poems viii, ix. 73 Critic Harold Rosenberg had preferred the moniker “Action Painters” for what these artists were doing, which correlates well with Elaine de Kooning’s insistence that a “painting” was a verb.

lack of drive to publish is revealing for the various reasons I want to explore in this chapter: his

disdain for critics; his belief, based on what he was told when he won the Hopwood Award in

1951, that poetry didn’t sell; his desire to refuse to write his sexual poems in code, thereby

ensuring that they wouldn’t pass censure by a publisher; and his aversion to academic poetry.

On this subject, Josh Schneiderman’s excellent essay, “The New York School, the

Mainstream, and the Avant-Garde,” contains a point that I find curious. In the essay,

Schneiderman writes:

For the New York school, then, the central lesson of Mark McGurl’s The

Program Era (2009) holds true: “for all its variety, postwar American literature

can profitably be described as the product of a system,” even (or especially) when

the literature in question attempts to evade that system. In what follows, I argue

that we can fully understand the group only if we trace the implications of

O’Hara’s investment in publication and a New York school born of his

engagement with Poetry and the wider institutional matrix of postwar literature. In

this way, the New York school is emblematic of the multiple projects undertaken

by Cold War–era groups of poetic outsiders like the Beats and the Black

Mountain poets, who largely legitimated themselves through a paradoxical

acceptance and disavowal of literary success.74

I believe my problem with Schneiderman’s assertion has to do specifically with his calling out

Frank O’Hara from the New York School poets. As I write extensively in this dissertation,

74 Schneiderman 351. See also McGurl.

O’Hara did not have “an investment in publishing” at any time in his career; just the opposite, in fact, he was hesitant even when a publisher was waiting – sometimes for years – for poems. This lack of interest is unique among the New York School Poets, the other members of which were more likely to pursue an audience, despite the fact that they all eschewed academic poetry and, in general, the machine that publishing had become – a machine largely disinterested, at the time, in their poetry. It is simply not true that O’Hara “largely legitimated [him]self through a paradoxical acceptance” of the publishing and distribution network machine during his lifetime.

O’Hara mocks his own hesitancy in the following poem, presumably about a weekend house party he’s committed himself to attend, but here thinks about work he’s yet to do for an upcoming publication in a Grove Press anthology:

I think I am going crazy what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch's I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems at Joan's studio for a new book by Grove Press which they will probably not print 75

The passage is rich with meaning – O’Hara comments on his weekday hangover, his

“excitement-prone” friend, Kenneth Koch, and an infrequently expressed wish that he didn’t have to go to a party. Why? He has some anxiety about poems he needs to get ready for Grove

Press, but defeatedly also wonders if the poems will ever be printed. Joan Mitchell was in France at the time, and her studio was used by friends occasionally as a getaway. This volume of poetry may have been the volume Ashbery later wrote about in this passage:

75 Collected Poems 328.

Once when a publisher asked him [O’Hara] for a manuscript he spent weeks and

months combing the apartment, enthusiastic and bored at the same time, trying to

assemble the poems. Finally he let the project drop, not because he didn’t wish his

work to appear, but because his thoughts were elsewhere, in the urban world of

fantasy where the poems came from.76

Writing the poems gave O’Hara life, publishing them appears not to have.

O’Hara was once asked by the Paterson Society to write a statement about his work. The document he produced was actually a long refusal to actually write about his poetry, saying in the statement, “But I don’t want to make up a lot of prose about something that is perfectly clear in the poems.”77 Nevertheless, he acquiesces by writing a statement, part of which reads:

If I then . . . wrote you about my convictions concerning form, measure, sound,

yardage, placement and ear—well, if I went into that thoroughly enough nobody

would ever want to read the poems I’ve already written, they would have been so

thoroughly described, and I would have to do everything the opposite in the future

to avoid my own boredom, and where would I be? That’s where I am anyway, I

suppose, but at least this way it’s not self-induced. Besides, I can’t think of any

more than one poem at a time, so I would end up with a “poetics” based on one of

my poems which any other poem of mine would completely contradict except for

certain affections or habits of speech they might include.78

76 Collected Poems vii. 77 Collected Poems 510. 78 Collected Poems 510.

His tone is a bit sarcastic, but his message is a common one among artists. O’Hara doesn’t like

critics and refuses to even apply literary analysis to his own work. “Critical prose makes too

much grass grow, and I don’t want to help hide my own poems, much less kill them,” he added

humorously.79

O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest became known as the “New

York School of Poets,” not because they wrote in a similar style – they didn’t – but simply because of the strong community they built. Their early writing careers coincide with the Beats, and indeed, they were all friends: Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky are in many of the extant early 1950s photographs of O’Hara, Ashbery, and others at one of the bars they frequented, a party, or at a poetry reading. O’Hara’s poetry, however, while subversive in a quiet everyday way, does not share the revolutionary, anarchistic tone which the Beats’ poetry became known for. After experimenting with form, content, and tone in college, O’Hara settled on a unique poetic voice and style shortly after his move to New York, and, while experimenting throughout his career, what is dominant throughout his poetry is his willingness to devour societal constructs, question them, and finally recreate them in a poetic way that flips them upside down. He applied this poetic technique at various times to capitalism, consumerism, patriotism, American foreign policy and national security, antagonism for Russia, and especially over many years and poems to the area of the performance of masculinity. Masculinity was under attack in the 1950s from many angles: readiness for war, corporate citizenship, suburbia and domesticity, and affluence and security. Interwoven with every one of these social concerns was

79 Collected Poems 510.

a degrading and corrupt fear that the incidence of homosexuality among American men was on the rise. Much of O’Hara’s writing subverts these concerns and fears with a mixture of humor, provocation, disgust, and anger.

O’Hara’s poetry was one containing many societal refusals, but as Epstein writes, wasn’t

“ivory tower protest:”

it was, instead, the textual representation of the very collective that nourished him

and his friends. By fomenting alternative, non-approved alliances, friendships,

collaborative ventures, and literary networks and by developing their own

publishing presses, journals, modes of certification and approval, marginalized

artists could deliberately fashion a ‘world elsewhere’ against the ideology of

conformity in Cold War culture at large and against the severe hostility facing

homosexuals [like O’Hara, Ashbery, and others], African Americans [like

Baraka], and experimental, bohemian writers in general. 80

O’Hara’s utilization of his collective-as-subject was as novel in mid-century America as the fact that he didn’t live a closeted homosexual life; membership in the collective also informed his publishing choices. Goodman notes, in his writing about literary figures in the first half of the twentieth century, that the “advance-guard is a species of art differentiated by a certain social relation.”81 By taking this observation to heart, and applying it not just to his life, but also to his art, I claim O’Hara invented a new way to write poetry, and that he foreshadowed the curated autobiographical writing we find in social media in the 21st century. O’Hara’s curation of

80 Beautiful Enemies 17. 81 Goodman 357.

everyday life, tone, and freeform style actually works beyond resistance to anticipate, predict,

and comment upon social changes in a very similar way social media is used in the 21st century.

Many of O’Hara’s short poems read like social media posts – blasts of thought, presented

without context, and without much afterthought. O’Hara’s poems are often bursts of glimpse into

a life, but not intended to show a complete picture – or autobiography - of the life they represent.

O’Hara’s lack of interest in poetic structure heightens the comparison. David Herd writes about

O’Hara that, “he remodelled (sic) poetry to make it viable in the middle of the twentieth

century.”82 This claim is actually quite an extraordinary one when viewed in the context of both

O’Hara’s biography and his meager life-time publications.

It is a compelling exercise to wonder what O’Hara’s critical reception would have been if, like Ashbery or the Beats, he had aggressively pursued publishing as he was writing. Avant- garde artists often don’t find large audiences immediately, and perhaps a large audience is, in the end, not an important goal for an artist. Liminal moments in an oeuvre usually have more to do with a drive to do what an individual artist perceives is a genuine or vital representation of their art, whether or not anyone else finds it laudable. Art for art’s sake was a life-giving concept for

O’Hara, who was naturally suspicious of any artist who created primarily for commercial reasons. David Lehman’s book, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of

Poets, convincingly argues that the New York School was the last avant-garde aesthetic movement America produced. His belief is that the next movement in the visual arts – Pop Art - already widely accepted as the important movement in art during O’Hara’s lifetime, carried with

82 Herd 138.

it a different audience response than did the so-called last avant-garde – Pop didn’t suffer the

scorn of critics or audience, even from the beginning of the movement. In the visual art field,

transitional artists like Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns bridged the gap from Abstract

Expressionism into Pop, and in poetry, Joe Brainard, with his collages and “Nancy” cartoon

homage pieces, takes O’Hara’s colloquialism and coterie into the Pop era. From Pop onward,

Lehman points out, anything goes in art – there is no longer a garde to react against.

There is an interesting paradox set up by O’Hara’s tendency to drag his feet when

approached by a publisher. For example, one of his most enduring and best-known collections of

poems is Lunch Poems, which was released by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s avant-garde San

Francisco press, City Lights. Published in 1965, one year before his untimely death, Lunch

Poems was 74 pages and contained 36 O’Hara poems. City Lights originally printed

“approximately” 3000 copies and sold them for $1.25.83 Bibliographer Alexander Smith quotes

City Lights co-owner Nancy Peters on the genesis of Lunch Poems:

Ferlinghetti says that he saw O’Hara in New York around 1959, where O’Hara

was writing poems on his lunch hour. Ferlinghetti asked for a collection of these

“lunch poems” to publish and O’Hara responded that he’d get them together. A

correspondence of five years followed until the poems were finally sent for

publication.84

There is something important to notice in this story of Ferlinghetti having to pursue O’Hara for

83 Bibliography 25. A side note: as I write this in 2019, Ferlinghetti’s bookstore and publishing house is still extant; Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 100 years old and still active in publishing. 84 Bibliography 26.

fully five years to find three dozen poems out of the 600 he’d written by that time for the chance

of being published by the renowned City Lights. This is not a poet who needs a large audience

for his ego, in fact, it seems just the opposite – as if he didn’t want a larger audience than his

close coterie of friends. Bearing that in mind, read what Micah Mattix wrote for The Atlantic

about O’Hara’s “loneliness” and his projected life:

. . . because O’Hara expresses himself in the same way modern Americans do:

Like many of us, he tries to overcome the absurdity and loneliness of modern life

by addressing an audience of anonymous others. O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—like

Facebook posts or tweets—shares, saves, and recreates the poet’s experience of

the world. He addresses others in order to combat a sense of loneliness, sharing

his gossipy, sometimes snarky take of modern life, his unfiltered enthusiasm, and

his boredom in a direct, conversational tone. In short, Lunch Poems, while 50

years old, is very a 21st century book.85

While I fully concur with Mattix’s comparison between O’Hara’s “I-do-this-I-do-that” poems and modern social media posts, the comparison works better if we think about that impulse to curate (and share) our lives, carefully composing which events we will share, and which we won’t. My slight disagreement with Mattix here is mostly around his supposition that O’Hara had a distinct need to “address an audience of anonymous others” for the purpose of making his life seem fuller. I think the fact that he wrote about his small audience (“you could fit the people

I write for into your john, all at the same time without raising an eyebrow”) and his reluctance to

85 Mattix The Atlantic n.p.

publish, even when he had a great offer to do so, must lead us to one conclusion: that it was the

writing of the poems which drove O’Hara.86 I also disagree that “loneliness” was not a central theme in O’Hara’s poetry; rather, it is in the forefront, or just hidden, in only a couple dozen poems. I do believe, however, that much of O’Hara’s manic social schedule was a result, whether conscious or not, of his efforts to never find himself lonely, and perhaps that’s what

Mattix refers to here.

O’Hara friend John Bernard Myers and his Tibor de Nagy Press put out several small edition

O’Hara works throughout his life, from early mimeographed sheets up to the last publication during O’Hara’s lifetime, Love Poems (Tentative Title). Myers has written, too, that O’Hara was a frustrating author to work with because of his equivocation. Love Poems (Tentative Title) contained 16 poems, and had a first edition of 480 copies, retailing for two dollars. Gooch writes about his correspondence with Myers over this title:

This collection of sixteen love poems to Vincent Warren was edited by John

Bernard Myers after years of ‘constant urging.’ When O’Hara finally mailed

twenty-eight poems to Myers for consideration in October 1964, he attached a

note: ‘Now don’t forget, if you don’t think these can make some sort of decent

thing by elimination, LET’S NOT HUMILIATE OURSELVES, there’s enough of

that around already!’ [Myers adds:] ‘I waited for these poems for three or four

years. Frank could never get himself to type them up. When he did give them to

86 6 June 1951 letter in Poems Retrieved xv.

me I couldn’t induce him to arrange them in their proper sequence nor give me a

title.’87

Goodman’s O’Hara-treasured article about the avant-garde also commented on public

perception. He called avant-garde art “naturalism,” and conflated it with an intentional and

cerebral separation from needing audience approval. He wrote, “Naturalism is an icily hostile

withdrawal from the audience, it will not share in their moral sense; it says in effect, ‘There is the

world you have made for me, damn you; I abjure it and you.’” 88 O’Hara’s work and his

resistance to publishing can be viewed as a naturalistic poetry using Goodman’s definition.

However, in addition to resisting “the world you have made for me,” O’Hara also moves through

that world without stopping: his work, due to its presentation of internal thoughts and

observations, reads as a constant, unremitting stream of consciousness.

2.6 Coterie Poetry: Art and Life Compressed?

Shaw gets to the heart of this idea when he writes that O’Hara’s constant coterie mentions are

evidence of what he calls membership in “privileged circles devoted to covert political or literary

activity.” 89 In other words, writing about his close community actually refers to his membership in a “privileged circle,” certainly a reversal from what most of America thought about a community of broke poets and painters, half of them homosexuals. Epstein finds the references to actually be the very core of O’Hara’s works:

87 Gooch 441. As a result, Myers working title was retained at publication. 88 Goodman 363. 89 Shaw 21.

What it [the avant-garde coterie] values most highly are spontaneity,

improvisation, and ‘radical’ or ‘deep nonconformity’ – an aversion to fixed

identity, habit, received ideas, and group-think of all sorts, which I would

distinguish from the ‘superficial nonconformity’ of fashion and lifestyle that these

poets tend to view with impatience and suspicion.90

Here, Epstein makes a distinction between a deep nonconformist approach to life and one that is consumer-driven, superficial, fleeting, and transitory. O’Hara shows that one can be both deeply nonconformist and still enjoy bursts of superficiality without an internal conflict. His frequent devotion to camp and homosexual humor is the bridge between the two. There is a distinct genuineness about the way in which O’Hara and his friends lived and worked – even when the poems themselves contain fabrications or adaptations. Lehman quotes John Ashbery writing in

Book Week just one month after O’Hara’s shocking death:

It is not surprising that critics have found him self-indulgent: his culte de moi is

overpowering: the poems are all about him and the people and images who wheel

through his consciousness, and they seek no further justification. ‘This is me and

I’m poetry, baby’ seems to be their message. . . 91

Ashbery seems to be signaling here that O’Hara had broken the mold with his poetry, and had invented a new form that critics and academics just “didn’t get yet.” This is one of the foundational aspects of an avant-garde form according to both Lehman and Goodman, and for

Ashbery, himself an accomplished and celebrated poet, to acknowledge O’Hara’s contribution, is

90 Beautiful Enemies 17. 91 Lehman 308.

itself important. He went on to write, “it [O’Hara’s poetry] incites one to all the programs of commitment as well as to every other form of self-realization: interpersonal, dionysian, occult or abstract.” 92

A common argument that early critics made about O’Hara’s poetry was that the barrage of friends’ names, streets, stores, train stops, and so on, leave the reader utterly without context. It is true that without knowing his biography these hyperlocal details might seem bewildering, but that very feature of his poetry - the lack of context - was itself an intentional reversal of the commonly portrayed notion that Americans in the post-war period all have a universal experience. Shaw suggests that this reversal, “also helped him to explore alternative models of kinship, both social and literary.” 93

O’Hara did not particularly need encouragement to write about his friends. But the 1951 Goodman article also argued that the wisest move for the avant-garde in the present

“shell-shocked” society was to reestablish a community of friends through art. “In literary terms this means: to write for them about them personally,” Goodman wrote. He continued by recommending the genre of occasional poetry:

But such personal writing about the audience itself can occur only in a small

community of acquaintances . . . As soon as the intimate community does exist –

whether geographically or not is relevant but not essential –and the artist writes

about it for its members, the advance-guard at once becomes a genre of the

highest integrated art, namely Occasional poetry—the poetry celebrating

92 Lehman 308. 93 Shaw 6.

weddings, festivals, and so forth. ‘Occasional poetry,’ said Goethe, ‘is the highest

kind.’94

O’Hara’s occasional poetry provides important historical touchstones for the mid-century art, theater, dance, and literary communities. He once wrote, “my force is in mobility,” which refers to an idea commonly found in his poetry – he seems to be everywhere at once.95 A significant

part of the “force” that was his “motion” was partaking of this rich, artistic, social life, and then

writing about it. These O’Hara poems particularly read as intimate, autobiographical, and

confessional – but a different kind of confessional poetry than, say, Robert Lowell’s confessional

poetry, which O’Hara disliked. In O’Hara’s brand of confessional poetry, a form, according to

Goodman, that “heightened the everyday,” his subjects were birthdays of his friends or his idols

(James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, or Rachmaninoff, for example), parties attended by his poet and

painter friends, gallery openings when his whole community were emerging artists, movies he’d

seen, pop culture heroes such as Billie Holiday or Lana Turner, ballet, or, later in his life,

international travel, which, although he didn’t mention why, was often for MoMA.96

I want to look specifically at O’Hara’s drive for writing poetry. Why did he need to write?

O’Hara actually wrote a good deal about his motivations for writing and what he hoped he was accomplishing. By investigating what he said he was doing, I hope to shed light on what the outcome of his writing was. Berkson recounted some thoughts about this in his new

94 Goodman 376. 95 Collected Poems 345. 96 Goodman 376.

“Introduction” for the reprint of Poems Retrieved in 2012. About the subject choices O’Hara made, Berkson wrote:

Just as O’Hara could write, “What is happening to me, allowing for lies and

exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems”—a statement at once as

mysterious and practical as there has ever been of the relation of poetry to

experience—the poems make you curious about their occasions because they are

so clear about what happens in them. 97

In this oft-quoted O’Hara statement, I find it interesting that O’Hara gives himself some allowance to fictionalize. If he hadn’t, the statement would read, “What is happening to me goes into my poems,” but instead, he allows wiggle-room for some curation of events and thoughts by adding, “allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid,” to the statement. In this way, I don’t believe O’Hara’s poetry was purely autobiographical, but rather, it was a fiction based on his life. Berkson allows for that, too, as he continues:

Of course, as O’Hara also insisted, a poem is its own occasion, and between one

poem and the rest, in the wide span of his poetic output, occasions and the poems

that rise to them combine and refract in lifelike ways.98

“A poem is its own occasion,” is exactly that sentiment Perloff read in O’Hara’s work, the one that led her to conflating his poetry with Abstract Expressionist paintings. Painter Elaine de

Kooning is known for saying that a painting is a verb rather than a noun: “A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image,” she wrote in an artist

97 Poems Retrieved xvii. 98 Poems Retrieved xvii.

statement published in 1959. 99 Berkson’s quote expresses that very thought with regard to

O’Hara’s poetry.

Berkson continues by remembering that O’Hara once told him, “Poetry is life to me,” which

Berkson read to mean that O’Hara’s life was what he wrote into his poems.100 While it is possible that’s what O’Hara meant, it’s also interesting to reverse his explanation and see how it would change. He didn’t say “Life is poetry to me,” which has a completely different context. It seems what he meant by his statement was that without poetry, life would be meaningless – my conclusion here is that that writing poetry actually gave O’Hara life. This thought seems consistent with everything O’Hara wrote about his work and with many affirmations he included in his poems.

Donald Allen edited and published an important anthology, The New American Poetry:

1945 – 1960, the publication in which Allen featured more O’Hara poems than any other poet. For the book, Allen required an essay statement from each poet on his or her work.

O’Hara despised writing prose about his poetry – he considered it redundant and an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, he acquiesced for Allen, who had become a good friend in the poem (and poet) selection process, with which O’Hara had helped Allen. In his statement,

O’Hara reluctantly tried to explain what it was about poetry that was so uniquely special to him.

He wrote this enigmatic statement: “The chair of poetry must remain empty, for poetry does not

collaborate with society, but with life.” 101 This sentence appears to support the thought that

O’Hara had no use for writing poetry that collaborated, agreed, or cooperated with society. His

99 de Kooning 29. 100 Poems Retrieved xvii. 101 Collected Poems 504.

poetry was not meant to conspire, collude, or participate in society, which he saw as artifice, and indeed, in many cases, a harmful and unyielding force. O’Hara was interested in writing poetry about life – in whatever form it came. And therefore, the “chair of poetry,” an odd turn of phrase, must remain empty. Why can no one fill that chair? Because there is one society, but millions of lives? Does he mean here, an “official” poetry – because if there ever would be one, it couldn’t possibly be him – he is everything America isn’t – homosexual, subversive, anti-patriotic, a

Russophile. What chair O’Hara’s poetry can fill, for the years he was writing, is a chair set aside for a homosexual man in the midst of the Cold War. In that regard, O’Hara’s poetry can be read as a kind of gay man’s survival guide in mid-century New York, and I think he’d be satisfied to have it seen as that. In Goodman’s essay that O’Hara so prized, Goodman identified characteristics of what he called advance-guard writing, including societal misunderstanding and sometimes condemnation of liminal times of invention in the arts, particularly in literature. This passage speaks to the difference O’Hara referred to between society and life:

And so in literature, it is the formal actions, the structure, texture, diction, syntax,

mood, and tense, trope and image, concreteness and abstraction, directness and

periphrasis, and so forth, that deeply communicate the personality-type or

character-structure. An experiment with these things is the same as saying, "Not

only do we disagree, but I am trying to make myself a different kind of person

from what you made me." 102

102 Goodman 366.

Members of the avant-garde in any field are, after all, revolutionaries, and some societal

revulsion is a part of the process. O’Hara had other strikes against him as well, namely, his

homosexuality and his deeply founded belief that the American Cold War rhetoric was

propaganda. The Goodman essay spoke to O’Hara at a particularly hopeful time in his life – he

had just won the Hopwood Award for Poetry, had $800 in the bank as a result, and was joining

his friends in New York after a lonely year earning a master’s degree at Michigan by himself.

Goodman, an author O’Hara admired, confirmed O’Hara’s unconscious belief that he and his

friends – together – would form a modern-day art colony on the streets of New York.

In the statement about his work O’Hara wrote for Allen, he insisted that his poetry was life-giving for him, as we’ve seen above. He wrote:

I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I

would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far

stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I

haven’t.103

Here, however, O’Hara goes one step further, and seems to compare a pursuit of poetry and a pursuit of love. First, however, he says that poetry is the only thing that keeps him from suicide.

He seems to believe this thought makes him somehow common, or of low character, which is somewhat opaque, but may refer unconsciously to his Catholic upbringing where suicide is the sin that can’t be forgiven. He follows this thought with an aspirational one – he’d rather

(romantically) die for love, but since that hasn’t happened yet he has to settle for poetry. O’Hara

103 Collected Poems 500.

ultimately doesn’t seem to be taking Allen’s assignment – or his own poetry - very seriously. He

goes on to say he doesn’t care much for a place in any canon or a philosophical theory:

I don’t think of fame or posterity (as Keats so grandly and genuinely did), nor do I

care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally)

anyone’s state of social relation, nor am I for any particular technical

development in the American language simply because I find it necessary. 104

This sentence supports the idea that he wasn’t writing at all for a large audience, but rather for himself and a few friends. I think he’s being somewhat disingenuous here – perhaps practical is a better word – but his poetry was a very important expression for him. As early as Harvard he wrote how embarrassing he hoped his letters would be to his family, so he knew his writing – even letters – were being saved, and would someday be read by many. A final sentence to muddy what his poetry is about:

I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone

else; they are just there in whatever form I can find them. What is clear to me in

my work is probably obscure to others, and vice versa. My formal “stance” is

found at the crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that

I know and can bear without hatred. 105

“What I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred,” puts an oddly negative spin on what otherwise seems a fulfilling life. The sense of life consisting of not being able to get something he wants or bearing without hatred, stripped away from his other

104 Collected Poems 500. 105 Collected Poems 500.

commentary, seems quite bleak. Scarcity or insufficiency rarely comes across in O’Hara poems, so it’s challenging to understand what he means here. It’s possible he was thinking about romantic love, marriage, children – knowing that as a homosexual, these things were not meant for him. He occasionally expressed a desire for what appeared to him as the vicissitudes of heterosexuality. Nevertheless, he’s covered that thought with his previous statement that obscurity for readers is probably clarity for him. He goes on to write that,

It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores

their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of

incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific

occasions, or both all the time.106

Is he being deliberately coy and arcane here to signify that he is a modern poet? Is it possible he has no idea what writing poetry does for him, or why he does it? Or that he doesn’t want to disclose? Finally, he seems to go out of his way to attack every other writer that will be included in the anthology, including those friends he recommended to Allen for inclusion in the book:

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry--all of the past you read is usually

quite great—but it is a useful thorn to have in one’s side.107

This statement comes across as a pre-emptory defense. O’Hara is making himself vulnerable by being included in large, important book with other contemporary poets, and he wants to beat others to disliking his poetry by admitting he dislikes theirs first. Perhaps the lifelong disdain he had for critics was simply a feeling of insecurity about his work?

106 Collected Poems 500. 107 Collected Poems 500.

Lifelong O’Hara friend Joe LeSueur also connected O’Hara’s writing as life-giving:

And as far as I could tell, writing poetry was something Frank did in his spare

time. He didn’t make a big deal about it, he just sat down and wrote when the

spirit moved him. For that reason, I didn’t realize right away that if you took

poetry as much for granted as you did breathe it might mean you felt it was

essential to your life. But I think Frank’s attitude toward poetry, or toward life in

general, was merely consistent with the way he lived.108

Micah Mattix also writes at length about this topic of O’Hara’s life-giving nature of the art of writing poetry:

While O’Hara is part of the Anglo-American lyric tradition, he differs from other

lyric poets in his understanding of the relationship between self-expression in art

and self-knowledge. O’Hara understands the self to be and expression of the same

power that is at work in the material world, but he does not hold that the

exploration of the self in art somehow provides us with an image of a coherent

and continuous self. While the self is a nexus of finite moments of feeling for

O’Hara, he does not hope to somehow salvage some continuous or essential self

out of these finite moments. These feelings are irreducible. However, he does

understand poetry to be a “testament” of the self, in the sense that feelings are an

expression of the power that holds the self together over a period of time. Thus,

the self, for O’Hara, is both singular and multiple.”109

108 LeSueur xv. 109 Poetics of Saying “I” 55.

I agree with Mattix that, for O’Hara, writing poetry was a life-giving artform, but at the same

time, it was not his life. In fact, one might read the fact that O’Hara doesn’t write poetry about

his work at the museum as a sign that he had an extraordinary ability to compartmentalize his life

into very discreet segments. Nevertheless, this new poetic form did contain parts of his life –

surely the parts he wanted his readers to know: the parts of his life that served a particular

purpose – humor, political rant, perverse homosexual reference – snapshots of his life written for

his intimate audience.

O’Hara’s new literary form is precisely what allows him to establish a strong poetic of

resistance. His art is not his life, in that it is not how he makes a living, despite writing often that

he “is a poet.” The form his poetic takes is what Goethe called “occasional poetry” for gifts to

friends on their birthdays and so on, and what early O’Hara critic, Helen Vendler wrote in “The

Virtues of the Alterable.” Recalling that she wrote, in a particularly prescient comment, that

O’Hara poetry was “Polaroid poetry” - snapshots taken and thrown in a desk drawer.110 I want to

expand on her description, because I think she was correct, both for the era in which she wrote

(the 1970s), but even more so now, in the era of ubiquitous social media and daily smartphone

photography.111 In Vendler’s time, Polaroid photography played a special role in daily lives – it was more immediate, more casual, but also, more easily placed aside and forgotten than photographs taken with a film camera, which required finishing a roll first, dropping the film off to be developed, waiting to pick the photographs up, and the exchange of money both for the

110 “The Virtues of the Alterable” 5. 111 It’s interesting to think about smartphone photography and social media posts as the Polaroids of the 21st century, and I think the comparison may help clarify what O’Hara was doing with his poetry.

film and then again for the photographs. The Polaroid, in contrast, provided an instant result, the

instant gratification of seeing the image immediately. The comparison, then, specifically with

Polaroid photography is particularly apt because it most closely approximates 21st century

photos taken with phones, then perhaps uploaded to social media; the moment having been

recorded, quickly forgotten. A similar attitude of nonchalance is also present in much O’Hara

poetry, particularly in three aspects of his work: his form is the snapshot, his content is the world

around him, and his habit of an attitude almost of disposal – tossing poems in a desk drawer and

forgetting about them once he’s had his say.112

Writing about the role of the snapshot as an archival tool with which to study the subjects of

the snapshot’s lives and culture, historian John Ibson refers to American snapshot historian

Nancy Martha West, who he writes, “has importantly pointed out, snapshots quickly came to be

reserved, nearly exclusively, for recording life’s happier moments.”113 West’s observation that snapshots were (and are) a highly composed look at a life is also a salient and noteworthy point that could be made about much of O’Hara’s poetic form. While writing often about actual events, people, and places, O’Hara’s work shouldn’t be fully depended upon to be representative or complete. He’s composed his poetic imagery for many reasons – to coerce a certain perception for himself or for the reader, or both. When O’Hara writes that he’s “blue,” for example, he’s either working to improve his own mood, or to garner sympathy from a reader. When he writes about friends, parties, weekend house parties, he’s performing what West calls “life’s happier

112 Andy Warhol reversed the prevalent attitude about Polaroids being disposable in the mid-1960s when he elevated them to fine art and exhibited them. O’Hara had already done a similar thing with his poems. 113 Ibson 2.

moments,” both a way to chronicle them, but in a way in which he aggregates, over time, to

proclaim what a great life he has. West’s comment could also certainly be extrapolated to

modern day social media posts and images, which I believe is what O’Hara’s poetry

foreshadowed.114 O’Hara’s poetic content is also related to the content that would be seen in mid-century Polaroids in that it, very often, is laser-focused on the small, mundane, everyday world immediately surrounding him.115 O’Hara was very tactically using his everyday

surroundings to write his prolific poetry – his tone was often that he was fooling with it. His

familiar insouciant, catty, or camp tones are each purposeful, meant to achieve an effective

response either for him or for his reader.

John Ibson’s study of snapshots of mid-century American men relies upon what he writes is

Shawn Michelle Smith’s clever observation that one who studies photographs should pay careful

attention to the unseen in photographs.116 What is not present in a collection of snapshots of

someone’s life is, in other words, perhaps as important (maybe even more important) than what

is present. This is also true of O’Hara’s poetry and supports his practice of carefully sifting

through the totality of his daily life and purposefully selecting the people, places, and events he

wishes to memorialize in his poetry. Berkson writes that O’Hara friend Kenneth Koch taught

Berkson how to write what he calls “a verbal awareness of experience” or poet Clark Coolidge

called “lingual attention.”117 Like his friend Koch, O’Hara practiced this time of poetry as well.

114 A natural outcome of O’Hara’s work in this regard can be discovered in the poetry of many poets who followed him, in particular in the poetry of Tommy Pico, which I will discuss in the Epilogue of this dissertation. 115 It is important to remember that while O’Hara’s choice of content is often every day, his everyday world was as a member of the international center of the art world; his friends often the most well-known artists of his day. 116 Ibson 2. 117 Notebook 253.

The emphasis O’Hara places on walking the streets of New York as a flaneur, for instance, with

that “lingual attention,” discloses on those ideas and observations that bolster the impression he

wishes to leave with his reader. Other imagery is unseen by the time he’s finished the poem.

One last thought on the comparison between Polaroid snapshots and O’Hara poetry is a

discussion of the ideology of photographic veracity. While Ibson believes, as do I, that the

photograph is a useful object for cultural study, he also notes that Marita Sturken and Lisa

Cartwright have written about the “myth of photographic truth.”118 To a greater or lesser extent,

any photograph has the potential to represent a momentary truth or a very well disguised fiction.

The famous Eddie Adams photograph of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet

Cong prisoner that became a symbol of the brutality of the Viet Nam war, for example, becomes

an entirely different image in the context of the narrative Adams recounted later.119 Dorothea

Lange’s “Migrant Mother” also has a contested content, both by the subject’s recollection and

Lange’s. Historian Allan Sekula wrote that “photography constructs an imaginary world, and

passes it off as reality.”120 It could be said that O’Hara’s poetry does much the same thing - it is often about real events, people, and places, but the resulting poem still is created as one would create an imaginary world. I don’t believe O’Hara wrote his poetry with a journalistic intention – the poems were not meant to be veracious. O’Hara crafted his poems carefully to project the effect he desired to achieve; for himself as he wrote, or for his reader. Marvin Heiferman, who has written extensively about photography and visual culture, once remarked that snapshots

118 Ibson 3. 119 BBC News n.p. 120 Sekula 181.

“may appear to be naive, but they are seldom innocent.”121 I believe what Heiferman means in this statement is that because photographs are always composed, with the moment of the shutter release planned to the millisecond, they represent what Heiferman goes on to write, are “the needs and desires of all who make and appear in them, as well as the social, commercial, and visual worlds in which they are produced.”122 An invisible feature of O’Hara’s poetry is just this insincerity – in a writing style that appears effortless, spontaneous, and unedited, O’Hara has created precisely the word image he wants his reader to experience. It is his mastery with words that belies this fact for the casual reader.

2.7 A Flaneur and the City

Much of O’Hara’s resistance to society is tied up in the performance of masculinity, as I write in Chapter 5 of this dissertation. However, Frank O’Hara’s poetry is not only about his unique performance of masculinity in a highly charged society. His is urbane poetry of the city, requiring both the cultural glitz and the grimy banality of New York in the decades after the war to charge it. O’Hara forged his 1950s life experience to mirror that of predecessor Parisian poets

Charles Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire, both of whom developed lives around a community of visual artists in Paris in the nineteenth century and the fin-de-siècle respectively.123 Like them, O’Hara fashioned for himself in New York the life of a flaneur, one who wanders the urban streets carrying on (and writing down) an internal or external dialogues about what he sees and thinks. The flaneur is both of the streets and, at the same time, removed

121 Heiferman 41. 122 Heiferman 48. 123 In another coincidental similarity, all three men died young; O’Hara at 40, Baudelaire at 46, and Apollinaire at age 38.

enough that he can comment on his surroundings as an observer. Traditionally, the flaneur is also

an observer of and commentator on the consumerism and the capitalist urgings of his fellow

citizens, which in O’Hara’s case further confirms his queer role in society as a consumer of

glittery objects, books, foreign cigarettes, and books of Russian or French poetry. Earlier

German culture observer Walter Benjamin described this conservation of idleness well: “To store

time as a battery stores energy: the flaneur.” But Benjamin, who popularized this term for the

detached city-stroller, also knew that the freedom of leisure could be deceptive: the flaneur is

also the person “who abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace.” The city

wanderer, he suggests, can easily become an acquisitive browser, “a spy for the capitalists”

entranced by the city’s commercial possibilities.124 Joel Duncan, however, notices another difference in the manner in which O’Hara carried out this flaneur-poet role. Thinking about

Benjamin as the model flaneur, Duncan cleverly points out that, “Benjamin’s flaneur is attempting to commune with ‘vanished time,’ a collective rather than a private past. O’Hara’s leisure, by contrast, is not merely circumscribed, he also has a shopping list.125 Duncan is correct

to notice that not only is O’Hara only concerned with the present on his walks, but he is also

doing more than just observing commerce, he is enthusiastically participating in it.

O’Hara masterfully played this dual role of the flaneur who was both standing away from

society, observing, yet at the same time, deeply embedded in society. Some of his best poetry of

the 1950s was written while carrying out this role. In the latter part of the 1950s, O’Hara settled

on a personal signature for these poems: he called them his “I-do-this, I-do-that” poems, but, in

124 Wallace n.p. 125 Duncan 93. See also Benjamin’s Arcades Project 416.

fact, by this time, he had been writing flaneur-like poetry for most of the decade. In addition to his autobiographical poetry, like both Baudelaire and Apollinaire, O’Hara was both a friend to, and an enthusiastic supporter of the visual artists of his time. O’Hara spent two years committed to arts writing for Thomas B. Hess, the publisher of ArtNews, from 1953 to 1955, followed by occasional forays into arts writing for popular magazines throughout the rest of his life.126 He also, of course, wrote exhibition catalogs and ephemera for the many exhibitions he curated for

MoMA. In this role, like in his poetry, he reprised his flaneur habit as a feuilleton journalist; he performed his life on the streets, at art galleries, at the opera, in bars, at jazz clubs, and during his lunch hours. O’Hara’s two years as an arts writer perhaps created for him this persona of wandering the streets of Manhattan’s emerging galleries, and writing about what he saw.

However, O’Hara created a new version of the feuilleton tradition in mid-century America poetry, except for one important difference: he gave his poems to friends, or stuck them in a drawer or coat pocket, often all but forgotten. By contrast, the feuilletonist has a patron who is paying him to wander and write; O’Hara apparently did it for his muse – his need to write.

O’Hara’s “I-do-this-I-do-that” poetry often works to record the “ways of operating” to resist dominance in the same way de Certeau described it. Often cleverly disguised as a simple list of what happened on his lunch hour at MoMA as he walked the streets from the museum to a diner and back, in these poems, O’Hara alternates chameleon-like between a consumer of culture and a

126 O’Hara left his information desk job at MoMA in 1953 to write for ArtNews, a New York art scene periodical for whom many poets and artists wrote in the 1950s. Among them were Elaine deKooning, Fairfield Porter, and James Schuyler. Poet William Carlos Williams, a favorite of O’Hara’s, had also written for ArtNews earlier in the century. O’Hara returned to MoMA in the International Exhibitions department in 1955, and remained at MoMA for the rest of his life, eventually being promoted from the International Exhibitions Department to an Assistant Curator of the Museum at large. He wrote exhibition catalogs, monographs, and popular feature articles on the visual arts throughout his career.

producer of one. “I make / myself a bourbon and commence / to write one of my ‘I do this I do that’ / poems in a sketch pad,” he writes as he cleverly conflates visual art and his poetry by writing in a pad manufactured for drawing.127 While carefully crafted (often with only minimal, if any, editing) to read as a consumer reminiscence, these poems also work to encapsulate and legitimize his quietly anarchistic life. The following example, from 1956, appears to simply be a collage of images, thoughts, and impressions from a Thursday lunch hour; however, close reading reveals a subtle, but insurgent, exegesis on the world, seeking, as de Certeau wrote, “to render what happened intelligible.” 128 This poem is striking because how much of the 1950s

American zeitgeist O’Hara packed into less than fifty lines. As a flaneur, O’Hara was not only observing while walking, but, as poetry critic Bruce Davidson posits, “Frank O’Hara, who serves as a kind of docent on 1950s culture, a poetic flaneur who observed the crowd yet who was often happy to be in it.”129

“A Step Away from Them” It's my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust.

127 Collected Poetry 341. Notice particularly that he says he writes in a “sketch pad.” O’Hara may not have been too interested in publishing, but he was always aware that he was creating art. 128 Vol 2 xvi. 129 Davidson 24.

On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday. Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight. I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, e bell' attrice. And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab. There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there. A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. 130

These “I-do-this-I-do-that” poems bear an internal unity that reveal, image by image, a system of significance illustrative of O’Hara’s poems. Here, in just five stanzas and 49 lines, O’Hara works

130 Collected Poems 257, 258.

to reveal an hour in his highly curated walkable life. Beginning with the title, “A Step Away from Them,” O’Hara leaves the reader wondering: who are “Them?” At first glance, a poem ostensibly about what O’Hara sees while walking alone on his lunch hour might lead a reader to believe that the poet is stepping away from his co-workers. Considering, however, the fellow

New Yorkers and situations he chose to write about, spanning many of the societal divisions of his time, perhaps he was referring instead to the “Them” who have a position of power in society, who judge people as welcome or unwelcome, who don’t value the same sights and experiences as the author. How else could we explain that during one random lunch hour,

O’Hara would encounter all the following: an opportunity for the homosexual gaze, various impulses about race and immigrants, and multiple examples of cultural influencers like advertising, shopping, film, and food?

Dated August 16, 1956, this poem consciously appears to read as a mere collection of the random lunchtime thoughts of a Manhattan office worker. The author, who works at the Museum of Modern Art, at West 53rd between Fifth and Sixth, leaves his building for a lunch-time walk, sees a construction site, shops for a wristwatch, notices cats on the street, then a billboard and a couple at Times Square. He has a cheeseburger and a chocolate malted at a diner, notices more people, then thinks about friends who have recently died. Walking by a magazine stand and a movie poster, he recalls the stories about the 1913 Armory Show, stops for a glass of juice, thinks about the Reverdy book of poems in his pocket, and returns to work. Close reading of the poem, however, reveals much more about the poet’s thoughts about the decade in which he was writing, and his unwillingness to participate in all of its expectations.

In the first stanza, O’Hara sets the stage for the poem – it’s his lunch hour, and he’s walking in New York among a sea of cabs. O’Hara was one of the only members in his social network who worked at what would be described as a “9-to-5” job. He wore a suit to an office to work, but lest we for a moment consider him a typical college-educated office worker, he immediately reminds the reader that, contrary to social norms, he is a homosexual man. After mentioning the cabs he sees, but doesn’t take (he’s not going far), and the “hum” of the ambient city sounds, he reveals a homosexual gaze as he notices lunching laborer’s “dirty glistening torsos,” and mentions that they’re drinking Coca-Cola, the American national drink. These laborers are the kind of men O’Hara might have met for sex in the latrines, making his very body an affront to

America, a thought which he twists purposefully by pairing the laborers with the most American product he can think of – Coca-Cola.

He didn’t describe the multitude of cabs above as yellow, but, three lines later, O’Hara uses the word yellow as an adjective about the construction worker’s hats instead, ensuring that pop of color exists in the poem as it did in life. The scene visually has bright spots of yellow from both the many cabs and the laborers’ hardhats. His poetry, in general, has a highly visual element, perhaps learned from his strong affinity with painters; he often uses color words in his poems. Regardless of where the tendency came from, Marjorie Perloff found it so important that she based her book on O’Hara, Poet Among Painters, on the theory that in his poems, he was using words to express a similar aesthetic as the Abstract Expressionists did with paint. Inserted here we now have a color (yellow) associated with the sights and sound (“hum-colored”) of the lunchtime street ambience.

In the next line, “Then onto the / avenue where skirts are flipping / above heels and blow up over / grates,” he refers to the memory of the famous image of Marilyn Monroe, with whom he has compared himself in other poems, in a white sundress, enjoying the summertime sudden burst of cool air from the street grate in the 1955 motion picture, “The Seven Year Itch.”131 New

York in August is hot, humid, and often unbearable, but for the saving grace of air conditioning, which, as that movie suggested, was just beginning to become widely available in the mid-1950s.

The publicity shots for this scene were shot at East 52nd and Lexington, but it seems unlikely he walked so far east only to return to Times Square in the following lines, so perhaps O’Hara just recalled the cinematic scene as he noticed random subway grates.

In the next vignette, he stops to shop for accessories – a wristwatch – an amusement he enjoys in other poems, but also a tacit confession that he enjoys an active role as a consumer of goods and a window shopper, a role that for decades was seen as a feminine role – and one that

O’Hara often participates in. Historian Robert Corber, investigating the subject of masculinity at the mid-century, reminds readers that shopping had been firmly in the feminine jurisdiction for much of the century, in her role as the person who kept the house. However, one of the troubling concerns about post-war masculinity was that men’s roles had begun to change from that of a producer (mechanic, farmer, machinist) to one of a consumer, and with the rise of the advertising age, the role of shopper or consumer was being increasingly taken up by men, and was especially enjoyed by homosexual men. In fact, Corber writes so convincingly about “consumer desire,”

131 O’Hara compared himself to Marilyn Monroe in “Returning (CP 246),” writing that it was a “responsibility being a sexual symbol” as Marilyn had said. He implies in this poem that his wartime experience included playing the role of a sexual symbol.

“the thrill of display,” the “exhibitionistic display,” and “merchandising and advertising of

commodities” that readers might think he’s writing about a group of homosexual men on the

street ogling one another and looking for signals for sex encounters.132 For O’Hara, living in the

city provided many opportunities for him to mention lunchtime shopping in poems, in effect

flaunting both this freedom as well as relishing the consumer role. This role – one of a shopper

for goods – was such an important one in the 1950s that it even had a starring place in the

politics of the Cold War when Vice President Nixon visited the Soviet Union and used his

televised meeting with Khrushchev to brag about American appliances.133

In the next stanza, O’Hara’s stroll has taken him to Times Square, where a Camel cigarettes

billboard blew smoke rings at 44th and Broadway, and, a block north (“higher”), the site of a

spectacular waterfall billboard that spanned the entire block from 44th to 45th Streets. The waterfall featured a “50,000-gallon waterfall 27 feet high and 120 feet long,” and had been installed in 1948 for the Bond Clothing Store. It was flanked until 1954 by a 50-foot nude figures, a man on one end of the block, a woman on the other, but in 1955, the sign was remade for Pepsi-Cola and the figures were replaced with giant Pepsi bottles.134 In just eighteen lines,

O’Hara has managed to mention Americana including Coca-Cola, Marilyn Monroe, Camel

cigarettes, and a Pepsi-Cola advertising landmark. He’s also described a forbidden homosexual

gaze. The next line contains another poetic reversal: a mixed-race couple and his reaction to

them: “A / Negro stands in a doorway with a / toothpick, languorously agitating. / A blonde

132 Corber 68, 69. 133 Starck 4. 134 New York Times n.p.

chorus girl clicks: he / smiles and rubs his chin.” The black man knows that in standing in a

doorway with a toothpick, his very body is threatening to some who pass. O’Hara certainly can

relate – as a homosexual man, he knows how to read other men’s body attitudes and positions in

looking sex. O’Hara is also very aware that due to his sexual orientation, his very body is an

outrage to most Americans. Regarding the black man, Lehman correctly states in his book, The

Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, that “O’Hara was one of the

first American poets to include them [black people] matter-of-factly in his vision of America.135

The black man in the poem has his eye on a blonde chorus girl, representing another kind

forbidden sex in 1950s America, but O’Hara doesn’t treat them as dangerous, or illicit; rather, he

treats them with a wink as he continues, “Everything suddenly honks.” Historian Kathleen Starck

quotes Victor Seidler when she writes that the decade of the 1950s was a decade where “issues

of feminine control” were also displaced on men who were also deemed “feminine:” Jews, gay

men, even black men.136 The term feminine here refers specifically to groups of men without power – non-hegemonic men. O’Hara seems to intuit a kinship as he associates with these other feminized groups. At the very least, he nods to being non-normative, and affirms the inter-racial couple as being outliers like him.137

O’Hara finally gets lunch in the next stanza, but not until he memorializes the riot of neon in

Times Square, noticeable even in broad daylight. He recalls his older friend, dance critic and poet Edward Denby, saying something about neon in the daylight being a “great pleasure,” while

135 Lehman 196. I would go further: in multiple poems, O’Hara writes matter-of-factly about Jews, Puerto Ricans, Negroes, and homosexuals – for him, marginalized people were his people. 136 Starck 58. 137 For much more on O’Hara’s complicated poetic relationship with American black men, see Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

he dines on a cheeseburger and chocolate malted at Juliet’s Corner, thinks about director

Federico Fellini, perhaps because Fellini’s film La Strada starring Anthony Quinn and Giulietta

Masina had just been released a month before.138 In the final three lines of the stanza, he provides a glance at New York high society as he sees a woman “in foxes,” (despite it being

August) as she “puts her poodle in a cab.” O’Hara need not mention the ostentatiousness of the social class who transport their pets in cabs – his readers understand what’s not written – a wry and critical eye-roll.

In the penultimate stanza, O’Hara opines about the presence of Puerto Ricans: they make the street “beautiful and warm.” This serves as another example of his federation with other marginalized groups who are viewed with suspicion at the mid-century. Puerto Ricans had moved in great numbers to New York in the post-war period, and had often been subjects of discrimination and violence. O’Hara affirms their presence as he notices several of them by describing their positive affect on the avenue.

This thought apparently reminds him of three close friends who had died in rapid succession in the 18 days before he wrote this poem: first “Bunny,” his friend Violet “Bunny” Lang, whom he had met at Harvard while an undergraduate. Bunny was an early muse as well as a founding member of the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge, and a close friend and confidant. Bunny appears in a number of O’Hara poems, and he was devastated when she died of Hodgkin’s disease at 32, on

July 29, 1956. Just eight days later, friend and well-known musical theater lyricist and bookwriter John LaTouche, died suddenly at 41 of a heart attack. LaTouche and O’Hara had had

138 IMDb n.p.

a long friendship, which started when an out-of-work young O’Hara did some typing for

Latouche in 1951, during the year O’Hara arrived in New York. LaTouche had later produced a

short sixteen-millimeter film written by and starring O’Hara and friends – James Schuyler, Jane

Freilicher, Larry Rivers, John Ashbery, shot at LaTouche’s house on East Hampton.139 Reeling with the grief of two close friends’ deaths, on the night of August 11, Jackson Pollock’s car crashed, killing him and a passenger. This poem is dated just 5 days after Pollock’s death, on

August 16, 1956. Pollock and O’Hara knew each other well from The Cedar bar – the “artists” bar where O’Hara and his poet friends communed with the glitterati of the Abstract Expressionist movement, arguing about art, philosophy, and occasionally, poetry. O’Hara was so much a part of Pollock’s circle that his wife, painter Lee Krasner, soon after this poem was written, asked

O’Hara (rather than Clement Greenberg, Pollock’s high-brow champion among the intellectual essayists) to write the first monograph on her recently deceased husband.

As I mentioned above, O’Hara’s life, despite the enduring sense of humor evident in his poetry and his letters, also has a deeply melancholic side – and this also frequently appears in his work. In this poem, he allows himself three lines here to memorialize his recently lost friends, all three dead before the age of 45, ending this thought with a philosophical question: “But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” He feels that the losses are the earth’s losses, not just his own, as these were three people who were creating some of the most personal and best art of all

O’Hara’s friends. In typical O’Hara fashion, however, he doesn’t dwell on his grief. He has the

139 Gooch 199, 223.

thought, records it, wonders if it means anything, and hastily returns us to his after lunch walk

back to the Museum.

Next O’Hara adds more pop culture references while at a magazine stand and on seeing a

movie poster for Bullfight, presumably the 1951 Spanish documentary that must have been

playing at an art theater nearby. As he walks by a building called the Manhattan Storage

Warehouse, he recalls that at one time, he had mistaken that building for the Amory Building,

where the famous 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art was held – an event which would

have held great significance for his painter friends.140 His last stop is for a glass of papaya juice,

perhaps under the Camel smoke sign, where an existing mid-century photograph shows a

storefront with the sign for “Elpine Papaya Drinks.” The owners of Elpines were a Spanish

Sephardic Jewish family who were Cuban immigrants, likely another O’Hara nod to his positive

thoughts about the melting pot of New York City in the 1950s.

The final stanza has the flaneur poet returning to work, perhaps having composed the poem

in his head, because he thinks of a poet he considers “his heart:” Pierre Reverdy. Rather than

referring to a pocket-sized chapbook, like he sometimes does in other poems, here his reference

must be metaphorical; poet Keston Sutherland points out that many critics have mentioned this

passage, “but I don’t think anyone has yet said in print that no such book existed in 1956 when

O’Hara wrote that poem.”141 I believe the metaphor O’Hara makes here is that certain poets –

Pierre Reverdy among them – are so dear to him that he carries them in his heart. O’Hara may

140 The 69th Regiment Armory, where the show was actually held, is on Lexington between East 25th and 26th Streets, farther east than where O’Hara is walking. 141 Sutherland 126.

also have read (and been carrying) Reverdy in the original French, as it appears Reverdy wasn’t

translated into English in book form until after O’Hara’s death.142

I disagree with Mattix on his understanding of what returning to work means to O’Hara, as

he often mentions this in his poems supposedly written on his lunch hours. Mattix sees O’Hara’s

“return to work where, unlike in the street of his lunch hour, there are fewer distractions. While

his lunch hour was a moment of escape the risk is that his feeling of loss will return once he

returns to his office and life will seem banal and pointless.143 I don’t believe O’Hara ever felt his work at MoMA was banal and pointless, as he functioned always to champion his friends’ art, art that he saw as aesthetically pure and uncorrupted by commercialism. In fact, specifically in this poem, where there is the raw grief and loss of three dear friends, his work at the museum is reparative, in the case of Pollock specifically. I do agree, however, that the functions served by lunch versus museum were two very distinct ones, and both countered feelings of banality and pointlessness – each in a different way. Poetry was, in fact, personal and a part of his life O’Hara didn’t freely share with a larger public. Curating museum exhibitions, on the other hand, was his world stage – and one where he relished the spotlight he could shine on his friends’ work.

This poem contains all of the following: O’Hara commentary on class, race, consumerism, pop culture, and homosexuality, forbidden sex, immigrants, the cosmopolitanism of foreign films and French poets, Hollywood, advertising, gender roles, friends, death, loss, and the most famous and important modern art show ever held in America. He’s written an essay on mid-century

142 It’s interesting to note that one of Reverdy’s translators was O’Hara friend and fellow poet, John Ashbery, who translated Haunted House, published in 2007. 143 Mattix 81.

culture in a short poem, and he wants us to believe he’s done it in real time, on his lunch hour.

These poems are shrewdly written so that they seem to write themselves - almost like

conversation or the fictional “phone call” he mentions in his famous Personism manifesto. In

point of fact, many friends and his editor have written about O’Hara’s lack of reworking or

editing poems, however, it’s impossible to know whether the poem comprises actual sights or a

very active and imaginative internal conversation. This work is unique in another respect in that

it is also an early published O’Hara poem, having been first printed in Evergreen Review in

1957, and subsequently reprinted in Lunch Poems.144

I argue throughout the dissertation that O’Hara’s work functions as early post-racial and post-gender American literature. What I mean by that is that he was in that leading edge of

American men who lived as homosexuals despite the great social cost, and used homosexual desire and experiences as content for his poems. O’Hara resisted all mid-century gender norms, which were significant, and wrote with great relish about his mid-century New York homosexual experience. Poetry scholar Bruce Davidson notes that “poetry has often been the site of alternative-often perverse-gender positions, nowhere more so than during the repressive 1950s and 1960s. But poetry is also the site where those gender positions are created.”145 His point in this statement is that in writing about his homosexual desires and experiences, a defining statement about homosexual men was being performed. O’Hara is a post-racial poet in the respect that, for him, serving in the War with blacks, Jews, and others meant that his America always included diversity in ethnicity and religion. Practically, this meant that he gave space to

144 Collected Poems 538. 145 Davidson 2.

others and normalized their place in his world. Nevertheless, the arts scene among poets and visual artists was still very white during the mid-century, even in New York. Music was where black artists had had more impact and inroads, and O’Hara often writes about visiting the 5 Spot where Miles Davis often played, or seeing a black artist like Billie Holiday sing. Where his post- racial views intersect with his writing is in these I-do-this-I-do-that poems. As he walks the streets of New York, he notices and comments on difference, assimilating various groups into how his representation of New York.

O’Hara’s work was prescient in this way, and while it probably rose personally for him out of his own status as a marginalized citizen, nevertheless, his worldview eventually found a large following, particularly in liberal political circles. Hazel Smith’s book, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography, also finds O’Hara’s work historically anticipatory; she identifies it as a hyperscape: “This landscape [of O’Hara poems] anticipates the world of multinational companies, hypermedia, and polymorphous sexual and racial identities we live in now.” 146 However, contemporaneously, the average American was so concerned with

America’s superiority, or being considered normal and performing their gender role correctly, that, for them, O’Hara’s worldview was often totally unrecognizable.

In a poem written in 1957, O’Hara describes a “night in the life” of the poet, but also includes nods to a variety of forbidden mid-century societal conventions. The humor O’Hara writes with in this poem is wry and likely slightly opaque except to those in his circle. O’Hara biographer Brad Gooch recounts that in 1957, O’Hara and his roommate, Joe LeSueur moved to

146 Hyperscapes 1.

a “cold water two room apartment on the third floor of a colorless brick building at 90 University

Place in what O’Hara coyly described to Koch as ‘the free glamourous Village,’” now known as the Union Square neighborhood. 147 From this glamourous new location, O’Hara penned this poem:

I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy. The police car is always near the door in case they cry or the key doesn’t work in the lock. But he can’t open it either. So we go to Joan’s and sleep over. Bridget and Joe and I.

I meet Mike for a beer in the Cedar as the wind flops up the Place, pushing the leaves against the streetlights. And Norman tells about

the geste, with the individual significance of a hardon like humanity. We go to Irma’s for Bloody Marys,

and then it’s dark. We played with her cat and it fell asleep. We seem very mild. It’s humid out. (Are they spelled “dikes”?) People say they are Bacchantes, but if they are we must be the survivors of Thermopylae.

The poem’s subject is an evening with friends – an innocuous version of his occasional poems – the ones he dashed off on the typewriter and stuck in a drawer, soon to be forgotten. However, this poem isn’t all what it originally seems, like so many O’Hara poems. During 1957, O’Hara

147 Gooch 292.

and LeSueur lived at 90 University Place, a three-story building between Greenwich Village and

Gramercy Park. In the first line, he describes the downstairs establishment as a “dyke bar,” referring to an establishment whose clientele are lesbians. Without leaving the first line, however, he lets us know he’s happy, presumably about his neighbor situation. Where many upstairs neighbors would look with haughty shame at the lesbians, or complain about the noise or music from the bar, O’Hara is careful to tell his readers that he is happy here. In line two, he tells us there’s always a police car near the door, which signals trouble in a paranoid reading, especially given New York police and their harassment of gay bars, but once again, O’Hara reverses the thought by writing that the police stay near the door “in case they cry.” This reversal of the lesbian stereotype of a hard, tough, mannish woman is typical of O’Hara’s sense of humor and the method with which he removes the sting of stereotypical marginalization. Line four is a further reversal, in which he opines that the police may stay nearby in case the lesbians, or he and Joe, need help with the key. It would, of course, stereotypically, be more likely that two gay men would have trouble with a key and lock than lesbians, who are known to be adept with tools and taking care of themselves. In this instance, it seems to be O’Hara who can’t get into the lock, even though the policeman apparently tries it too, without positive results, since this means that (line 5) they have to go somewhere else – to Joan’s – to sleep. “Joan’s” would be

Joan Mitchell’s apartment, within walking distance. Here O’Hara also introduces us to the rest of his party: Joe and a woman named Bridget.

In the second stanza, O’Hara writes about meeting Mike (Mike Goldberg) at the Cedar tavern for a beer (University Place and Eighth), the artist’s bar where O’Hara and his poet friends hung out, listening to aesthetic discussions and jotting down poetry. Likely written in spring, O’Hara

notes the wind blowing leaves around the Place, and mentions next that Norman (Bluhm) is also at the Cedar, and is telling a tale (O’Hara calls it a geste) that goes on and on and has about as much significance as an erection has on humanity. They go to a friend, Irma’s, for Bloody

Marys, play with Irma’s cat until it falls asleep, and have a mellow evening. He mentions that it’s humid out and then returns to the subject of the beginning of the poem, wondering if he’s spelled

“dykes” correctly: “Are they spelled ‘dikes’?” Finally, he reverts to talking about stereotypical sexual orientation origin myths. “People” have said the dykes are Bacchantes, and not one to want to upstaged by his lesbian neighbors, he suggests that gay men would then be

“the survivors of Thermopylae.” He’s apparently heard or read critical gossip about lesbians emanating from a Greek Dionysian tradition in Rome, women who are intoxicated with dance and drink, and perhaps even mutilation ceremonies. A dark thought, but he follows it up with an observation about gay men – if indeed lesbians are mutilating pagan drunks, gay men must be

“survivors of Thermopylae,” the Greek mythological entrance to Hades. This is a perverse statement of inclusion, of brotherhood, with his neighbors, figuratively including himself and his friends in the same description.

What has O’Hara accomplished with this poem about a day and night in his life? First, he’s normalized his lesbian neighbors for his readers, even mocking the reason the police are so near gay establishments. He’s shown off his literary knowledge, a common part of his poetry, by mentioning the Bacchantes and the survivors of Thermopylae. Most important, he’s surrounded his readers with his friends – Bridget, Joe, Mike, Norman, and drinking, an increasingly important social activity for O’Hara. Note also that where they went, how they got from place to

place, begins to form an unconscious map of the neighborhood and where it is safe and hospitable for he and his friends to be.

2.8 The Post-War Urban Homosexual Community

Many returning homosexual World War II soldiers who had discovered, to their surprise, others like them in their barracks and submarines, chose not to move home and back into secrecy, but rather to move to urban areas. Communities of more-or-less visible homosexual men developed rapidly in the post-war period in New York City, Washington, D. C., San Francisco,

Chicago, and Miami. Regardless, the post-war period in America was one of the most hostile to homosexuality in the history of the country. America came out of the War with a strong desire to create the appearance of uniform, binary, black and white positive and free experience for her citizens: democracy versus Communism, West versus East, true versus false, patriot versus traitor; were all strongly reinforced socio-political messages in the decades after World War II.

Among these binaries was a strong distinction made between heterosexual men and homosexuals, heterosexuality, of course, being the norm. This binary only became more pronounced as homosexual men (unexpectedly) refused to retreat into their pre-war secrecy and isolation after their service to the country.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds her readers that this binary of sexual orientation, so prominent after the War, is a created construct, not inherent in previous human behavior:

The dividing up of all sexual acts—indeed all persons—under the “opposite”

categories of “homo” and “hetero” is not a natural given but historical process,

still incomplete today and ultimately impossible but characterized by potent

contradictions and explosive effects.148

It is worth noting that Sedgwick wrote those words in Epistemology of the Closet in 1990, fully four decades after O’Hara began writing his mature poetry, so her comment that sexual orientation categories are “still incomplete today” should be read in that context.149 What I mean to say by that is that an outward, obvious display of homosexual desire or sex was, in 1950, anathema to everything Americans knew or could imagine. It was dangerous, life-ruining, and unthinkable. It was illegal and carried felony charges in many jurisdictions. A whisper of homosexuality rendered one a pariah in America, so much so that it is easy to forget when one thinks about the apparently emotionally healthy life and community O’Hara and his friends built with one another.

How was it that a returning soldier, who faced severe punishment while in the service if found to be homosexual, tolerated relentless societal derision to be his true homosexual self once he was out of service? Historians believe that the nature of living conditions in the service contributed to the strength of identity demonstrated by post-war homosexuals. The armed services in World War II consisted almost entirely of young men living in close quarters with little or no privacy, conditions which helped these homosexual men discover one another. Ibson writes very succinctly about the War as it relates to homosexuals, a topic I devote most of

Chapter 3 investigating. He writes, “The Second World War was the largest same-sex gathering in American history, involving over sixteen million men, roughly one-tenth of the country’s

148 Epistemology xvi. 149 I would assert that “still incomplete today” applies even in 2020, thirty years after Sedgwick’s comment.

entire population.”150 What he is referring to in this passage is the “homosocial” nature of the armed services, referring to a large group of young sexually-active men with little or no opportunity to interact with anyone but other men, along with, of course, the attendant lack of privacy and restricted leave. It is highly ironic that the lengthy efforts the military used to keep homosexuals out of the service, not only failed, but actually introduced homosexual men to one another.151 The result of the irony being that these men didn’t want to hide their identity once they got out of service. In many ways, this was the beginning of the modern homosexual community, rather than the Stonewall Inn riots two decades later.

Sedgwick has worked to investigate the outcomes of a homosocial environment, both on heterosexual men and homosexuals. It is important to her scholarship that the two concepts be not only adequately defined, but placed correctly in history. For that reason, what follows is a lengthy quote from her book Between Men on this subject:

“Homosocial” is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences,

where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a

neologism, obviously formed by analogy with “homosexual,” and just as

obviously meant to be distinguished from “homosexual.” In fact, it is applied to

such activities as “male bonding,” which may, as in our society, be characterized

by intense homophobia fear and hatred of homosexuality. To draw the

“homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to

hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and

150 Ibson 7. 151 See Chapter 3 of this dissertation for a lengthy discussion of World War II and the “problem” of homosexuality.

homosexual - a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically

disrupted. It will become clear, in the course of my argument, that my hypothesis

of the unbrokenness of this continuum is not a genetic one — I do not mean to

discuss genital homosexual desire as ‘at the root of” other forms of male

homosociality—but rather a strategy for making generalizations about, and

marking historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations with other

men.152

The importance of Sedgwick’s distinction is this: a homosocial environment can have two outcomes, and World War II did. One outcome was that homosexual men met one another and realized that they didn’t have to live in secrecy, shame, and isolation after their service was over.

This is the experience O’Hara and some of his early homosexual friends at Harvard (like Edward

Gorey) encountered. For other men, the homosocial environment, however, as Sedgwick notes above, produced the exact opposite - a fear of, and hatred for homosexuality and, as a result, against any physicality or showing of affection between men.153

2.9 Mid-Century American Attitudes about Homosexuality

I believe the reason O’Hara chose to write the poems he did has its roots in the fact that he

understood deeply that as a homosexual man, he was an outlier, an aberration for the society

around him, who not only didn’t acknowledge him, but actively worked to erase him. His life

required the reparative use of the arts, and in his case, specifically poetry. The aesthetic forms

152 Between Men 1, 2. 153 We would call this fear and hatred “homophobia,” but the term homophobia, as used by Sedgwick, is ahistorical when talking about the mid-century period. See Wickberg for scholarship on the timing of the usage of the word.

and subjects he adopted: non-metrical, every day, uncoded homosexuality, campy, internal

dialog, allowed O’Hara to establish a poetic of resistance in a very anxious decade, particularly

for homosexuals.

The 1950s was the height of the so-called lavender scare in Washington and elsewhere,

during which homosexual men were losing their jobs based solely on rumors, hunted by the

federal government, conflated with sex perverts and victims of mental illness, arrested for

felonies simply for congregating, and so on. From O’Hara’s “Lines During a Certain Piece of

Music (1960)” comes this stanza:

well but if you lust after someone you must face it your life, after all must be real. 154

While O’Hara led a homosexual life, he often wrote about a calculated life in his poems – one meant to produce a reaction in his coterie of readers. In this poem, he is, at once, both self- deprecating and comically egotistical, comparing himself to Marilyn Monroe as a sex symbol:

Now more features of our days have become popular, the nose broken, the head bald, the body beautiful. Marilyn Monroe. Can one’s lips be “more” or “less” sensual?155

His nose broken as a boy by a schoolyard bully, his hairline receding at an alarming rate for a

man in his early 30s (horrifying for most young men), but a pride in his body of one who

generates, in his circle, the same reaction Marilyn Monroe gets among heterosexual men. He

may even be asking in the last line if his lips are “more” sensual than Monroe’s.

154 Collected Poems 384. 155 Collected Poems 147.

Given that O’Hara writes about sexuality, sex, and body parts and fluids, his first-person narrative perspective becomes an important element in his work. Why? Because even though he is open about sexuality, it is of the utmost importance when he’s writing that he’s aware that, depending on who is reading, his thoughts can elicit various receptions. O’Hara’s tendency to openness when writing about sex is a certain sign that he expected his writing to be read only by his coterie of friends. Homosexuality was still not spoken about in public during O’Hara’s lifetime – except perhaps to denigrate or make fun of it – and so, for a homosexual author, to whom you are speaking (or in his case writing), makes all the difference in your level of candor.

Are you writing in a paranoid manner? Then one should not be quite so straightforward, perhaps use some coded language as O’Hara’s predecessors like Auden had. But if you’re writing in a reparative manner, to be read by other homosexuals or people with whom you don’t have to hold back, then it is politically correct to say what’s on your mind. Either way, the resulting text is politically charged, by commission or omission.

O’Hara’s work is of a generative moment – one which uses the moment of writing the poem as the subject of the poem itself. At the same time, while his poems read as though they are the entirety of his life, like social media posts, they actually are moments in his life curated in such a way that they produce the affect he wishes. O’Hara’s life is something like his poems, there is some reality there, but it’s been camouflaged in such a way that he exhibits the view he wants readers to see or feel. O’Hara does this so naturally that he can do it on the fly, as fast as he could write what he is actually doing or seeing or feeling. This has to do with that internal dialogue and with the fact that he once wrote about writing poetry, “you just go on your nerve” – that is, he

writes without self-censorship. 156 Fellow poet Allen Ginsberg wrote “first thought, best thought”

in the 1960s about editing oneself, overthinking a poetic phrase, rather than cherishing the

immediacy and impulsiveness of poetry. 157 O’Hara, too, mastered this writing habit of producing poetry with very little editing or rework. What he gets from this is a connection with his reader as though they are having a conversation. There is no fear of being “outed” or denigrated in any of his writing – he was writing for an insider audience all the time.

Despite all the other accomplishments O’Hara made with his poetry, the aspect of his life that is most present is his homosexuality. Throughout his career, he writes about his homosexuality - for various reasons and with various results. He uses vulgar references to it to shock readers, he makes fun about it, he sometimes is vulnerable and candid about it. It is, for him, a bedrock foundation for whatever else he includes in his poetry. Despite the fact that many early O’Hara critics failed to pick up on the blatant homosexuality in his work, O’Hara’s friend Joe LeSueur made very clear in his book about his friend what O’Hara’s point of view about the issue was.

Nelson recalls that, “LeSueur insists, however, that O’Hara also remained deeply committed—

'as a point of pride and as a moral obligation’—to ‘hammer[ing] home to straight people the clear, unmistakable message that he was an uncontrite, arrogant queer who was not about to sing miserere for fall on his knees to anyone.’” 158

Without a doubt, O’Hara’s unrepentant homosexuality did interrupt the natural hierarchy of

American society, and particularly the fact the he refused to mask or hide it. Homosexuality

156 Collected Poems 498. 157 Thuene 3. 158 Nelson 54. Also see LeSueur 227.

violated the binary position that men are men and women are women. Homosexuality, too, is a

form of sexual difference that cannot be seen, and that violation, thought of in the mid-century of

“passing,” seemed particularly offensive during the Cold War. Images of spies and traitors, of

blacks pretending to be white, of Jews pretending to be Christians, all carried this formidable

falsehood of passing. O’Hara also wrote about the “undiscussable” subjects of interracial sex,

and beyond that, homosexual interracial sex. As a member of a marginalized community, power

relations were perhaps more evident to him than to other poets. Nevertheless, O’Hara quickly

learned to gather social and aesthetic alliances with visual artists – both as an audience for his

poetry and for his many poetic/visual art collaborations. Further, if the New York School of

Poets were, indeed, the last of the avant-garde, as Lehman concludes, they held a unique liminal

moment in the timeline of art, one in which great artistic contributions can be made.

In the summer of 1956, O’Hara worked on a long poem of 200 lines, that he titled “In

Memory of My Feelings.” In this poem, he investigates poetically what his identity is, and what

it means to have that identity – or identities. The poem begins:

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.159

Quietness was perhaps a fleeting moment for O’Hara, who was almost constantly on the go with his friends. Here he suggests that there is one part of him who is a quiet, transparent man, one who has “several likenesses.” To clarify this image, he refers to things that are always plural – numbers, years, stars. They don’t often exist as just one – if you see one, there is another one

159 Collected Poems 252, 253.

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right before it or after it. So, Frank O’Hara isn’t just one man – he’s several. It’s likely, he began feeling this way as a boy – on the one hand, a good boy – a piano student, a Catholic church attendee, a son; but on the other hand, a boy having sex with another boy in a hay loft, a boy with a secret, a boy who can’t be kept transparent. He continues:

My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart!

Some of these selves are naked and so vulnerable, O’Hara writes he has to borrow pistols to protect himself – note especially his use of the plural word “myselves.’ From whom does he require protection? From people who can see who he really is and want to murder him, erase him, free America from all homosexuality. During the time he was writing, the people with

“murder in their heart” would include the American government, the military, the Church - almost every dominating institution found him an undesirable as a homosexual man.

At times, withdrawn, I rise into the cool skies and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape, speaks, but I do not hear him, I’m too blue.160

O’Hara is in a blue mood when he writes this stanza – evidenced by admitting that he is

“withdrawn” at times – a characterization few would expect from knowing about his life through his poems. He finds the world difficult to understand or figure out, perhaps because he is non- normative and therefore is not entitled to the cultural hegemony that “normal” grants. He

160 Collected Poems 252, 253.

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mentions Manfred – a character who whispers in his year, but O’Hara is “too blue” to hear him.

This seems to be a reference to Lord Byron’s Manfred, a story in which the main character,

Manfred, perhaps somewhat autobiographical, is persecuted by sexual guilt for an offence never named, but perhaps related somehow to Byron’s own rumored affair with his half-sister. If he had listened to this character, what would O’Hara have heard? This poem is dedicated to friend and muse, Grace Hartigan, for whom O’Hara carried a non-sexual torch, and to whom he frequently wrote love poems. In his sadness, he may be sorry that his homosexuality prevents him from having a romantic relationship with Grace. Nevertheless, he didn’t hear what Manfred told him because he was too melancholy, a rare condition for O’Hara to admit in his poetry.

2.10 O’Hara and the Female Muse

A significant feature of the gendered relationships within O’Hara’s coterie was his serial relationships with single heterosexual women. These women included Bunny Lang, Jane

Freilicher, and Helen Frankenthaler at various times. However, painter Grace Hartigan was perhaps the most significant poetic muse for O’Hara for a number of his early years in New

York. Two years earlier than the poem above, he had written this poem, which memorializes his love for Grace, entitled, “For Grace, After a Party:”

You do not always know what I am feeling. Last night in the warm spring air while I was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't interest me, it was love for you that set me afire, and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, isn't there

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an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside the bed? And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn't you like the eggs a little different today? And when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding.161

O’Hara begins this poem by confessing his love for Grace Hartigan. He expresses some frustration that, despite their closeness, she doesn’t always understand his conflicted sexual feelings. At the end of the first stanza, he notes that while he was “blazing his tirade” outside with someone he doesn’t care about, his sexual turn-on was to be thinking about her. He asks her if she finds that odd, but I think what he’s also intimating is that he found it odd. The next few lines remind Grace of his devotion for her – doesn’t he find her an ashtray without her asking?

Wouldn’t he make her breakfast in bed if they were together?

Taken as a whole, this work contains a fleeting desire for the kind of life venerated by society

– domestic couplehood. Homosexuals during the 1950s understood that marriage, couplehood, wasn’t for them, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t desire it, dream about it, regret that they’d never have it. Without an institutional sanction of homosexual romantic love like marriage, the actuality that it could ever exist seemed impossible to them. Additionally, one of the attendant freedoms of being homosexual was being promiscuous and having lots of sex with many strangers. In the pre-HIV society, this behavior was not rare, indeed, it was expected.

Nevertheless, O’Hara was head over heels for the two years he and Vincent Warren were a couple, writing beautiful love poems to his romantic partner, and he was depressed and listless

161 Collected Poems 214.

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when that relationship ended. What stopped O’Hara from acting on the domestic impulses he

perhaps had about Grace was the strain he felt in the service of denying his true identity – he was

a homosexual man. He understood deeply and intimately that you simply couldn’t have both.162

Author Hazel Smith writes about this subject of female muses and specifically about this

poem, in her book, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, Homosexuality,

Topography. She sees the same things I do in the poem, but reads them differently:

The poem to Grace Hartigan, “For Grace, After a Party,” draws on a discourse of

heterosexual tensions, jealousies and resolutions. The poem uses a well-worn

heterosexual form of persuasion: ‘I was temporarily attracted / distracted but it is

really you I love.’ The sex of the third person in the poem is indeterminate,

though to read the poem in terms of real life rather than text life is to assume that

the third party is male. The poem ends with an image of ‘breakfast in bed’

conventionally associated with heterosexual marriage.163

As I wrote above, I don’t believe the intention of the poem is, in any way, a riff on the common heterosexual brush off – I think it is much more sincere and complicated than that. There is also absolutely no doubt about the sex of the third person – O’Hara was known to be exclusively homosexual, and the lines, “I was / blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t / interest / me,” is clearly a reference to anonymous homosexual street sex. What’s enchanting about this poem, in my reading, is the difficulty O’Hara has in accepting that while he loved Grace, and he

162 It is a great tragedy that later in the 1950s, as Hartigan was preparing to marry, her psychoanalyst convinced her that a married woman couldn’t have a homosexual man as a friend. A number of years went by with no communication between the two. In 1966, she asked O’Hara to lunch to try to repair what she had realized was a mistake, but the rift was not mended and he died shortly afterward. See Gooch 359, 360. 163 Hyperscapes 124.

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knew she loved him, because he was a homosexual, they could not consummate their love and keep a romantic relationship. He’s not trying to keep her and also keep his street sex life; he’s trying to explain to her – and to himself – the heartfelt ambiguous frustrations of the differences between heart attraction and sexual attraction. I read this poem as one of O’Hara’s most candid, most revealing of his entire oeuvre.

Near the end of the poem, O’Hara writes another stanza referring to the plurality of his inner selves, which begins with the line that ultimately was carved on his tombstone: “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” On his tombstone, this line (by itself) takes the meaning that he gracefully lived in a way that was true to himself, doing what was right for him despite society’s objections. However, in context, he seems to be referring to Grace herself in the line, as he follows it with a long list of “sordid identifications” barely suggested by the “masque of conception” – the person he was born as. He continues:

I am a Hittite in love with a horse. I don’t know what blood’s in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downtown in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist in which a face appears and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian sleeping on a scalp164

Throughout this list, there is a sense that O’Hara is saying that who he is, who he was born as, is not acceptable, not socially approved, and, regrettably, won’t allow for a sexual relationship with

Grace. Several of the personas above have homosexual overtones – “I am a girl,” I have “a

164 Collected Poems 256.

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sprained ass-hole,” “I am a baboon eating a banana,” “I am a child smelling his father’s underwear.” Other personas are just outrageously unapproved, anti-social: he is a dictator, a child-eating doctor, and a scalping Indian. This isn’t the only poem in which O’Hara identifies as a person of color or another marginalized group, but here he is a Hittite and an African prince.

The empathy that being marginalized himself gave O’Hara for others is evident as far back as his

Navy days, when he befriended Jews and effeminate sailors who couldn’t survive the military atmosphere. There is perhaps a touch of feeling sorry for himself here; thinking about Grace and how deeply he cares for her, but also knowing that that fraternal love can never become something romantic.

2.11 Poems About Homosexuality and Camp Humor

The following poem, provocatively titled “Homosexuality,” and written early in O’Hara’s

New York life, is an attestation of the sexually authentic way he had chosen to live his life. By using the pronoun “we” in the first line, there can be no mistaking that he includes himself in the company of the title:

So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!165

O’Hara’s proclamation, both with the title and this first couplet, is that an open homosexual man lives, at best, a double life – one life with the men he picks up for sex, and another life with his friends - those who surround him. He may be “out” to his friends as well, but the very distinct sexual ritual between strangers – of the homosexual gaze or glance, the returned gaze, the body

165 Collected Poems 181.

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language of assent, and the very distinct possibility that an arrangement to engage in sex between the two has been accomplished without a spoken word. Masks are removed, and not only is there no conversation involved between the two men, “keeping our mouths shut” also refers to an unspoken oath that afterwards, the encounter never happened. Epstein insists that by urging his fellow homosexuals (“we”) to choose exposure rather than concealment in this poem with a subsequent line, “It's wonderful to admire oneself with complete candor,” O’Hara declares himself untangled by the corrosive masculinity ideology of his time.166 Epstein continues:

“Choose exposure rather than concealment, he [O’Hara] urges his fellow poets and homosexuals, speech rather than silence.”167 It’s ironic that there was a flip-flop in certainty over masculine gender roles in the early Cold War period – homosexuals who had come out (at least to themselves) during the War, went on to form communities of homosexual men and knew exactly what the principles of behavior for homosexual men was. On the other hand, heterosexual men during this period were terrified about questioning their masculinity; the social rules about masculinity seemingly pulled out from under them. O’Hara has many moments of self-doubt, but rarely over his sexuality – not only was he comfortable with “complete candor,” but he

“admired” himself for it.

This early internal thought about pride in who he is marks the beginning of some of O’Hara’s best poetry, written between 1953 and 1956. Another period of great growth in his poetry is from roughly 1959 to the early 1960s, the time which includes the love poems he wrote to Vincent

Warren, but also the robust back-and-forth poetry between he and replacement friend (but not

166 Beautiful Enemies 245. 167 Beautiful Enemies 245.

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lover), poet Bill Berkson. Caleb Crain has an interesting observation about O’Hara’s tone in this

poem: “After all, O’Hara does allow his gay desire to surface; although he pretends to veil it for

decorum’s sake, his veil is something between a demurely fluttering curtain and a waving

flag.”168 My view on the whole of O’Hara’s poetic oeuvre, although I admire the poetic beauty of

Crain’s observation, is that there is more “waving flag,” intentionally drawing attention to his homosexuality, or being vulgar for shock value, than “a demurely fluttering curtain,” and that’s one of the characteristics of O’Hara poetry that separates him from earlier homosexual poets, who, for many reasons, felt obligated to write in code. The trick before O’Hara’s generation was to write in code for your homosexual audience, but in a way that featured plausible deniability for your non-homosexual audience, who, for the most part, didn’t realize there was even a parallel layer of meaning happening. This type of coding goes back in American literature to

Walt Whitman, and was de rigeur until after World War II. O’Hara doesn’t practice this type of coding in his poetry.

In a letter to his friend painter Michael Goldberg, O’Hara describes how he felt when his friend Bunny Lang, perhaps worried about him finding a market for his work, pointed out to

O’Hara that his poetry was “too out:” “If one is going to start being embarrassed about one’s work I don’t know where it would stop, or rather it would stop.” 169 The “it” he refers to is his writing – saying, in other words, “If I have to worry about my work being ‘too out,’ I wouldn’t want to write at all.” A strong desire to refuse self-censure was a feature throughout O’Hara’s life. It was a choice he didn’t have during service; he wrote about his thinking while at Harvard:

168 Crain 289. 169 Beautiful Enemies 245.

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“and shit when I get the chance [after he leaves the Navy] you’ll know who the real me when I

come back who I really am and you’ll make no mistake you’ll know it o k.” 170

Despite O’Hara’s openness about his homosexuality from the very first poem he wrote as an

undergraduate, and then throughout his career, early criticism seemed determined to ignore it –

both in his biography and in writing about his poetry. There are several factors at work here –

first, there wasn’t a mainstream culturally appropriate way to write about homosexuality without

passing judgement or offering sympathy during O’Hara’s lifetime. Homosexuality was a disease,

a perversion, something to be ashamed of during his lifetime. Critics therefore just ignored the

O’Hara poems that contained open or combative references to homosexuality or sex at all. In

addition, likely because “normative” heterosexuality was so anticipated and expected, writers

about culture didn’t seem to understand that one’s worldview about power structures was

wrapped up in non-normative sex practices, so much so, that it colored every aspect of the

homosexual’s life. The idea, then, was that perhaps you knew or noticed O’Hara is a

homosexual, but you sideline that fact and treat his poetry as if it had been written by a

heteronormative poet.171 Smith notices this critical curiosity as well, “For, as we will see, even

the critics most eager to characterize O’Hara in this way [as a gay poet] seem to have

reservations about totally circumscribing him as such.”172

A significant contribution O’Hara makes to the canon of queer poetry is his use of gay humor: camp, the only “reparative practice” Eve Sedgwick named specifically in her writing on

170 Early Writing 112, emphasis mine. 171 Marjorie Perloff’s generally positive 1977 book, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters - the first book of literary criticism about O’Hara - for example, contains just one sentence identifying him as gay – in a quote from literary critic Saslow – “the still unsung gay poet Frank O’Hara.” Poet Among Painters 3. 172 Hyperscapes 126.

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the subject. O’Hara’s frequent use of camp reveals his personal worldview, insouciantly

portraying his poetic as casual as, you know, just jotting down a poem, having a sandwich for

lunch, going to the movies, or whatnot. To illustrate, on this day, in “Poem (1955),” he suddenly

notices that everyone around him is blonde:

All of a sudden all the world is blonde. The Negro on my left is blonde, his eyes are brimming like a chalice, he is melting the gold. Beside me, passed out on the floor, a novelist burns a hole in my pants and he is blonde, even the cigarette is. Some kind of Russian cigarette. Jean Cocteau must be blonde too. And the music of William Boyce. Yes, and what comes out of me is blonde. 173

Even as he is taking notice of a hairdressing trend, O’Hara doesn’t fail to bring in aesthetics, showing readers how classy and worldly he is – mentioning the Russian cigarette, Jean Cocteau, and William Boyce. However, his next move is to vulgarly refer to urination, which completes the high art/low art formula of the camp sensibility equation. Even in a low moment, O’Hara manages to use this camp sensibility to survive. In “Naptha,” he writes he “feels like a truck on a wet highway,” then asks himself, “how can you / you were made in the image of god.” In a mock argument with himself, he replies, “I was not / I was made in the image of a sissy truck- driver.” Perloff, reading Naptha fully fifty years after she first read it, recently wrote:

173 Collected Poems 237.

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The tone is complex. It’s one of those moments where the poet admits being very

low — skidding along like a truck on a wet highway. His friend remonstrates,

“how can you / you were made in the image of god.” On first reading, we are

likely to think the words are “you made (sic) in the image of a god” — the usual

cliché. But “image of god” is part of Catholic theology: we are all made in the

image of God. So the would-be compliment is deflated and leads to the “I was

not / I was made in the image of a sissy-truck driver.”174

This short passage, “a sissy-truck driver” contains a deliberate reversal – who would think to

conflate those two? A truck driver is the epitome of the hyper-masculine man, and a sissy, of

course, the epithet all gay men have had used against them. The notions of camp and survival

come together in O’Hara’s poetry like no poet before him. While it is remarkably difficult to find

mid-century essays about camp, essayist Susan Sontag was curious enough about the

phenomenon to write about it in 1964.175 She wrote,

It [Camp] is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the

essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And

Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among

small urban cliques.176

“Small urban cliques” would, by itself, be an apt description of O’Hara and his community. But

Sontag understood that camp had, as a part of its charm, a secret badge of identity – the very

174 “Reading Lunch Poems” 390. 175 Christopher Isherwood is the notable exception to the lack of literary mentions of camp during the 1950s – he has a character explain camp in his novel, A World in the Evening (1954). 176 Sontag 275. Sontag capitalizes the word Camp throughout her essay.

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badge O’Hara figured out during the Navy that he wanted to live out in his life. No poem in the

O’Hara oeuvre embraces both his sense of coterie and camp like the poem, “At the Old Place

(1953):”

Joe is restless and so am I, so restless. Button's buddy lips frame "L G T TH O P?" across the bar. "Yes!" I cry, for dancing's my soul delight. (Feet! Feet!) "Come on!"

Through the streets we skip like swallows. Howard malingers. (Come on, Howard.) Ashes malingers. (Come on, J.A.) Dick malingers. (Come on, Dick.) Alvin darts ahead. (Wait up, Alvin.) Jack, Earl, and Someone don't come.

Down the dark stairs drifts the steaming cha- cha-cha. Through the urine and smoke we charge to the floor. Wrapped in Ashes' arms I glide.

(It's heaven!) Button lindys with me. (It's heaven!) Joe's two-steps, too, are incredible, and then a fast rhumba with Alvin, like skipping on toothpicks. And the interminable intermissions,

we have them. Jack, Earl and Someone drift guiltily in. "I knew they were gay the minute I laid eyes on them!" screams John. How ashamed they are of us! we hope.177

This poem, with all its silliness and high drama, would be an instantly recognizable evening for homosexual men. But camp is more than just silly poems without coherent context or reversals of slurs. Its literary use can be much more sophisticated. Sontag includes a point in her “Notes on

‘Camp’” which catches exactly the argument I’m making:

Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it. Needless to

177 Collected Poems 223, 224.

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say, the propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction. . . . Homosexuals

have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp

is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness. 178

“Camp is a solvent of morality,” she writes, implying that it dissolves morality: it is propagandistic and it reveals the homosexual’s belief that aesthetics trumps all.

In what other ways does this sensibility project into O’Hara’s writing? Consider this example, an excerpt from “Biotherm,” written in 1961; here, O’Hara uses his well-developed camp sensibility to protect himself:

then too, the other day I was walking through a train with my suitcase and I overheard someone say “speaking of faggots” now isn’t life difficult enough without that and why am I always carrying something well it was a shitty looking person anyway better a faggot than a farthead or as fathers have often said to friends of mine “better dead than a dope” “if I thought you were queer I’d kill you” you’d be right to, DAD, daddio, addled annie pad-lark (Brit. 19th C.) well everything can’t be perfect you said it179

O’Hara writes about being called a faggot by a stranger on a casual train ride, and recalls an acquaintance’s father telling his son he’d kill him if he thought he was queer, both common enough occurrences in the life of gay men. Rather than display anger or shame, however, O’Hara mocks the person who spews the slur and sighs, “well everything can’t be perfect.” Survival techniques such as this one, the moral sigh, in addition to talking about such events with one’s

178 Sontag 290. 179 Collected Poems 441, 442.

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coterie of friends, are precisely the survival mechanisms O’Hara and other homosexuals used

(and still use) to disarm the combat of daily life. Ross summarizes O’Hara’s use of camp as, “an

imaginative conquest of everyday conditions of oppression, where more articulate expressions of

resistance or empowerment were impossible.” 180 Smith argued this reversal, “is often one of the dynamics of a non-essentialist gay identity,” in which she meant “non-hegemonic” when she wrote “non-essentialist.”181 Perl summarized the coterie and the tenor of the times thus:

These writers and artists were mostly in their early twenties, and the city seemed

wide open to them, a world away from the small towns in which they had grown

up. At the time, the United States, deep in the Korean War and in the grip of

McCarthyism, was a socially oppressive place, and New York City was an

enclave for an artist inclined toward recklessness.182

Crain sums up the role of O’Hara’s work in the nascent struggle for equality this way: “And

O’Hara’s gay persona – expressing anger and desire, insisting on a full emotional presence— deserves the attention of gay studies.”183 Homosexuality has, for most of history, been a taboo

subject. Yet art is never greater than when it questions social convention and exposes hypocrisy.

How is it that these colloquial poems about everyday events hold so much power? I think

Sedgwick discovered one way they are powerful – they are reparative because they are accurate

about homosexuality. My argument here is that they were also reparative for the author, a

reparative use of writing literature that Sedgwick didn’t write much about. Certainly, younger

180 Ross 74. 181 Hyperscapes 106. 182 Perl 55. 183 Crain 287.

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gay poets flocked to O’Hara, in many cases moving across the country to be near him, so

reading his work also served a reparative role in their lives. However, it’s important to consider

that O’Hara’s goal with his work wasn’t first as reparative literature for other anonymous gay

men – it was first to save himself and his friends from the dominance of society and state. Had he

been interested in a much larger audience, he could have pursued that. As a result of his self-

care, some of O’Hara’s best poems are dialogues with himself – either internal conversations or

communications between an unnamed narrator and a character he has created named Frank

O’Hara. This type of poetry is what O’Hara excelled at producing, often in one sitting and

usually unedited. Ashbery wrote about this quality that O’Hara excelled in producing, that it was

a “temporal, fluctuating quality that runs through his work and is one of its major innovations.184

Bill Berkson writes in his unfinished work, A Frank O’Hara Notebook, notes from which he planned to write a book on his time with O’Hara: “where is he? he is everywhere, he is not a character, he is a person, and therefore general.” 185 O’Hara’s 1948 diary contains the realization that, “I myself was my life.”186 This ontological realization gave O’Hara dogged hope and

resolve during his military service, but also followed him throughout life. O’Hara’s poetry was a

distinctive and piquant mash-up of everyday life, utopic wishes, political commentary, and

posturing. When Berkson writes that “he” is “general,” I think he means that term “universal,” at

times, an everyman. However, O’Hara was far from America’s version of a universal man.

Nevertheless, while I agree in general with Berkson, I also believe that O’Hara was a character in

184 Collected Poems vii. 185 Notebook 149. Berkson’s notes were published in book form by his widow after his death. 186 Early Writing 122.

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his own poems at times – in fact, he writes in third person occasionally to emphasize this.

Berkson’s comment returns us to the earlier discussion of whether a carefully curated and presented life is, or can be, synonymous with an actual life.

Curiously, after writing the average of a poem every week or two over 15 years’ time, during the last five years of his life, O’Hara’s frequency and quality of writing greatly decelerated.

Many have commented on this very noticeable trend, with conjecture ranging from O’Hara’s being so affected by his breakup with Vincent Warren that he lost his way, to his advancing alcoholism dampening his creative muse, to the simple observable fact that he had more and higher-profile responsibilities at MoMA. While all of these factors likely played a role in his marked decrease in writing, Berkson writes that he asked O’Hara: “A moment in early 1966, when I asked Frank why he was writing so few poems: ‘I just don’t have any ideas.’” 187 Many authors have associated increasing responsibility at MoMA with O’Hara’s paucity of writing in the final five years of his life. LeSueur comments on this:

By now Frank was assistant curator in the museum’s international program, which

handled traveling exhibitions. This meant that he had bigger responsibilities, and

as a result he was sometimes distracted from his writing. He realized what was

happening and worried about it. . . . He also began to have occasional dry spells,

but all he could do was go on living and hope that out of his life another poem

would emerge. At times like that he drank more than usual and made life hell for

his friends, mercilessly took them to task or got difficult at parties.188

187 Notebook 250. 188 LeSueur xx, xxi.

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Because he died later in 1966, sadly, we will never know if O’Hara would have rediscovered his muse, or if his poetry “career” was coming to an end. Nevertheless, it is somehow heartbreaking to hear the poet who could dash off a decent poem during a party or on his lunch hour, admit that his creative well had gone dry before he was even 40 years old.

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CHAPTER 3

LIVING INAUTHENTICALLY: THE WARTIME ACTIVATION OF A GAY POET

In this chapter, I look at the role service in the American military had in activating Frank

O’Hara as a political poet, the role that World War II played in the lives of young homosexual men like O’Hara, and their subsequent life choices. Investigating this previously understudied

O’Hara relationship requires both a review of the anti-homosexual policies of the military in

World War II, and a close reading of the earliest extant O’Hara poetry from his undergraduate college years. My exploration in this chapter both provides insight into his decision to always live as a gay man, and also textually works throughout his poetry to subvert mid-century social constructs about the performance of masculinity, particularly the man-as-warrior role. Early Cold

War concepts and paranoias about masculinity are the nexus of O’Hara’s mature political poetic, yet the genesis of his attitudes borne in O’Hara’s military service has not been well studied. This chapter carefully examines the complex relationship between the United States’ military and governmental preoccupation with homosexuality during World War II, Frank O’Hara’s “coming of age” military service, and his subsequent politically opinionated and subversive poetry written over the two decades he lived after his discharge.

3.1 O’Hara the War Poet

By studying O’Hara’s biography and his early writings as an undergraduate and graduate student, I claim that his formative years spent in the military politicized O’Hara’s subsequent views on America, war, race, religion, and masculinity. In 1958, O’Hara wrote heuristically about his autobiographical poetic practice, comparing it to nationalism: “poetry’s part of your

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self (sic) / like the passion of a nation / at war it moves quickly / provoked to defense or aggression / unreasoning power / an instinct for self-declaration / like nations its faults are absorbed / in the heat of sides and angles / combatting the void of rounds / a solid of imperfect placement / nations get worse and worse.”189 It is remarkable that, in this poem written a dozen years after his discharge, O’Hara conflates a nation at war with his need to write poetry; this poem supports the idea that writing poetry was life-giving, a part of his identity. O’Hara’s personal poetry is a part of him as much as the “passion of a nation” that “moves quickly” when at war, he writes. This national passion moves a country to “an instinct of self-declaration:” a need to aggression or defense. He can’t help but add an editorial about his feelings about war, that nations are imperfect, in fact, they are provoked to “unreasoning power” at times. In fact, “in the heat of sides and angles,” he continues, “nations get worse and worse.” O’Hara writes numerous times about the subject of a national will; here he suggests that the passion of a nation that moves it to war is the same passion that fuels him to write poetry. The unusual revelation of the correlation between war and his poetry in his writing is usually arbitrated in O’Hara’s biography by his homosexuality.

Harsh wartime anti-homosexual military policies continued from World War II into and through the 1950s as governmental discrimination against homosexuals in what early Cold War historians call a “crisis of masculinity.” 190 Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell enumerated masculinity as one of the “the deeper-running social currents of a turbulent mid-century

189 Collected Poems 309-310. 190 For my purposes, I define the “early Cold War” period as the two decades following the end of World War II to the end of O’Hara’s life in 1966.

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America,”⁠ and many other authors called the period “the decade of the crisis of masculinity,” a phrase used to describe an overwhelming and persistent societal preoccupation with the correct or normal performance of the masculine gender role in the years after the War, which, obviously, did not include homosexuality.191 This masculine performance expectation was driven by World

War II military policies and actions defending their absolute commitment to dominant normative

heterosexuality. The established and normative masculine narrative O’Hara defies in his poetry

has, for him, then, its beginnings in the insistent military expectations of masculinity with which

he lived in the Navy as a boy of 18. I will explore the link between these topics in this chapter by

examining the history of the military vis-à-vis the homosexual man and locating O’Hara’s post-

war writings about the war, the government, and masculinity - all of which are significant tracks

in his body of work. While there is no doubt that military service at a young age affects every

soldier’s psyche, young homosexual O’Hara had the added burden of serving while, at the same

time, attempting to avert attention by the Navy and his fellow soldiers, knowing that, should he

be found out, he was subject to severe anti-homosexual military punishment.

I further claim in this chapter that with its anti-homosexual policies and punishments, the

American military ironically worked to activate, define, and liberate homosexuals. It did this by

failing in efforts to “weed out” many homosexual servicemen despite intricate and far-reaching

attempts to do so; thereby, instead providing an utterly homosocial environment where the gay

soldiers met and bonded with one another.192 The post-war outcome of this self-identification

191 Bell lxxviii. For scholarship about the Cold War “crisis of masculinity,” also see Berube, Boone, Creadick, Corber, Cory, Cuordileone, Davidson, Genter, Martin, Schlesinger, Whyte, and Starck, among others. Schlesinger’s often-quoted article appeared in Esquire in 1958, illustrating the number of years this “crisis” persisted. 192 For a discussion of the usage here of the term “homosocial,” see Chapter 1 and Sedgwick.

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was that homosexual men didn’t all go back home, marry, and carry on secretive furtive homosexual sex encounters as American men had for decades, but instead, empowered by having met others like them in the service, many moved to urban areas and formed communities more-or-less out in the open despite living in the midst of a strongly conservative heteronormative culture. These pioneering queer men (and women) eventually became the generation who, in 1969, rioted against the New York Police Department over the frequent raids at The Stonewall Inn and other gay bars, in the event that galvanized and gave form and momentum to the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.

While conflating Cold War societal pressures with masculinity is a subject studied by many scholars, it is rarely mentioned in scholarly works on O’Hara’s poetic. My research identified just two O’Hara scholars who have written at all about this interesting connection between

O’Hara, the military, masculinity, and the politics of his poetry. Claire Seiler’s 2013 article,

“Francis O’Hara, War Poet,” also notices that scholars have all but ignored O’Hara’s writing about the War, but asserts that his Hopwood Award-winning collection of poems, “A Byzantine

Place,” guarantees O’Hara a place in the conversation: “Frank O’Hara is a touchstone poet of the post-World War II period. We know him as an exemplary New York poet, cold war poet, queer poet, and postmodern poet. . . . Francis O’Hara, however, was also - even first - a war poet.”

Poetry scholar Michael Davidson, whose book about male poets contains a chapter on O’Hara, concedes, despite contrary evidence, “O’Hara is the last poet one might associated with cold war subjects.” 193 Both authors correctly claim that O’Hara scholars have not tied his political poetic

193 Davidson 66.

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to the anti-homosexual environment he experienced in the War regardless of the fact that, throughout his career, his texts are replete with incendiary political statements, dissent, and droll disrespect for American military and foreign policy, particularly as it relates to Russia.

Seiler devotes some thought to why this has been the case regarding O’Hara, and concludes that, after World War I poetry, the game had changed with regard to the expectations the public had for the so-called genre of war poetry. She writes, “The question of what might be “expected” of World War II poetry was already a problem during the war.” 194 This question resulted in what

Seiler calls a “persistent underestimation” of O’Hara in this regard:

All of which is to say that the persistent underestimation of O’Hara’s poetic

engagement with the war likely owes as much to continued underestimation of the

poetry of World War II as it does to the hardening of ready impressions of

O’Hara’s poetics. If we seek a poetry of war only through accustomed means—

including outright topicality and war vocabulary—then we risk defining the genre

of World War II poetry by assumption rather than demonstration.195

As one of the few scholars who has identified O’Hara’s work in this genre over a period of some six decades, I am indebted to Seiler for the idea that I should look at O’Hara’s service time and subsequent writing. This has proved important, not only to understand his later political views, but it is an essential component to his very bold decision to live out the rest of his life as an open homosexual man. This topic also relates back to my earlier discussion of O’Hara’s early critics and canon-making. The early O’Hara critics didn’t review or write about his war literature, so it

194 Seiler 817. 195 Seiler 818.

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was essentially forgotten. Finally, Seiler writes that this dismissal of O’Hara’s war writing is still going on:

Perloff, surveying O’Hara criticism on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary

of Poet Among Painters almost fifteen years ago, cautioned against turning ‘this

mercurial and highly individual poet into a mere representative of fifties’ queer

sensibility or Cold War politics.’196

To Perloff’s thought, I don’t believe O’Hara was a “mere representative” of either genre: mid- century queer poetry or Cold War political poems. I actually believe he did much to invent both genres, and that there is no reduction of his oeuvre in recognizing that.

O’Hara jokes in his November 2, 1948 diary entry, from his junior college year: “I voted for the first time today, and I’ve been waiting to vote for so many years that I was quite excited.

Maybe I’ll become a social novelist, except that I probably couldn’t think of anything to say, and would never be sure it was right, at that. And I’m not irresponsible enough to be successful at it, really.”197

3.2 World War II and the Homosexual “Problem”

It is important here to investigate just what the American military’s attitude toward homosexuality was when 18-year-old O’Hara enlisted and served in the Navy. A brief history of the military attitudes and policies about homosexuality during World War II will provide useful context about O’Hara’s subsequent attitudes and poetic responses. During the Second World

196 Seiler 825-826. 197 Early Writing 106.

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War, the United States military spent an enormous amount of time and effort attempting to

ensure that their troops contained no homosexuals.198 Despite the government’s efforts weed out all homosexuals, detailed briefly in this chapter, they failed – and, rather than eradicating all homosexuals from the military, inadvertently worked to both define and memorialize America’s early social construct of the homosexual, even planting the seeds for the homosexual civil rights movement that began in earnest twenty-five years after the war when it exploded in New York

City with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Allen Berube’s book, Coming Out Under Fire, is an exhaustive history of homosexuality and World War II in which he observes, “The veterans of

WWII were the first generation of gay men and women to experience such rapid dramatic and widespread changes in their lives as homosexuals.”199 Berube concludes that Selective Service and other elements of the mobilization for the war paradoxically “helped to loosen the constraints that [had] locked so many gay people in silence, isolation, and self-contempt.”200 The difference to which he refers is the first American institutional definition and recognition by a

U.S. government body that men who had sex with men should be defined as a group of people, rather than simply by the acts they performed, which, for many decades, had already been illegal in America.201 Despite this military recognition being derisive and troublesome, after the war

these men - homosexual soldiers, former soldiers, and those forbidden to serve – banded together

in semi-clandestine urban communities of sorts around a shared self-identification experience.202

198 Throughout this chapter, I focus primarily on homosexual men rather than lesbians unless specifically mentioned. While there were anti-lesbian policies as well, almost all the focus at the beginning of the war was on homosexual men. Creadick (92) and others note that the United States was the only country in World War II actively excluding homosexuals from service. 199 Berube 267. 200 Berube 256. 201 The acts performed had long been illegal in the United States, covered in every state by sodomy statutes. 202 Indeed, many of these men had been branded and identified as homosexual by the military.

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“Once they left the constraints of family life and watchful neighbors,” Berube explains, “many

recruits were surprised to find that military service gave them opportunities to begin a “coming-

out” process.” Peacetime had, in effect, kept gay people “unaware of themselves and each

other.”203 While the term “coming out” is ahistorical in this context, Berube’s point is well made.

After the war, some of these men, like O’Hara, simply began to live outright as homosexuals rather than carry the burden of their secret any longer. Nevertheless, the efforts of the military to identify and cleanse their troops of homosexual men who had “slipped in” often had disastrous effects on the soldier’s lives: men faced dishonorable discharges labeling them mentally unfit, as well as courts martial proceedings and military prison sentences - the stigma and the record of which followed them for the remainder of their lives. While these efforts by the military were devastating, life-long, ruinous stains on men’s reputations, it was ironically also these military policies and discriminatory actions that directly led to the eventual decades-long fight for homosexual civil rights as a collective reaction to the discrimination they had endured during and after the War.

I don’t believe Berube intended to indicate that New York or other American cities hadn’t been home to homosexual men for decades, but, instead, that the wartime experience of introducing homosexual men to others like them had resulted in a democratization of living authentically for many more American homosexual men – certainly urban men, but also rural and small town men who chose to reside authentically in the city after the war. Historian George

Chauncey addresses this frequent historical misunderstanding in his book, Gay New York:

203 Berube 6.

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Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. After discussion on

why the rise of urban homosexuals post-war has been the subject of more scholarship than the

decades before the war, he concludes, “we have failed to see the gay subculture that existed

before World War II [because] it has been obscured by the dramatic growth of the gay subculture

after the war. As the groundbreaking work of Allan Berube and John D’Emilio has shown, the

war ‘created something of a nationwide coming out experience.’”204 Nevertheless, Chauncey

succeeds in correcting an historical lacuna with his book: “Ultimately, one of my central goals in

Gay New York became to show that multiple sexual cultures co-existed in early-twentieth-

century New York . . .”205

In September 1940, Congress passed a conscription act, “The Selective Training and Service

Act,” the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States.206 The Act generated interest in

whether recruits were “normal” in terms of their psychological health, which provoked - for the

first time - questions about recruits’ sexual preferences. Berube explains that previous to the Act,

“the Selective Service System and the Army and Navy had not concerned themselves with sexual

orientation when screening men for military service.”207 However, after the passing of the draft, the armed forces initially narrowed the scope of those who could serve to heterosexual non-black men.208 The psychiatric profession, newly legitimized within the American military during the

interwar period, appears to have been responsible for raising the red flag about homosexual men,

204 Chauncey 10. 205 Chauncey xxi. 206 Berube 2. 207 Berube 2. The military before World War II followed the U.S. criminal code – they prosecuted soldiers for sodomy, but made no other attempt to identify or rid themselves of homosexual men. 208 The Selective Training and Service Act was also known as the Burke-Wadsworth Act, Pub.L. 76–783, 54 Stat. 885, and was enacted September 16, 1940 – before the United States entered World War II.

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who they considered to be mentally ill and therefore unfit for service. In addition to homosexual

men, women and blacks were also deemed unfit for service, as they would all make “poor

combat soldiers, their presence in units would threaten morale and discipline, and their

integration would turn the military into a testing ground for radical social experimentation.”209

Nevertheless, despite the military devising screening questions both for draft boards and for induction center doctors designed to keep homosexuals out, many homosexual men evaded detection and enlisted rather than reveal that they were homosexual. Early ineffective screening tests provided to draft boards and induction centers recommended looking for effeminate behaviors and asking the recruit if he “liked girls.”210

Homosexual men enlisted - or tried to enlist - for many reasons. Some, already struggling

with homosexual feelings, thought that service might “cure” them; Berube quotes one

homosexual soldier as saying, “I think one of the reasons I enlisted was because everybody told

me the Marine Corps was going to make a man out of me.”211 Others had never heard the word

“homosexual,” or perhaps didn’t think of themselves as one despite perhaps having had sexual

encounters with other men. Still other homosexual men wanted to serve their country regardless

of their sexual orientation.

The military’s main concern about homosexual men as soldiers was two-fold: first, the fear

that homosexual men, as “sexual deviants,” would be unable to control their homosexual desires,

and second, that they were too effeminate to rise to the level of masculinity required to be a

209 Berube 2. 210 Medical Circular No. 1 issued by the Selective Service on November 7, 1940 was a guide to psychiatric screening for community doctors. Berube 11. 211 Berube 5.

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soldier. By 1943, American military doctors had developed another screening tool called the

Cornell Selectee Index, which attempted to identify homosexuals by their career choices. “Men

who checked off interior decorator, dancer, and window dresser were considered to have

difficulty with their ‘acceptance of the male pattern.’”212 These men were then excluded from service. Ultimately, however, despite numerous attempts to identify homosexuals, Kinsey claims the draft boards rejected only 1/10 of 1% (0.01%) of the men that came before them, while induction centers rejected about 4/10 of 1% (0.04%), and about 4/10 of 1% (0.04%) were removed from service either by discharge or court martial.213 Since Kinsey’s study (not published until after the war) found almost 40% of American men reporting they had had same sex contact that resulted in orgasm, the military’s effort to root out the homosexual by rejecting just 1% of men reporting for duty seems to have been utterly unsuccessful.214 Interestingly,

lesbians’ service in WWII was not pursued or prohibited by military leadership in same way it

was for men, presumably because stereotypically masculine characteristics in a woman actually

ironically made her more fit for service, and her presence was not seen as a threat for morale.

Nevertheless, throughout the War and for more than a decade afterward, throughout the

1950s, the American military continued to study the “homosexual problem” and instituted

measures meant to either identify the homosexual man at the induction centers or to get rid of

him once he was found to be a member of the troops. In August 1942, the Navy Surgeon

General’s Office wrote, “the problem of the homosexual in the Naval Service and what to do

212 Berube 20. 213 Kinsey 622. By the end of the War, over 16 million American persons had served, including 10 million draftees. 214 Kinsey 623.

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with him is ever before us . . . It seems likely that under these circumstances homosexuality may

become more widespread in the service as the war progresses.”215 It’s difficult to know exactly what the Surgeon General’s office meant by this – were they, in effect, just admitting that they were unable to screen adequately for homosexuality, or does the statement contain a more nuanced notion that the homosocial nature of armed service itself was a contributing element in homosexual men self-identifying? At the very least, the homosocial nature of military life certainly did little to combat homosexual behavior in the troops. This wartime formula: young men removed from all contact with women, lonely and isolated from friends and communities, and spending all their time with other young men in an atmosphere utterly devoid of privacy - practically insured that barracks and ships were filled with homosexual tensions. Berube reports that noted Kansas psychiatrist Dr. William Menninger “went so far as to characterize the entire wartime army, in a ‘technical, psychiatric sense,’ as ‘fundamentally a homosexual society.’”216

If a homosexual man bypassed military screening tools and made it into the service, only

later to be “found out,” the consequences were severe, and included imprisonment, a court

martial, and dishonorable discharge. After the United States entry into the War in 1941, however,

imprisoning all the homosexual soldiers who made it past the draft boards and induction centers

into the service proved extremely costly in terms of both military time and personnel. Signaling

the frustration of the leadership over being unable to rid the services of homosexual men –

despite enormous efforts - Major General Allen Gullion called homosexuality in the military,

215 Berube 44. 216 Berube 45.

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“this vexatious problem.”217 When faced with homosexuality charges, these men were often

discharged without a trial as “mentally ill,” a resolution choice made by military leadership to

avoid lengthy imprisonment and court martial proceedings.218 Men charged with homosexuality

also sometimes “voluntarily” separated from the armed forces, dishonorably discharged for “bad

character,” rather than face a court martial. If the homosexual soldier was, in fact, subjected to

official military criminal charges, however, Berube suggests the punishment was severe; even

more severe in the Navy where O’Hara served than in the other military branches:

Under the Articles of War, the maximum penalties for Army enlisted men and

officers convicted of non-forcible sodomy were five years’ confinement at hard

labor, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and dishonorable discharge or

dismissal. Under the Articles for the Government of the Navy, the maximum

penalties for enlisted men were the same punishments but with ten years of

confinement at hard labor, twelve for officers.219

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson provided official governmental guidance on the issue in a

1941 policy document entitled, “Sodomists.”220 In this document, Stimson reminded commanding generals in the field that court martial was the only acceptable way to remove these men from service, and called for an immediate halt to the unapproved practice of dishonorable discharge. The sodomy policies of the military were based upon the prevailing civil law of the nation, and the Secretary saw a double standard between civil sodomy laws and military law as

217 Berube 131. 218 American psychiatry at the time indeed considered homosexuality a mental illness. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS-1) wasn’t codified until 1945; it listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disorder. 219 Berube 129, emphasis mine. 220 Cleveland and Ohl 17.

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problematic. Nevertheless, Berube claims that certain generals continued to utilize the

undesirable discharges, which previously had been used only for alcoholics, drug addicts, and so-

called psychopaths.221 Thus the Navy often offered homosexuals caught having or soliciting sex

a choice of dishonorable discharge by signing a confession or trial by general court martial. The

military’s conflicting opinions and practices on what to do with the homosexual mirrors

American psychiatrists’ confusion about how to define these men and then what to do about

homosexuals who had gotten by the draft board and induction centers. Between 1941 and 1945

more than 4,000 soldiers and 5,000 sailors were hospitalized, diagnosed, and discharged from the

service with “homosexuality” appearing on their military record.222 In contrast, for the forty years from 1900 to the beginning of WWII, this number had only been in the hundreds.223 Many medical personnel were sympathetic to the homosexual soldier and used codes to identify him in his medical record rather than subject him to a life-long damning stigma of having been labeled a homosexual. Later in the War, psychiatrists began to use a “psychoneurosis” diagnosis for discharge for homosexual men. By the time O’Hara enlisted in the summer of 1944, the use of this “solution” was already extensive. Berube notes, “The abuse of the psychoneurosis discharge became so widespread in the Army - late in 1944 the number of discharges for psychoneuroses equaled the number of men inducted.” 224 In other words, during the last full year of the War, the

221 Berube 139. 222 Note the early pathologizing of homosexuality by “hospitalizing” and “diagnosing” these men. 223 Berube 155. Berube also notes here that malingering by faking homosexuality was virtually unknown in WWII, unlike in Vietnam. First, young men wanted to serve their country in WWII, and second, the taboo of homosexuality was much more stigmatized in the WWII era. The totality of these so-called “blue discharges” – those men (and a few women) who were discharged for mental illness, homosexuality, psychoneurosis, or bad behavior (alcoholics, drug addicts, and so on) was a staggering 48,000 to 68,000 soldiers. 224 Berube 167, emphasis mine.

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number of men inducted into the service was the same number of men who were dishonorably

discharged with a psychoneurotic discharge! These discharges, while not specifically labeling the

soldier a homosexual, still carried with them a stigma that followed a soldier for the rest of his

life, which included denial of all GI benefits, future difficulty gaining employment, and so on.

After the war, Dr. Edward Strecher, who had been President of the American Psychiatric

Association in 1943 – 1944, wrote to Dr. Karl Menninger about his frustration over the failure to

provide a non-punitive military procedure for managing homosexual soldiers.225 In June, 1946,

he wrote, “we failed to solve the important matter of how these chaps should be discharged.”226

His tone implies that he believed the men had suffered military mistreatment in the processes used to separate them.

In 1943, the National Research Council of the United States, a national organization founded

during the Civil War for the coordination of scientific and technological research and

development, produced a book for soldiers entitled Psychology for the Fighting Man. The book

contained chapters on “Psychology and Combat,” “The Right Soldier in the Right Job,”

“Efficiency in the Army,” “Morale, Leadership, and Differences Among Races and People,”

among others.227 In a chapter entitled “Food and Sex as Military Problems,” the Council included a section on homosexuality, ostensibly addressing the soldiers themselves on the issue. While the paragraphs on homosexuality reflect the outdated thinking of the times, they also show a

225 Menninger was one of the founders of the famous Menninger Foundation and Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. 226 Berube 169. 227 The National Research Council was a national organization founded in 1916 for the coordination of scientific and technological research and development. The Council’s membership came from the government, the various branches of the military, the universities, and private research laboratories.

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surprising understanding and acknowledgment of the oddities and behaviors resulting from living in such a close homosocial environment. The next passage, presented in full to exhibit the extent of the section on homosexuality, reveals the chaotic nature of the messaging given to the soldiers:

Although medical officers at the induction centers try to keep them out of the

Army, a sexually abnormal man who finds satisfaction only with other men may

get in. Some of these men have no feelings of inferiority or shame, no mental

conflict, over their homosexuality, and readily apply their interest and energy to

the tasks of army life. If they are content with quietly seeking the satisfaction of

their sexual needs with others of their own kind, their perversion may continue to

go unnoticed and they may even become excellent soldiers.

But if, as not infrequently happens, such a man forces his attentions upon

normal men, there develops a situation of such gravity for the whole group that

the court-martial and discharge of the man from the Army is necessary. Attempts

to reform such men are almost always futile.

The man whose homosexuality develops for the first time in a situation

where he cannot have normal sexual satisfaction may be only mildly disturbed by

what he has done, but it is more likely that he will suffer from mental conflict. He

will feel inferior to other men, ashamed and worried for fear he will become a

confirmed homosexual and become unable to enjoy normal sexual intercourse

when he gets back home. Or he will feel afraid of being found out and punished

by dishonorable discharge and a long [military prison] sentence; or he will suffer

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strong feelings of guilt. Or he may have all these feelings at once.

So long as he is thus seriously worried and dissatisfied with himself, the

chances are that he may be all right again when he returns to normal conditions of

life. But he should put up a strong fight with himself to control his homosexual

impulses and find some other outlet for his sex drive as soon as he can.

Strictly speaking, there are no real substitutes for sexual satisfaction. And

there is no way to kill the sex need. The best many men can hope for is to succeed

in avoiding the things that will stir up or increase their desires to uncontrollable

extremes. They should keep their minds off feelings of deprivation as much as

possible by hard work and strict attention to the job of winning the war, and

should find what helpful outlets they can for the release of their emotions.228

This extraordinary section of the book displays the confusion and bewilderment the military felt about homosexuality. The text’s logic circles back on itself as it expresses that despite the induction center’s best efforts to stop them, homosexual men get by the screenings and become soldiers, and if they have no feelings of “inferiority or shame” about their sexual orientation and keep to their own kind, they might make “excellent soldiers.” However, if these men try to recruit or make sexual advances to “normal” men, this is an offense so grave that punishment includes courts martial proceedings, military prison sentences, and dishonorable discharge. If a soldier was “normal” when he was recruited, but finds himself having homosexual thoughts while serving, as long as he is “seriously worried and dissatisfied with himself,” he is probably

228 Psychology for the Fighting Man 340 – 341.

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“normal” and should be fine “when he returns to normal conditions of life.” Despite this

assurance, the soldier should “put up a strong fight with himself to control his homosexual

impulses and find some other outlet for his sex drive as soon as he can,” although the book also

explains that there are no substitutes for sexual satisfaction. The final paragraph of advice, that

the soldier should concentrate on “hard work and strict attention to the job of winning the war,

and should find what helpful outlets they can for the release of their emotions,” reads historically

as somewhat condescending and patronizing propaganda, given the audience of the book is

young men dealing with serious and complex identity and sexual issues, not to mention

concurrently fighting in a war. In another section of the book, the authors also warn soldiers

against masturbation, which they euphemistically refer to as “when a man relieves his sexual

tension by himself,” particularly if he masturbates as a preference over intercourse, for that

behavior “is definitely abnormal.”229 One wonders what the young men who read these sections thought they should do with their sexual needs. The entire section reads as if the authors didn’t have anything really useful to write about homosexuality in the military, or sexuality in general for that matter, but thought they should include something on the subject in their Psychology

Guide.

As the war progressed, Berube notes that, in some cases, the military seems to have given up on its efforts to identify and remove homosexual soldiers. Some armed forces leadership even noticed that homosexual soldiers possessed certain talents that could benefit the military and began to move those who weren’t causing the men in their unit any trouble into those job

229 Psychology for the Fighting Man 339.

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categories. Noting that in civilian life, many gay men were “in such occupations [such] as

beautician, music teacher, actor, bookkeeper,” the military began to deliberately utilize gay

soldiers in positions such as corpsmen, yeomen, and chaplain assistants.230 O’Hara himself requested pharmacist’s mate or hospital assistant as his first choices when he enlisted, but ultimately served as a radioman due to a supervisor’s recognition of his musical training.231

In what was probably the final published wartime statement on homosexuality, in March

1945, a Colonel Marion Rushton wrote an article in The Judge Advocate Journal about the

official Armed Forces policies on various “crimes” committed by soldiers:

The Homosexual: This is a delicate - to some a revolting problem. Medical

science distinguishes between the constitutional homosexual and the casual

or curious sodomist. The War Department has recognized the distinction and

since January 1944 has permitted the constitutional type whose crime is not

attended by violence or contribution to the delinquency of a minor or other

inferior to resign for the good of the service or to receive a blue discharge. That

policy, with safeguards, is now being applied to sodomists in military custody.

Thus we will rid our institutions of some utterly unsalvageable soldiers and the

civil communities to which they return will be no worse off than formerly. Civil

courts rarely convict for this crime even in States where under the law they may.

230 Berube 57. It appears, then, that if homosexual soldiers kept to themselves and did their jobs, at least in some circumstances, they were left alone to serve. It is unclear how widespread this attitude was held, and probably was determined by individual attitudes of the local leaders. 231 Gooch 66.

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The prisoner confined for another crime who turns out to be a sodomist presents

a special problem. 232

Notice here that Colonel Rushton identifies the homosexual soldier as “a sodomist” rather than the previously very common descriptor of simply “homosexual.” As the war was winding down, military policy seemed to be looking more to the laws of the 48 states with regard how to deal with homosexual soldiers. Official military policy in this document supports Berube’s claim that the expense and effort involved in prison sentences and courts martial of homosexuals had institutionalized a different method of dealing with homosexual soldiers. It’s worthy of note that the Colonel seems to think that dishonorable discharge for these “sodomists,” returning them to

“civil communities” renders the communities “no worse off than formerly.” This is either a highly disingenuous statement or one that, at a surprising level, fails to understand the stigma and lifelong difficulty a man with a dishonorable discharge faced – as a result of ignorant and intolerant military attitudes – and the lack of a nuisance he would be to a community. However, I argue here that the subtle difference between referencing these men as sodomists rather than homosexuals converts these men from simply undesirable for service, to making them criminals.

The change in terminology sees full “play” well into the 1950s when homosexual federal employees were fired from their jobs if there were so much as a whispered rumor that they were homosexual. Thinking about the homosexual as a criminal – rather than the previous definition of mental illness, while neither is now widely thought to be true, nevertheless significantly changed the tenor of the discrimination in the postwar period.

232 Page 23.

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As I detail in the Chapter 5, the end of the War was far from the end of the military and federal government’s obsession with the homosexual man. Despite the military’s difficulties with their policies on homosexuals, the Veteran’s Administration renewed its anti-homosexual instructions after the war, both in 1946 and 1949. Further, throughout the early Cold War period decade of the 1950s, homosexuals were targets of one after another investigation, congressional hearing, policy change, Executive Order, suspicion, purge, and challenge as a paranoid America wrestled with the homosexual manifestation of the Other and conflated homosexuals and

Communists as common enemies of the state.

3.3 Frank O’Hara’s Navy Experience and War Poetry

One of the World War II soldiers who escaped the military’s recognition as a homosexual was Francis Russell O’Hara, an eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate who enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1944. O’Hara had grown up in a middle-class suburban Boston

Catholic family and had navigated his boyhood “outsider” status by studying classical piano and visiting art museums.233 These interests and activities, encouraged by his parents, replaced for him the stereotypical boyhood activities of sports and girls, and were a common way for an effeminate boy like O’Hara to manage difficult years of differentness often accompanied by peer bullying. O’Hara biographer Brad Gooch suggests that during high school, O’Hara had had

“sexual epiphanies, seeking the truth of his sexual identity, in his case, a homosexual identity, which was becoming quite obvious to this sensitive adolescent while he was still living at home

233 Gooch (51) reports evidence that previous to his enlistment in the Navy, O’Hara had had at least one sexual experience with another boy when he was 16.

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in Grafton.”234 In fact, by the time O’Hara enlisted, his nose had been broken by a bully who took notice that his 5’7,” 130 pound frame and his interest in culture marked him as a weakling and potential homosexual.235 Still, according to a later poem, the bullying event did engender a

response from O’Hara against the bully, indicating a determined and spirited personality O’Hara

undoubtedly took with him to the Navy. “To be always in vigilance away / from the bully who

broke my nose / and so I had to break his wristwatch,” he wrote, following this description with a

thought about defending his identity, “A surprising violence in the sky / inspired me to my first

public act / nubile and pretentious by growing pure” 236 From O’Hara’s recounting of the

incident, we read that he found both a way to take his revenge and to stick up for himself –

breaking the bully’s watch – which he describes as “my first public act.” This phrase suggests

he’s signaling that it was the first time he stuck up for himself about his sexual orientation. His

choice of the word “nubile” in the next line provides a sexual undertone in the passage, lending

some evidence that the act of bullying was based around his perceived homosexuality. His high

school yearbook indicated a “snappy” personality, an aspiration “to live in a big city,’” with

“Bull!” as his favorite exclamation.237 Without a doubt, he carried this pugilistic attitude with

him to the military, and it likely played a role in his not being identified as a homosexual during

his service.

While still at university, O’Hara wrote a short undated poem titled, “Autobiographia

Literaria,” describing his childhood. “When I was a child / I played by myself in a / corner of the

234 Gooch 50. 235 O’Hara writes about the bullying that broke his nose in the poem, “Digression on Number 1, 1948 “ (Collected Poems 260). 236 Collected Poems 261. 237 Gooch 39.

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schoolyard / all alone,” he wrote. “I hated dolls and I / hated games, animals were / not friendly

and birds / flew away.” O’Hara remembers his childhood as a lonely one where he avoided

interaction with other children, animals, and even birds. “If anyone was looking / for me I hid

behind a / tree and cried out “I am / an orphan.” Rather than depicting himself as shy, he implies

that being alone was his preference, a state that he actively sought. The hiding impulse he

describes is unsurprising – homosexuals, whether children or adults, depended on their ability to

hide - to carry a secret - for their well-being and survival. However, once O’Hara could surround

himself with supportive friends, in college and especially after he moved to New York, he

became the center of a very active mixed social circle. Biographer Brad Gooch extensively

discusses O’Hara’s childhood, which revolved around the Catholic Church, parochial schools,

movies, books, his piano lessons, classical records, and solitary visits to art museums. He

became more social in high school, but always valued his solitary time. O’Hara later wrote, “And

here I am, the / center of all beauty! / writing these poems! / Imagine!”238 He feigns surprise, in

the final stanza, to find himself a poet, “the center of all beauty,” but his early biography always

seems to point to a career in the arts, and his plan to enjoy a life of aesthetics. Perhaps his poetic

line instead communicates his delight at finding himself so.

O’Hara’s enlistment the summer after he turned 18 (in 1944) was what every young man in

America was doing during the War years. “Every one (sic) had to do it,” he wrote later in

college, recalling his service.239 This line succinctly sums up his feelings about enlisting, a decision he doesn’t ever question or argue in his later poetry, no matter how anti-war the subject

238 Collected Poems 11. 239 Early Writing 112.

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of the poem. He chose the Navy because he liked the sea – he enjoyed swimming and being around the water, having been raised near the ocean. His service politicized him, however, to an extent that he wrote skeptically about the “official” American narrative and American foreign policy throughout the rest of his career. Beginning immediately after discharge, in the fall of

1946, O’Hara wrote both homoerotic poems and sincere and introspective works about his experience in the War. Paradoxically, O’Hara’s immersion in the close homosocial living quarters of the Navy barracks or submarine, I believe, directly lead to his mature poetic in which he stubbornly disregarded early Cold War societal pressures and paranoias about the performance of masculinity to design a new form for his poetry – a form that, in many cases, was rife with his uninhibited and provocative homosexual texts. These poems not only recorded, but also celebrated, he and his friends’ homosexual lives while refusing to rely on the longstanding poetic practice of writing coded clues to other homosexuals. In fact, O’Hara’s poetry later portrays an intimate emotional immediacy about his life as a member of the New York arts scene in the 1950s, which he shared with friends such as artists Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline; poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Amiri

Baraka, and numerous essayists, dancers, and jazz musicians.

Gooch points out that by enlisting in the Navy, “O’Hara was entering a confusing world where men from different cities and classes were forced into close quarters in intimate barracks, where black soldiers were segregated from white soldiers, where largely unsuccessful attempts were made at induction centers to screen out homosexuals.”240 O’Hara recalled his induction

240 Gooch 59.

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process as shocking and disturbing – but also the beginning of a sort of dissociative “out of

body” existence in which he kept his “real self” in one internal place, and performed his role as a

soldier in another. O’Hara wrote repeatedly about the cognitive dissonance of trying to develop

and keep a sense of one’s actual identity, a normal activity for an 18-year-old, while at the same

time conforming enough to escape homosexual detection by everyone around him. While an

undergrad, O’Hara wrote a long personal essay about his experience in the war:

What there was to say and what there was in me to say or express just any way to

get it said; what anyone and everyone had done to make them marked and

separate from the rest; for they had stripped and raped us all and given us cards so

we could practice our new trades newly forced in a legal way now that we were

broken in and we all looked the same nobody could tell anybody else from

anybody else; everyone without an eye, the mouth a line, and a stupid soul to stare

on every face I’m dead I’m dead; nothing to do but say this isn’t really me

because the real me slipped away just before you got here; shit I’m no dope I

knew this was going to happen and I slipped away before you got here I slipped

away the real me; and shit when I get the chance you’ll know who the real me

when I come back who I really am and you’ll make no mistake you’ll know it o k

I won’t need a number you’ll know who I am.241

In this passage, O’Hara recalls the humiliation of public nakedness and orifice examination during the induction process: he felt “stripped and raped.” This procedure was followed by close-

241 Early Writing 112.

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cropped military haircuts, identical uniforms, and all the other induction procedures the military did with new recruits to begin to break their individuality: “nobody could tell anybody else from anybody else.” O’Hara’s response to being a part of all this? “I’m dead, I’m dead . . . the real me slipped away just before you got here.”242 However disturbing it reads here, this innate ability to disassociate seems to have actually saved him from a potentially disastrous two years – one that could have ended very badly for a young homosexual soldier. A desire for authenticity, however, follows this line immediately in his writing, “when I get the chance, you’ll know who the real me

. . . when I come back who I really am.”243 Indeed, O’Hara is true to his word here – once he was out of the service (“when I come back”), he never again pretended to be anything but a homosexual man – even when he knew his sexual orientation worked against him. It was his military service – the two years living in fear and isolation – that precipitated this decision.

3.4 O’Hara’s Post-War Decision to Live Fully as a Homosexual Man

O’Hara wrote numerous times about his full acceptance of his sexual orientation and his absolute commitment to never again hide his identity like he had had to do in the military. In these excerpts, he celebrates his individuality and the surprises it sometimes engenders. “well but if you lust after someone / you must face it / your life, after all must be real”. 244 And in another poem: “And if / some aficionado of my mess says "That's / not like Frank!", all to the good! I / don't wear brown and gray suits all the time, / do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera, / often. I want my feet to be bare, / I want my face to be shaven, and my heart— / you can't plan on the

242 Early Writing 112. 243 Early Writing 112. 244 Collected Poems 384.

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heart, but / the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”245 These sections of the poems, “Lines

During Certain Pieces of Music” and “My Heart,” not only celebrate his sexual orientation as a part of his real life – “if you lust after someone / you must face it,” but the following line, “your life, after all must be real,” reads as his commitment to live authentically. Further, he prides himself in having a more interesting and varied life than one who wears the civilian “uniform” of the 1950s, the grey flannel suit, all the time. In fact, he writes that he is such a fashion trendsetter that he wears his old blue Navy work shirts to the opera. O’Hara sums up the thought with an oath that his life, his heart, and his poetry can all be assured to be “open.” There was, however, some cost associated with this authenticity.

Despite the peace O’Hara describes with his decision to live authentically, that decision did impact him negatively in numerous ways throughout his life, some small and personal, but some more significant. In the first place, I contend that O’Hara’s poetry didn’t become well-known during his lifetime because he refused to edit his creative impulses to remove (or code) all references to homosexuality. This decision carried with it huge costs – it required him to eschew critical success for his work as well as finding another way to earn a living, which he did as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). O’Hara writes about capricious epithets on New

York streets in his long-form poem, “Biotherm.” “. . . then too, the other day I was walking through a train / with my suitcase and I overheard someone say “speaking of faggots” / now isn’t life difficult enough without that . . .” Typical of O’Hara’s mature attitude about his sexuality, he writes about this incident with humor and “spleen” – his favorite word for bitchiness – as the

245 Collected Poems 231.

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poem continues, “. . . well it was a shitty looking person anyway / better a faggot than a farthead

. . .”246 In addition to these daily urban micro aggressions, homosexuality may have also impeded his career growth as an art exhibition curator. A MoMA oral history interview with O’Hara’s co- worker, Waldo Rasmussen, illustrates the consequences this choice sometimes had. Rasmussen said,

For example, . . . Porter McCray [Rasmussen and O’Hara’s boss] has told me that

[MoMA Director] Alfred Barr was very conscious of his [O’Hara’s]

homosexuality . . . this was something which troubled him about Frank, all the

more so with Larry Rivers' nude portraits of Frank. That apparently made him

very uncomfortable and really made him not like Frank. . . . I think his [O’Hara’s]

homosexuality was used against him, I really do.247

The painting to which Rasmussen refers is a monumental nude of O’Hara by Larry Rivers, for which O’Hara posed in 1954. It later hung in an exhibition at the nearby Tibor di Nagy

Gallery, and apparently caused frustration and embarrassment for Director Barr, known to be conservative and something of an egotistical autocrat.248 O’Hara seems to recall the young sailor’s promise to himself when he describes, in a 1956 letter to painter and friend Mike

Goldberg, how he feels when a friend points out that his poetry is “too out:” “If one is going to start being embarrassed about one’s work I don’t know where it would stop, or rather it would

246 Collected Poems 441. 247 MoMA Archives Oral History: W. Rasmussen 72. Alfred Barr was the founding Director of the Museum, and still very much still involved with everyday decisions during the 1950s. The subsequent Director, Rene d’Harnoncourt, who promoted O’Hara twice, apparently had no such problem with O’Hara’s sexuality. 248 Barr was no longer the Director of the Museum during O’Hara’s life, but he continued to work there as “Director of Collections” and exert considerable influence after Rene d’Harnoncourt was appointed Director in 1949.

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stop.”249 O’Hara expresses here that it wouldn’t be worth writing if he couldn’t be genuine, and that self-censorship would require so much effort that he’d stop writing poetry altogether. This strength in himself, to decide as a young man to build a life as an open homosexual in such contentious times, is apparently the result of the pain and fear he felt during his two years of hiding in the service. Fortunately, he met other homosexual poets and artists during his undergraduate years, and these friends bolstered his resolve to live authentically. It is with their friendship and support that he built his community, a family-of-choice, in New York.

3.5 O’Hara Biographical War Poetry

Negotiating these frayed disconnects is the subject of a large number of O’Hara’s particularly personal and autobiographical poems. Epstein insists that by urging his fellow homosexuals to choose exposure rather than concealment in this poem with the line, “It's wonderful to admire oneself with complete candor,” O’Hara declares himself untangled by the ideology of his time.250

This detachment from the ideology of the early Cold War ideals for masculinity, for O’Hara, was impossible while he was in the Navy, however. Concealment was the only way he could avoid derision, a dishonorable discharge, and prison. In addition to the passage above, O’Hara wrote several more times about his induction experience, indicating the importance of the event to him.

Gooch quotes O’Hara from an unpublished manuscript: “Coming away from home, shedding my garments in the station in the midst of thousands of gleaming buttocks and ugly faces. The light

249 “Too out” describes a criticism meant to indicate because he wrote honest, raw poetry about sexual orientation and acts, body parts and functions, that he was unpublishable, a fact that O’Hara didn’t care much about. After his Navy experience, he was determined to be who he was. 250 Epstein, Beautiful Enemies 245.

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came through the windows, pale and ashamed then. I stood there and to order.”251 O’Hara writes he was well aware of “the subtle looks, ashamed and furtive peeks of naked eyes,” while “my pants fell like a punishment, and that day, as a rite, my father died, could never again touch me in a disapproval or, even, reward.” 252 The picture O’Hara paints of his induction experience – one of shame and obedience – seems an unusual comparison to his declaration of independence from his father, with whom he shared a love of classical music, and a close enough childhood relationship that he later told Grace Hartigan that a line he had written in the poem “Second

Avenue” was precisely what his father, apparently aware of O’Hara’s sexual orientation, had once said, “Do what you want but don’t get hurt, / I’m warning you. Leave the men alone, they’ll only tease you.”253

Surely the shame he felt was a result of the military’s actions, rather than parental ones.

Nevertheless, O’Hara seems to have conflated the two and took the experience as his rite of

passage into manhood.254 By the time he was thirty in 1956, however, with hindsight, he was

able to add a measure of typical camp humor to his recollection of induction, more in keeping

with his mature personality and writing. In “Returning,” he adds a more characteristic

homosexual gaze to the scene:

Well, there are a lot of things you haven’t forgotten, walking through the waiting room you know you should go to bed with everyone who looks at you because the war’s not over, no assurance yet that desire’s an exaggeration and you don’t want anyone to turn out to be a ruined city, do you?

251 Gooch quotes from an unpublished manuscript, The 4th of July 61. The manuscript is in the possession of O’Hara’s sister; she has not allowed a copy of it to be made and it was unavailable to me as I wrote this dissertation. 252 Gooch 61. 253 Collected Poems 148. 254 O’Hara’s father, with whom he had shared cultural interests, died in 1946, as O’Hara starting his Harvard undergraduate years.

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As Marilyn Monroe says, It’s a responsibility being a sexual symbol, and as everyone says, it’s the property of a symbol to be sexual. Who’s confused? Dead citizen or survivor, it’s only your cock or your ass. They can do what they can in gardens and parks, in subway stations and latrines, . . .255

This section of the poem recalls similarities to his time in the Navy, and O’Hara admits he’s forgotten much of it. What he hasn’t forgotten are the gazes of fellow soldiers in the electrified homosocial environment. He recalls his internal dialogue with great specificity – he is thinking that he should “go to bed” with everyone who looks at him because, while he’s still figuring the business of sexual attraction out, no one can assure him that desire is “an exaggeration, and, after all, the war isn’t over” – he and his waiting room full of gazers could all die yet. He identifies comically with Marilyn Monroe to comment on his accepted responsibility to “be a sex symbol,” and seems to say – survivor or not, it’s just sex – what’s confusing?

Reflecting on his service years, and perhaps on the restrictions placed on his identity, O’Hara wrote in 1948, as a college junior, about how he planned to mitigate any long-term psychological damage or neurosis from his hostile service environment by insisting vehemently that he would never again hide his identity: “it’ll never happen to ME again, and well, NOT ME NOT ME

NOT ME NOT ME NEVER”256 Since there was little chance of him re-enlisting, what is he

writing about in this strong declaration? Why the insistent vow? I argue that through repetition

and his use of all capital letters he’s reiterating again and again, both to himself and to his reader,

that he will never again allow someone else to have the ability to tell him what his identity

255 Collected Poems 246. 256 Early Writing 112.

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should be. While he emphatically exclaims this vow, in the same passage, he also balances it

with the lines, “well, it wasn’t too bad,” and “well, every one (sic) had to do it.” It seems he

wants to be clear that, while the experience didn’t ruin him, he survived – even conquered; he

will never allow another institution to tell him how to live. His refusal to live or write

inauthentically, as he forecasted in this undergraduate “oath,” is woven throughout his

biography. Instead of pursuing publication by writing in code, like fellow homosexual and

friend, John Ashbery, and many previous homosexual poets, O’Hara decided to write without

pursuing publication, preferring to write for himself and his close coterie of friends.257

It is surprising that O’Hara’s physicality and cultural demeanor didn’t give his homosexuality

away during his service - he described himself as effeminate numerous times. He characterized

his affected gait in a 1960 poem entitled “A Short History of Bill Berkson.” His friend, and

younger poet Berkson, was heterosexual, so this dialog begins as Berkson chides O’Hara for his

way of walking:

ah shit well why don’t you walk right I don’t feel like it a ballerina at heart on your toes 258

O’Hara answers that he doesn’t “feel like it,” he’s “a ballerina at heart,” and that’s why he walks on his toes. James Schuyler once wrote that O’Hara “walked lightly on the balls of his feet, like a dancer or someone about to dive into waves.” 259 Younger poet and artist Joe Brainard also commented on O’Hara’s walk:

257 Ashbery is known as a gay poet who did continue the tradition of writing in coded language to speak directly to his homosexual audience. See Lehman 156, among others. 258 Collected Poems 379. 259 Homage 82.

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I remember Frank O’Hara’s walk. Light and sassy. With a slight twist and a slight

bounce. With the top half of his body slightly thrust forward. Head back. It was a

beautiful walk. Casual. Confident. “I don’t care.” And sometimes “I know you are

looking.”260

In another memory of when he first met O’Hara, Brainard wrote, “I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly.”261

O’Hara remained a slight, small effete man throughout his life, as he describes himself in a poem from the summer of 1963, at 37 years of age: ". . . at 16 you weigh 144 pounds and at 36 / the shirts change, endless procession / but they are all neck 14 sleeve 33.” 262 He was a small teenager who grew up to be a small man. In other poems, he references “my primping prissy heart,” writes, “I must be a pansy myself,” and declares, “because we are sissies.”263 In his

poetry, O’Hara often neutralizes common homosexual epithets by using them to describe

himself, thus reversing their sting. However, his fellow sailors and the officers to whom he

reported must have somehow overlooked his appearance, demeanor, gait, and interest in classical

music, literature, and art. None of his poems reveal that he suffered bullying or ostracizing from

his fellow sailors, who called O’Hara “Butch.” 264 How is this possible? It is unlikely that many

18-year-old recruits during this time period would have been sexually knowledgeable about

homosexuality. Many recruits were probably virgins, and many more had probably never heard

260 Homage 168. 261 Brainard 7. 262 Collected Poems 475. 263 Collected Poems 94, 47, and 93. 264 Gooch 86.

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the word “homosexual” before, likely instead thinking of homosexuals as “queers,” “fairies,” or

“faggots,” if they were familiar with homosexuality at all.

O’Hara not only didn’t have the “bulk” of a soldier, but he kept to himself, at least at the

beginning of his time in the service. He wrote, “No one had said anything to me for months and I

had said nothing in return.”265 While the feeling that months went by without him speaking or being spoken to may be hyperbole, nevertheless, in the first few years after discharge, this is how

O’Hara remembered the experience. Gooch writes, “it gave him time to dwell on the flourishing of what he would later call ‘my rococo self.’”266 On top of likely being overwhelmed by the situation, perhaps he intuitively felt that keeping his own company was a required strategy for survival. Gooch interviewed a fellow soldier from the Navy, who told him,

For an eighteen-year-old Fran was rather refined. He was always talking about

classical music and classical pianists. . . . At that time he was fantasizing about

becoming a concert pianist. He was obviously more intelligent than most of the

people I encountered. He was friendly and talkative. I wouldn’t have selected him out

as far as peculiarity of behavior from anybody else. Any homosexuality certainly

wasn’t evident to me, but maybe I was just too naive. Or maybe he wasn’t that sure

about it at that time either.267

Another said, “Francis appealed to me because he had a quieter and more mature nature than

man of the other guys. . . . Francis had a clean mouth. He was well-mannered and reserved. He

265 Early Writing 112. 266 Gooch 61. 267 Gooch 66.

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wasn’t one of those macho boisterous types.”268 In the interviews Gooch conducts for background on O’Hara’s military service, O’Hara’s well-known later homosexuality usually comes up. The soldiers he had served with often said they found him cultured, knowledgeable about books, art, and music, but many say that they didn’t suspect he was a homosexual then.

This either indicates naiveté on their part, or it indicates that O’Hara was extremely careful in how he conducted himself during his service. Still one of O’Hara’s barracks mates told Gooch,

“When we were kids, we would have said that he was a sissy type,” so some fellow sailors noticed.269

Homosexuality and same sex sexual encounters in the barracks or on the ship apparently

weren’t rare. While O’Hara rarely wrote about sexual encounters during his Navy service, there

are a couple of mentions – one veiled example from during the war, and one more open, a

memory from years later. In one of O’Hara’s carefully constructed letters home, he told his sister

Maureen, “About four of us take them [showers] together each night and have lots of fun. Our

chief amusement is throwing each other into an all-cold, icy shower. Last night someone had left

part of a dungaree rag in there so we threw that at each other.”270 O’Hara’s unpublished novel, entitled 4th of July, includes his memory that he had met homosexual men in the Navy, “from the one who masturbated in the showers every night to the one who blew me under the covers with

secret and night-delirious pleasures.”271 Homosexual author Donald Webster Cory, who wrote

The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (1951) in an attempt to correct years of

268 Gooch 81. 269 Gooch 64. 270 Gooch 64. 271 Gooch 64.

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misinformation about American homosexual men, claims that his personal knowledge of homosexual activity in the U.S. military was corroborated by men like this one he interviewed for his book: “[T]hose who entered in the armed services returned with reports of homosexual tendencies and bisexual activities so widespread that only their absence in any representative group could be considered phenomenal.” Cory continues:

“Everybody on my ship was at least a little gay, many most of them more

than a little,” an ensign on a cruiser whose normal complement was not at all

small told me.

“Everybody?” I asked rather incredulously.

He laughed, “Well, Don, at least half,” he answered, and then quickly added, “and

I ought to know.”

These people, however, Kinsey correctly points out, make their advances

only among those most likely to give them a favorable reception.272

O’Hara’s New York friend and roommate for over a decade, Joe LeSueur, told biographer

Gooch:

Frank talked about having been buddies with someone on his battleship. It was

sort of like going steady. It never got sexual, but it was sweet and loving. He

didn’t talk about it very often. He implied that if there was the slightest hint of

homosexuality among the men it was really thought to be quite disgusting.

272 Cory 80.

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Obviously the relations were basically homosexual but the could never be

admitted as such. 273

Suffice it to say that O’Hara wasn’t the only homosexual soldier in his barracks or on his

submarine. While he may have been unrecognizable as a homosexual himself, judging from the

high number of military discharges, other soldiers were not as discreet, or as fortunate.

In addition to writing that he kept to himself, O’Hara also mentions finding occasional

fleeting friendships with other sailors around common interests in music or literature. He wrote

to his parents that he was “on the whole more independent, freer, more confident, happier, and

more at ease - because I’ve found I can rely on myself, not only to amuse myself, but to attract

new friends.”274 O’Hara later wrote numerous poems about or including positive experiences he had with these few other soldiers who shared his aesthetic interests. One of the earliest suggests he capitulated to the regulation of the Navy while he was a sailor, kept his head down, kept his own counsel, and did his job. “There was an older man who knew what the Navy was about and what he had to do and what everyone else had to do and saw the big picture not just here and now but tomorrow and kept everyone in line for the bosun” he wrote in an undergraduate essay.275 This “older man” apparently showed the younger recruits how the Navy worked, and

O’Hara seems to have been willing to pay attention to “the big picture.” However, he also

resourcefully used his pre-Navy interests to both pass the time and meet other soldiers who had

273 Gooch 87. 274 Gooch 77. 275 Early Writing 2.

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similar love for music or literature. In one of his letters home, he wrote to his parents, “Except for swimming most of my real pleasures are in my mind. So are always at my fingertips.”276

Young sailor O’Hara had a sophisticated background in classical music, thanks, in part, to his father’s interest in classical music, and his parents’ support of his piano lessons. He wrote about composing music during the Navy, playing whenever he had access to a piano, seeing music performed live when he had the chance, and occasionally finding other soldiers who knew literature or music in the various places he was stationed. In “Lament and Chastisement,” he writes:

Later on, when the weather had grown hot, the ship smelly, the sea molten, we

had to wash with salt water and special soap; there was no way of washing

clothing because the ship was too crowded; the beds stank; and lying one night

unable to sleep the same person said, “You know, I read a book by Henry

Baudelaire once; it was given to me in college; every word was a different color

like an experiment; each poem changed color from the words that were put in so

you didn’t know at all what the book was about and you didn’t think of

wondering because you knew anyway.” We had a long argument that night and

for the next week about Stravinsky because his wife was a musician and had told

him Le Sacre du Printemps was a work of ignorance. He also recited almost

perfectly part of the “Communist Manifesto” and it was good to think of it and to

276 Gooch 70.

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think of it having been written and lived by for even a short time there in the heat

with every body (sic) crowded around being sweaty and smelly and snoring.277

Stravinsky was a particular favorite of O’Hara’s father, so it’s likely he was trying to convince the other soldier his girlfriend was mistaken, but he must have been thrilled for the cultured company. Throughout his life, as I write in Chapter 4, O’Hara loved Russian poets and composers, and also found an interest in communism - both as a utopian community ideal and as way to find fault with America’s Cold War paranoias. While writing about another soldier whose girlfriend back home had never used “safes” because they didn’t know where to buy them, he recalls what the soldier remarked when he found out O’Hara was interested in music and art. He records a conversation in which he discussed Stravinsky with the soldier whose girlfriend was an artist. The soldier departs the conversation with this bit of wisdom for O’Hara, obviously not having noticed that O’Hara himself was queer, “Oh, the arts they’re all queers it’s you and me joe [sic] that win the war. And the waves [sic] of course.” 278

O’Hara didn’t meet many colleagues who shared his cultured interests, but he did find a few

fellow sailors who were interested in music or art, particularly when he was stationed in San

Francisco, where he attended numerous concerts and visited art museums. The dedication he

showed to finding ways to utilize his love of books and writing, or music, and to improve his

living situation during service is remarkable. It is notable, first, that he was doing this level of

purposeful identity building as an 18-year-old soldier in the Navy, but even more so as a young

homosexual man trapped in an incredibly hypermasculine and flagrantly anti-homosexual

277 Early Writing 122. 278 Early Writing 113.

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institutional setting, where merely allowing yourself to show who really you are would have horrific, severe, and long-lasting consequences. Still, not every day was this lucid for the young soldier. In another passage, he writes, “Everything is fine, I tell myself, and grit my teeth until my gums bleed.”279 He sanguinely wrote to his parents: “Lately I’ve been getting better adjusted,

I think . . . One can’t stay at home all his life, I guess.”280

Refuge found in music is a theme throughout O’Hara’s life – developed long before he enlisted, but tested and found to be a worthy companion while he served in the Navy. In addition to Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, O’Hara’s taste ran to Schonberg’s tone poems, composed in his modernist avant-garde atonal system. Throughout his life, O’Hara identified closely with creators of misunderstood subversive or avant-garde art; in addition, a Schonberg affectation would also demonstrate his cosmopolitan musical taste. In a work from his undergraduate years, he makes reference to the “refuge” and companionship he finds in music: “and I play Schonberg

/ with only a slight nervousness: it is / my home, my refuge from you all. / (And even if you are all here with me?)” 281 In another undergraduate work, he was more specific about the role music had played in his tolerance of service life in a passage about Key West, where he was briefly stationed at the beginning of his tour:

I also realized in Key West that if you went without lunch and dinner and drank

fifteen bottles of beer the world seemed a great deal worse than it had. There is

nothing like a good crying jag to make you want to hear the Brahms Concerto for

279 Gooch 108. 280 Gooch 72. 281 Collected Poems 26.

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Violin and Orchestra in D major, opus 77. Or is it 72. Why yes, I rather liked the

Walton. Yes, Heifetz did it. Why yes, I suppose we are the only two people in the

world who remember what it sounds like. No, I don’t think Schoenberg is being

perverse. 282

This passage reveals a young, lonely sailor exploring ways to overcome his isolation – alcohol, internal conversations, but also music – listening to it and also recalling performances he had been present for. Was Schoenberg being “perverse” when he composed atonally, rejecting tradition and rebelling against the rules? Not surprisingly, O’Hara embodies the same proclivities as a poet – creating his own form, disregarding the “rules,” and discounting the importance of pleasing publishers or critics. In both these passages, O’Hara seems to find Schoenberg’s example one worth remembering.

For his entire life, O’Hara recalls memories from his Navy service through music or literature, indicating how important a life-raft the arts were for him during those two years. In

1954, he wrote a long occasional poem entitled “To Jane; and in Imitation of Coleridge,” conflating an homage to his friend, painter Jane Freilicher, with an unlikely poetic reference,

Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Freilicher was a great friend and muse of

O’Hara’s at the time; they had met because of mutual friend, poet John Ashbery, who lived in the same building as Jane. Perhaps O’Hara’s Navy service stimulated the Coleridge dedication; in any case, the poem refers to his state of mind while living on the submarine at the end of his enlistment, and an unusual combination – salt and Mozart – as his method of contentment. “And

282 Early Writing 115. O’Hara seemed ambivalent about the spelling of Schoenberg’s name, sometimes spelling it Schoenberg, other times Schonberg.

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I am all at sea, at war,” he writes, “But I should be master of my ship / not just a member of the

crew!” Mastery is the self-assessment O’Hara assigns to his state of mind on the ship – his

ability to thrive in the midst of war, a way of thinking not unlike the way a pianist would talk

about “mastering” a difficult piece. Next, he inserts his friend Jane, who, in the poem, “think [s]

that I will slip into insanity and the blue.” We don’t know what precipitated these lines – perhaps

Jane had indicated she was concerned about him being depressed or “blue.” 283 Regardless, he continues, “I will not [slip into insanity], for I more and more / am master of myself each day.”

The poem reads as though this thinking about “mastery” was a self-improvement method he used while on the submarine, as he continues by writing about “the South,” as in the South Pacific: “I do not know how in the South / I managed to content myself / with salt and Mozart in my mouth

/ on the Pacific like a shelf.” In yet another reference to his use of music “to content himself,” this time O’Hara recalls Mozart rather than Schonberg. In the next stanza, he reminds the reader that he had had a similar experience to the submarine when he was a boy: “or how in New

England where I grew / and tried both to fight and to escape, / I thrived without her intimate view.” In this stanza, he begins to tie in how Jane fits with these thoughts – the connection is that now that they are friends, she is able to help lift his moods, but both as a child or on the submarine, he had to depend instead on his own internal methods of survival. As a child, he fought bullies and escaped through music, literature, and art; as a young soldier, he worked on

“mastery” of his emotions, also using his cultural interests. He continues the poem by writing,

“And if her face, my sky, hold fast, / do not abandon nor disdain! / the vessel shall be mine at

283 The word “blue” appears in nearly two hundred O’Hara poems. While he often uses color words in his poems – orange, lavender, green, and so on, blue appears with unusual frequency.

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last, / as if my life were after Jane.” His friend Jane, now that he’s met her, insures he’s master of

his ship. One of O’Hara’s greatest adult attributes was to surround himself with a family of

friends who were the center of his life and his work.284 In this poem, he recognizes Jane as an important member of that family community, taking as high a place in his life as his love for music, which both constituted his childhood escape and his mastery at sea. He implies she holds the highest and most prized place in his life. And so, his concluding stanza ends where the poem’s title began, with Jane: “for as the war, art, dissipation, / led me on and made me sane, / I find a world of sweet sensation / leading me now, and it is Jane.” 285

While in college, O’Hara wrote that all the sailors he served with found one method or

another to cope: “for all that time everyone did nothing but act inept wish they were somewhere

else and said absolutely nothing that could tag them for something other than what they weren’t

by decree unless they could sneak away for a while to a library or a concert or a bar or a

whorehouse.”286 This passage contains not only a reaffirmation of his impression that all the soldiers had discovered a place to escape – he snuck away to library or concert, while for others, the destination perhaps was a bar or whorehouse. Contained within this passage is a telling phrase, however, about the additional pressures he faced while in service to make sure no one found out he was a homosexual. “Everyone,” he writes, “said absolutely nothing that could tag them for something other than what they weren’t by decree.” This oddly worded phrase suggests that everyone felt compelled to be careful what they said, however, he was especially careful

284 O’Hara’s creation of a non-biological “family” is itself a subversion of the mid-century American monolithic “nuclear family” narrative. More on this in the Chapter 5. 285 Collected Poems 183 – 184. It is somewhat surprising that O’Hara, an open homosexual man, found a number of heterosexual women muses for his work, even to the extent of writing love poems to them. 286 Early Writing 112, emphasis mine.

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because he had a less than upfront relationship with what the Navy said he “wasn’t by decree.”

To write it another way, the Navy had allowed him to enlist, thereby certifying that he wasn’t a

homosexual, because their “decree” was that homosexuals weren’t fit to be soldiers. His

behavior, then, required extra care on his part so that he wouldn’t be “tagged” as a homosexual.

Throughout his life, O’Hara makes reference to little-known literary or musical references in

his poetry as a kind of wink to the few readers who would catch them. The practice is similar to

other modernist poets, influenced by the precedent set by T.S. Eliot in “The Wasteland,” for

example. In a poem written about his memory of the declaration of the end of the war, “Noir

Cacadou, or The Fatal Music of War,” written at the University of Michigan, he recalls the scene

on his ship when the war ended. This poem, a tapestry of memories, feelings, and the joy of

romance, bears two titles: the first “Noir Cacadou,” refers to an absurdist Dada dance performed

at nightclubs such as the Club Voltaire in Zurich at the end of the first World War, where

Dadaist poet and artist, Tristan Tzara, produced events. It is “insider” references like this, known

to his early critics, which persuaded them to sometimes categorize him as a Dada or surrealist

poet, although O’Hara defies comparison with earlier periods by the sheer variety and

individuality of his form.287 The second title, “The Fatal Music of War,” combines two themes around war that O’Hara writes about often – killing as a moral dilemma, and, of course, music.

In this example, O’Hara poem writes a recollection of the day the war was over, and the celebration that took place on his ship. “We were standing around / with guitars and mandolins /

287 Poems Retrieved 1. For more on Noir Cacadou, see Buchner 24, Douin n.p., and Mee n.p. Throughout his career, O’Hara and his friends saw him as “their” Baudelaire, Apollinaire, or Tzara because of his predilection for choosing visual artists as friends and his self-appointed role as the hub of a tight community of friends.

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when the war ended. Yes.” It’s telling that he remembers the event with music – his constant companion during his service. He then recalls the Admiral’s speech: “and the Admiral said ‘Men

/ you were admirable.’ We / loved him as I love you. More, / and it meant nothing, simply / a remark after another war.” The line containing “as I love you” signals to the reader that O’Hara is talking to someone else – someone he loves, but he doesn’t identify the other person. And where the Admiral’s speech was a platitude, which “meant nothing,” something expected after

“another war,” we believe his love for the person to whom he’s recalling the story actually does mean something. Indeed, the remainder of the poem is a memory about someone O’Hara loved or at least desired onboard the ship, someone with whom he shared the celebration of the ending of the war. In one of the few references to a love affair during the Navy, O’Hara continues: “That is / why I want you, must have / you . . . it will be love and lovely / and level as the horizon from

/ out exotic and dancing deck.” The celebration on the ship’s deck includes O’Hara’s love interest, and if the reader wonders about the sex of his lover, he clears that up: “Your beard will grow very / fast at sea and you will / not know what instrument / you are patting.” He leaves no doubt that he’s describing another soldier – a man with a beard, and makes a lewd joke about patting an “instrument.” In the next stanza, he imagines them engaging in sex, “wallow [ing] lasciviously in arms. / You’ll see how easily we / provoke the waves, although / the sextant shakes and positions / get difficult. / And every dawn / the whine will go up, the black / look that means love is near. . . Then afterwards / we’ll help each other dress.” There is no way to know if

O’Hara’s recollection of a celebration that concluded with a sexual encounter described in this poem is fictional or not. Since he wrote the poem changing verb tense from a memory, something in the past (“we were standing”) to future tense as he writes as though he’s talking to

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his lover (“your beard will grow”), by implication, his conversation and sexual encounter with a

lover are likely a fantasy. Nevertheless, the fantasy itself is an expression of the internal

authenticity of his memory.

Perhaps most importantly, no matter what the method of coping – music, literature, sexual

fantasies – he employed, O’Hara, who saw his induction experience as his induction into

manhood as well as the Navy, used his time in the service to become a mature man. Beginning

with that induction experience he’s examined in his work, he believed he entered the Navy as a

boy, attached to his parents and childhood, but exited a mature man who had discovered and

tested his authentic identity. In the fall of 1946, fully 71% of the incoming college students were

GIs, and O’Hara presented himself as a Navy work shirt and chinos non-conformist.288 Excerpts

from the diary he kept from October to January of his sophomore undergraduate year indicate his

intimate thoughts about fitting in, a social skill he had apparently accomplished so well while in

the Navy. In October, 1948, he records this: “The impulse, the, at times, compulsion, toward

normalcy must be avoided, when its fulfillment is known to be unsatisfactory, and when the level

of endeavor is, as it is by definition, inferior to that possible through idiosyncratic behavior.289

Assimilation seems to be on his mind in this line, but his Navy experience tells him that assimilation leads to an “unsatisfactory” life. Upon returning after the holidays in January, 1949

– back in the dormitory, his thinking is: “That hall full of people worrying about what anyone else is saying or thinking about them! Why should anyone stifle an impulse to be uniform? Je ne suis pas come les autres, if I remember Rousseau, and if I am not better, at least I am

288 Gooch 95. Henry Kissinger and Daniel Ellsberg were also in O’Hara’s Class of 1950. See Gooch 97. 289 Early Writing 101.

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different.”290 By age 22, O’Hara seems not only aware that he doesn’t “fit in” to societal norms, but here he seems to own – even value - his so-called “idiosyncratic behavior.” Gooch notes that a “classmate described him (O’Hara) as ‘this small, thin, angry, sentimental Irish boy from a hick town’” but that “O’Hara coped with any social fencing he felt to be beneath him by going his own way, as he had in the Navy.”291 I believe the two years in the Navy performed on O’Hara the same task that so many young men experience while in service: a maturation beyond what would have been reached so young had he not served. Throughout this chapter, I allege that

O’Hara successfully completes his Navy service in spite of his homosexuality, instead appropriating his aesthetic interests in music, literature, and art, both to keep him company, but also to grow and mature internally. These diary entries suggest that he’s cultivated a healthy confidence in who he is.

One of the best excerpts supporting my argument that Navy service convinced O’Hara that he could and should live authentically as a homosexual man upon discharge is from O’Hara’s undergraduate essay, “Lament and Chastisement.” One passage of this long prose text stands out, demonstrating his unusual maturity for a teenager as he describes a moment, bolstered by reading Joyce, during an uncomfortably long stint in the South Pacific on a sweltering submarine:

At this time I reread Ulysses, needing to throw up my sensibility and Joyce’s art

into the face of my surroundings; I found that Joyce was more than a match, I was

290 Early Writing 108. “Je ne suis pas come les autres,” literally “I’m not like the others,” translation mine. 291 Gooch 99. In O’Hara’s era, describing a boy or man as “sentimental” seems to have meant “effeminate.” Gooch describes a conflict between O’Hara and his parents in which they accused him of sentimentality. This usage seems to have fallen out of our modern lexicon.

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reassured that what was important to me would always be important to me;

deprived of music I wrote pieces which turned out to sound something like early

Bartok, and I wrote awful poetry compounded of Donne, Whitman and

Cummings, which I later destroyed. I found that I myself was my life: it had not

occurred to me before; now I knew that the counters with which I dealt with my

life were as valid in unsympathetic surroundings as they had been in sympathetic

ones; for art is never a retreat; the person who cannot face himself enough to face

the world on certain given terms may find that other terms are more suitable to his

psyche: this is a matter of self-knowledge, not cowardice; there is no ivory tower;

there are arrangements of the complex resulting from physical, intellectual,

emotional, aesthetic sensitivities which dictate a particular way of life; but no one

way of life is more valid than another; I had subconsciously felt this, and now I

knew it. From that monstrous womb: a second birth.292

The fact that O’Hara found succor particularly in Joyce, whose works Ulysses and A Portrait of

an Artist as a Young Man occupied O’Hara’s reading time during his tour of duty on a

submarine, underscores his later interest in writing about his interior thoughts in a stream of

consciousness style. A dairy entry reads, “The world is inside my head, spinning slowly.”293 He doesn’t mention reading poetry during his Navy years, but he does mention writing – and subsequently destroying – poetry. Nevertheless, I believe that Joyce played a larger role in

O’Hara’s mature poetic style than other scholars have perhaps noticed. Here we have a young

292 Early Writing 122 – 123. With regard to his Navy poetry, Gooch (79) quotes O’Hara as saying he “tossed them overboard.” 293 Gooch 99.

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homosexual sailor on a submarine in a physically and emotionally uncomfortable setting and his

study of and reflection on Joyce’s work leads to what he describes as “a second birth.” It would

be some years before O’Hara’s poetry had the distinctive “O’Hara” sound to it, but all scholars

would agree that two of the most identifiable characteristics of his poetry are his description of

the ordinary, the everyday aspects of life; and second, the interiority of his poetry – his writing

down his thoughts or interior dialogues as he goes through his day. Many scholars have written

about Joyce’s talent for the same literary devices of “foregrounding the process of thinking,” or

his writing “deeper and farther than any other novelist in handling interior monologue and stream

of consciousness.”294 Edmund Wilson wrote about Ulysses, that what Joyce accomplished was to render “as precisely and as directly as it is possible in words to do, what our participation in life is like—or rather, what it seems to us like as from moment to moment we live.”295 Wilson could have been writing about O’Hara’s poetry when he wrote those words. It seems the strength and identity O’Hara drew from Joyce’s work during his service also piqued certain stylistic inventions that he borrowed and then made his own. Both authors also share the characteristic of writing forthrightly about sexual encounters, even somewhat crudely. While Joyce’s so-called

“obscene” passages caused him enormous publishing difficulties, particularly in Britain and the

United States; conversely, O’Hara eschewed publishing, intuiting that his vulgarities about homosexual sex would certainly prevent many of his poems from being published. Later in life,

O’Hara announced his admiration for homosexual poets Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, but he particularly liked William Carlos Williams, who also wrote about ordinary everyday life, and

294 Jayapalan 328. Kiberd n.p. 295 Grey n.p.

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Russian poets Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the love for their work affecting his

view of American foreign relations and the Cold War. However, Joyce was the author who

seems to have most interested O’Hara during this formative period in life – his military

Bildungsroman. Relating poetry with the performance of masculinity seems to have been an

equation that persisted from O’Hara’s childhood. He once told friend and fellow poet Bill

Berkson that during his childhood he considered poetry to be “sissy.”296 Choosing to be a poet, then, seems to be a statement of his total acceptance of his identity. And on the subject of independence of spirit, in one of his frequent letters home to his younger brother and sister, he writes, “And always remember that you are alone always as far as what you yourself are going to be.”297 Biographer Gooch reminds his readers that “self-creating was a part of the ethos of the time” and that Jane Freilicher once said of O’Hara, “’With Frank, I somehow got the feeling of someone who had detached himself from his family.’”298

3.6 Diversity, Inclusion, and the Utopian Community

The desire to create a utopian community where differences of many kinds, including race

and ethnicity, are either minimized or celebrated is a common desire for both homosexuals and

other marginalized groups; using literature to do this work is also common.299 The urge to create

a literary utopia is a central feature of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative

practice, which I wrote about in the previous chapter. According to Sedgwick, homosexuals as a

296 Gooch 64. 297 Gooch 43. 298 Gooch 13. 299 This feature of the collective subject is also seen in black and Jewish American literature in the mid-century. Indeed, outsiders have often been the vanguard of American culture.

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group have not historically been the recipients of nourishment vis-a-vis the politics of the state,

and so do generally fall outside the prevailing ideologies. The anti-homosexual policies and

actions of the military in World War II would certainly be an example of a “politics of the state”

decidedly not nourishing queer soldiers like O’Hara. Sedgwick also suggests that this so-called

“outsider collective” tending to gather around literature, “Its [the outsider collective’s] fear, a

realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to

assemble and confer plenitude on an object [in O’Hara’s case, literature celebrating his ‘taboo

utopian collective’] that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”300 The celebratory nature of O’Hara’s written comment, “I found that I myself was my life,” is directly related to his discovery in Joyce, and using what’s he’s learning as an act of community building.301

Political reversal is frequently at the heart of O’Hara’s work – his personal preference for, and creation of, a utopian collective of his own making rather than blindly following the official monolithic version of American life. Further, by viewing O’Hara’s coterie poetry through this lens, the work becomes transcendent rather than merely trivial and silly. Rather than reading his less-than-perfect relationship with his family after his father died as a tragedy,

O’Hara creates a nuclear family for himself built around his friends, both gay and heterosexual.

His urban collective was his new family, and this family-of-choice shared with him the things that gave his life meaning: literature, art, music, theater, dance, and philosophy. The New York

300 Sedgwick, Novel Gazing 27-28, emphasis mine. See also Love, Crozier, Hawthorne, Clewell, Hanson, Rohy, and Flatley for additional scholarship on reparative reading theory. 301 See Shaw 21.

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art scene in which O’Hara built his life consisted of a variety of ethnicities and religious backgrounds, another way of living that he had begun to enjoy while in the Navy.

O’Hara became sensitized to racism and bigotry during his service; Gooch refers to his letters home about his fellow soldiers’ racism, which he not only condemned, but over which he developed an “increasingly fiery sense of outrage at any injustice.” 302 In a letter home, he wrote about his younger siblings, “I hope he [brother Phil] and [sister] Maureen are not believing that all Japs or Germans are bad. The Nazis are only less than 1/3 of the German population, and the

Japs we are fighting are the top ones, at most only 1/10th of the people.”303 This sentiment shows a level of adult analysis one wouldn’t expect from 18 year old soldiers, and was likely not a common one among his fellow sailors. Never having previously met Americans from the Deep

South, O’Hara was astonished at their unashamedly racist banter. He repeatedly mentions in letters that he found southerners, “so darn anti-Negro,” and also mentions other soldiers from marginalized groups, including “the lonely Jewish boy who thought I was kind.”304 For the remainder of his life, throughout his poetry, O’Hara celebrates diversity of all kinds – expectedly, diversity of sexual orientation, but also in repeated references to immigrant

Americans and people of color he sees or interacts with in New York. In his junior year diary, this entry from October 12, 1948:

Have just returned from Yom Kippur services, the first time I had ever attended.

To think that the Kol Nidre had to be revived as spiritual protection against

302 Gooch 65. 303 Gooch 58. 304 Gooch 65.

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coercion by Christian savages! To think that it has remained in constant use these

two thousand years! Our guilt stays in our blood, passed down generation to

generation, like syphilis.305

Still, some have pointed out that despite his obvious affection for marginalized communities like his own, his support didn’t extend to protests or civil rights rallies, so common in America in the

1960s. There is, for example, no record of O’Hara (or any of the New York School poets outside

LeRoi Jones, for that matter) ever attending such an event. In addition, O’Hara’s homosexual fetishization of the black man’s penis is a complication that bears further investigation; I write much more about that in Chapter 4.

An illustration of O’Hara’s sensitivity and empathy toward soldiers demeaned by others exists in another section of his long prose poem, “Lament and Chastisement.” In it, O’Hara recalls in the poem the day in 1944 when President Roosevelt died, and writes that the half-mast flag flying for the President made him recall a gruesome murder of a black mess-cook, as if the half-mast flag was for cook as well as the President. O’Hara’s poem doesn’t mention the mess- cook’s crime, but, according to Gooch, it had to do with the cook “messing” with a native

Melanesian woman.306 The poem has a distinct sexual undertone to it, which supports Gooch’s

claim. First, however, O’Hara recalls the reaction of his unit upon hearing of Roosevelt’s death:

silence.

Hushed were the camps, hushed we all as if the faintest sound might avalanche

the world, that first day that President Roosevelt was dead. There was no

305 Gooch 99. 306 Gooch 82.

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moderation, no intelligence, no proportion, in our mourning; no man is

indispensable? every man is indispensable. And it is the illusion which great men

create that the world will not long survive them. There is no leader but a summing

up of wills: our flag at half mast for our ideals.307

The thought that Roosevelt was no longer alive to lead America to victory in this hell of a war must have seemed unbelievable to all Americans on that day. O’Hara writes that he believes, however, that in Roosevelt’s leadership was the sum of the wills of all Americans, a sentiment of the World War II generation that has not been repeated during a war since. O’Hara’s personal philosophical and moral struggles with World War II and subsequent American wars become much more complicated as his life went on. Here, however, he seems to believe that American involvement in the War was “the summing up of wills,” but in a short time, and for the remainder of his life, O’Hara writes with shame, guilt, and even hatred about what America did to win the war. It isn’t surprising to find both points of view in his work considering he was very young and so personally affected by the things he saw in service. Roosevelt’s long, over three- full-term service as President, leading America first through the Great Depression, and then into involvement in the World War, must certainly have made it seem to most Americans that, as

O’Hara writes, “. . . that the world will not long survive [him].” His next thought, though, after reiterating that it is “our ideals” that America’s involvement is about, the memory of Roosevelt’s passing and the half-mast flag brings up another memory for O’Hara – the memory of the gruesomely murdered camp cook. “That same week there was a murder. One of the negro mess-

307 Early Writing, page 125.

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cooks, living in their segregated hut with his radio, his soft laugh, and his hat dyed yellow with

an Atabrine tablet, was found before their hut, his hands cut off, his testicles tucked neatly in his

cheeks, his lips sewed shut. The flag was at half mast.”308 O’Hara’s conflation of the death of the

President with the death of this mess-cook by remembering that the flag flew at half-mast, in his remembrance, for both of them, demonstrates a humanity many of his fellow soldiers probably did not share about black soldiers. It’s possible that the realization about his sexuality had already begun to soften O’Hara’s feelings about other marginalized people, or that his entrenched childhood Catholicism had taught him to treat people equally. It’s also possible that he had witnessed bigotry against Irish people in Boston during his early life, and was himself, therefore, one to take notice of it around him. Regardless, the gruesomeness details of the mess-

cook’s murder stuck with O’Hara – he not only wrote about it as a college student, but again

over a decade later. In the later poem, he remembers this gruesome event occurring on a Sunday,

when in fact, FDR died on a Thursday. Perhaps the half-mast flag, which would have been flying

for a week or two, is indeed the memory that links the two in his mind.

in New Guinea a Sunday morning figure reclining outside his hut in Lamourish languor and an atabrine-dyed hat like a sick sun over his ebony land on your way to breakfast

he has had his balls sewed into his mouth by the natives who bleach their hair in urine and their will; a basketball game and a concert later if you live to write, it’s not all advancing

308 Early Writing, page 12. Atabrine is a bright yellow tablet form of anti-malarial medication extensively used by American soldiers in the Pacific in World War II. A contemporaneous medical report reports a common side effect: “A very distinct, greenish-yellow fluorescence was apparent not only in the nails, but also in the entire skin and the mucous membranes of the test subjects.” Miller, Hermann, and Rubin 445.

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towards you, he had a killing desire for their women.309

This poem is an example of the impact that social injustices had on O’Hara at a young age. It’s remarkable that he’s still thinking about it twelve years later, and decides to write about it again.

What is clear in O’Hara’s writing is that his wartime service exposed him to all kinds of people from all over the country and provided numerous “opportunities” to witness bigotry and racism, all of which sensitized his reaction to the plights of others. With the lines, “. . . later if you live to write, it’s not all advancing / towards you . . .” he seems to allow his younger self – that 18 year old kid who witnessed this - to stop and take a deep breath in order to realize that his life is not in danger as he has no desire for “their women.”

In another section of the essay, “Lament and Chastisement,” O’Hara writes about a second racial incident he witnessed as a soldier:

. . . when I came back upstairs the head man and his burliest assistant (the latter

was not God-fearing but made up for it by his efficiency, that trait indicating a

subconscious sympathy with right way to do things, namely, God’s way) had

pushed a negro’s face into the floor; when I came in the burly one stopped

twisting his arm up to his collar bone, the head man stopped kneeing him in the

small of the back, and the negro was helped to his feet; he was possibly five feet

tall, ninety-eight pounds, with a pipe-stem neck and head round and frail as a

Christmas tree ornament; when the negro had stumbled out of hearing the head

man apologized for the opinion I might be entertaining quite properly of God’s

309 Collected Poems 294.

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guidance and correction; it was true; the negros only offense was that he had

stayed in the toilet longer than the others; the head man’s judgment had been

distorted by bodily fatigue and he had been wrong; he was only glad that he had

erred on the side of zeal rather than laxity. He suspected innocence of

dissimulation; he rather admired the courage of the frankly depraved.310

O’Hara seems to have saved the black soldier from further harm and injury just by coming upon the scene. The soldier, even smaller physically than O’Hara himself, was at least able to

“stumble” away from his attackers. O’Hara doesn’t say in the piece whether or not his presence alone was what made the perpetrators stop, or whether he, in particular, was known as someone who took up for black soldiers. We can ascertain from his commentary about the event that not only were these men violent and bigoted, but there is also an unusual mention of God in his recollection – were the perpetrators also men who invoked God in their zealous enforcement of military rules? Or racist behaviors? It is unusual for O’Hara to write about God, so it seems likely this is the case. These vignettes of racial injustice stuck with O’Hara and he was moved to use them as subject matter for his poems, even years after his service.

My supposition that O’Hara spent his Navy time secreting his homosexuality to survive was apparently not always the case with other homosexual soldiers in the barracks or ships he resided. His college writing often mentions incidents where fellow homosexual soldiers or those

bullied for other reasons suffered bad fates. Military irresoluteness about how to handle those

soldiers who passed through the draft boards and the induction centers but then displayed sexual

310 Early Writing 120-121.

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“problems” that disrupted the troops is a subject that O’Hara writes about a good deal in his

university years. In addition to homosexuality, a variety of sexual incidents and behaviors

apparently became the military’s problem. In a later poem, O’Hara writes: “Two young boys,

cousins, who thought I looked like someone they knew in a small town dawn sahth because I

said cuhb and pahk and they did too kept wetting their beds at the same time to the half hour

every night and finally went back to the small town regretfully because by that time they had

changed their minds.”311 Does he mean that they were regretful because they had changed their minds about enlisting or that the bed-wetting (“at the same time to the half-hour”) had been deliberate and by the time the lengthy bureaucracy had decided to discharge them, they had changed their minds and wanted to stay? We can’t tell exactly what his writing indicates, so we don’t know any more about these cousins, but we do know from what he writes that O’Hara himself never seems to have resorted to any type of prank to get a different assignment, lighter duty, or a discharge. He served honorably and apparently “passed” as heterosexual successfully.

Another example of a soldier who had difficulty adjusting to the service, again hailing from the south, brought a different reaction O’Hara:

Another boy from the sahth had the same name as a poet of the English

Renaissance and masturbated every night in the shower to everyone’s vast

amusement in that he was so stupid anyway fit only to be a sharecropper and no

one ever turned him in for it because it was really too good fun and he so upset

311 Early Writing 112-113.

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when you kidded him that it was ready too good fun to let a psychiatrist get ahold

of. 312

In both cases, O’Hara finds a fascination with the similarities between his dialect and that of the

southern soldiers. He rarely writes in a vernacular as he did in these early examples. However,

video and audio recordings of O’Hara reading his work or being interviewed exist,

demonstrating he had a very pronounced Boston accent that he clearly was playing on here. Was

this “too good fun” he recounts about the soldier who masturbated in the shower actually good-

natured ribbing from comrades, or was it something darker? Again, he doesn’t provide enough

detail for us to know, but what the anecdotes do signal is the regularity with which the young

soldiers were dealing with extremely unusual and artificial homosocial tensions in incredibly

unforgiving circumstances. Another story illuminates prejudices his fellow soldiers had about

homosexuals:

And from up north there was a Greek boy who looked ten years old and could

move his hip in and out of joint when he felt like showing off in the showers and

began to have nervous seizures and sweat and tremble and go to the hospital but

the people who knew all about queers said he was queer and just trying to get out

of it all because he had no guts they never do.313

Fellow soldiers who believed that homosexual soldiers who exhibited nervous disorders were

“just trying to get out of it . . . because [they] had no guts” apparently were unaware that homosexuals actually had no need to “get out of” service – all they had to do was admit to being

312 Early Writing 113. 313 Early Writing page 113, emphasis mine.

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homosexual when they were drafted and they would never have been accepted as soldiers. Those

who didn’t exclude themselves that way, one can conclude, either hadn’t yet accepted their

sexual orientation themselves and did not want to be labeled homosexual, or understood their

sexual orientation, but wanted to serve anyway. O’Hara biographer Gooch quotes from an

August 1944 letter O’Hara wrote to his parents in which he mentioned the incident to them. He

opined, “Without exaggerating at all the discharge will ruin him - from what conversation I’ve

had with him, and it was intimate on his part because he wanted a listener, it will cause a

permanent inferiority complex and possibly a nervous breakdown.”314 This and other expressions

of empathy over the institutionalized mistreatment of fellow soldiers indicates the pressures he

himself was navigating by working hard not to be “discovered” as gay himself.

3.7 Moral Misgivings About War

While his personal wellbeing was constantly at jeopardy should his unit discover he himself

was a homosexual, O’Hara also had other greater moral misgivings about the war, including his

resolute belief that killing was immoral. In one of his first mentions about killing vis-à-vis the

war, he wonders how much one, as a sailor in the Navy, should become ensnarled in the ideology

of the War. “Should one allow oneself to become involved? / What is the proper spirit? / If I

killed Yasuo Kuniyoshi could I sleep? Even if he told me to?” he writes.315 This thought provokes larger questions about life and death, framed by a farcical prayer: “If I should die would anyone care? / Am I really me? / Is death gratuitous? / Is suicide disinterested? / If you are

314 Gooch 64–65. 315 Early Writing 113 - 114. Yasuo Kuniyoshi was a Japanese-American artist.

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there God, wiggle your ears.” The second line of this stanza, “Am I really me?” is yet another

existential reference to an existence lived by others’ rules, and reveals that for undergraduate

O’Hara, identity questions were still meaningful - in this poem, wrapped up around feelings of

isolation – “If I should die would anyone care?” – and a test for the reality of God, “If you are

there God, wiggle your ears.” By the time he wrote these lines, having already been discharged,

his doubts about what the War all meant on a micro-level, a personal level, are still with him. His

sense of camp, developed throughout his early post war years, allows him to end the stanza on a

funny note, but the humor likely belies a serious question. He exposes a dialogue with God here

that is ongoing in his poetry, and he appears to be mentally testing his early learning about the

church and its attitude on killing against a soldier’s work, finally wondering if God is actually

there. The poem closes with this line, “Did Michael Frankel or I say ‘what’s a guy like me doing

in a place like this’ first?”316 Michael Frankel’s identity is lost to history, but the second phrase of the final line – how did I end up here? - is certainly something most soldiers probably wondered during their military service. O’Hara frequently wrestled with the soldier’s conundrum of taking another’s life, even long after his Navy service ended. While his Catholic upbringing had provided rules about killing, he had been soured against the Catholic Church’s choices with regard to war since childhood. Gooch quotes O’Hara on the subject: “My next political memory was that of revulsion at having been made to pray for Franco’s success during the Spanish Civil

War when I was in grade school and didn’t know which side was which. By the time I read For

316 Early Writing 114. “Lament and Chastisement” was written during O’Hara’s junior year at Harvard, in the fall of 1948, for Professor Albert Geurard. Gooch reports O’Hara earned a B+ for the work, 61.

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Whom the Bell Tolls this made me furious, and still irritates me in a metaphysical way.”317

Having lost trust in the Church, O’Hara set about making up his own mind about who was telling him the truth. As such, he ponders throughout his life the extent to which he should buy into

America’s propagandistic war message likely frequently repeated to the young enlisted men.

This level of introspection in his poetry is characteristic of O’Hara, and he writes about

America’s continuing wars throughout the 1950s. From another poem on the subject: “we owe ourselves / what? / nothing? / nothing; / we are guilty? / no / guilty? / no. / guilty (as the heart bleeds dawn-grey with the only killing remorse the pain for that we could not not do)? / yes.”318

The penultimate line in this stanza reads awkwardly, referring once again to being in a situation without free will – “that we could not not do.” Rephrasing, O’Hara feels guilt “with a killing remorse” for that which was done because it was ordered, and the soldiers had no choice – they could “not not do” what they had been ordered to do. The helpless feeling of living inauthentically – responding to orders, hiding who you really are, watching what you say and do carefully, is a recurring theme in O’Hara’s early work.

Because World War II ended during his enlistment period, and perhaps because he was stationed on a submarine, O’Hara was not at the front lines nor did he witness combat. And yet, throughout his career, he writes about questioning America’ guilt – a collective national guilt – over the killing performed in America’s name. In this poem, he conflates war and cannibalism:

September came quietly. The trees wound around me so decorously, It was like an initiation. “Are you a cannibal?”

317 Gooch 37. 318 Early Writing 128-129.

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“My mother . . .” “Answer me!” The leaves settled about the trees in an even more profound circle. How was I to know? There were hints of war and everywhere I looked girls were taking jobs in factories. I had done nothing. I pride myself on my innocence. Even that is completely gratuitous. Like the rain. Please. No more longing, yearning, words fail me, my poor fool, care for yourself, you are dying. it is up to god to pray for the dead. That is what privilege means is it not?319

The imagery in this poem bespeaks loudly about O’Hara’s feelings about the war. He feels that the “initiation” he was involved in meant that he was bound – trees winding around him. A voice of authority demands to know if he is a cannibal – one who eats other humans. He doesn’t want to answer – in fact, doesn’t answer directly; he recognizes there is human death occurring – the hints of war are obvious: women are taking factory jobs, for example. But, he writes, “I had done nothing. I pride myself on my innocence.” Even when proclaiming his innocence, however, he feels guilty – his innocence feels gratuitous, perhaps because other innocents could “not not” kill and so perhaps they were all guilty. There is a striking psychological battle occurring in the background of this poem as finally he begs, “Please. No more . . .” and refers the questioner to god – this time not capitalized – who, he writes, is the one who should pray for the dead.

Throughout his life, O’Hara seems to be unusually aware of the role World War II played in creating the world in which he lived. He was aware that the military-industrial machine required war as its fuel, that capitalism and consumerism had roots in the post-war economy, and that

319 Early Writing 128.

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even his beloved Hollywood has been co-opted by the government for propagandistic reasons.

This knowledge makes O’Hara cynical, wary, and sarcastic with regard to many aspects of the

world at large. Joel Duncan notices this throughout O’Hara’s poetry and his biography:

O’Hara [. . .] knew that the fortunes of postwar America were built on the mass

destruction of World War II. In view of this, O’Hara writes, ‘I historically belong

to the enormous bliss of American death.’ Of course, death haunts every future.

O’Hara’s poetry is known for its fascination with celebrity, personality, and the

proliferation of cars as well as smaller commodities in postwar New York. But

rather than simply affirming the spuriousness of such objects, his attachment to

them is full of pathos, dramatizing the insubstantial, and even deathly, quality of

individual existence within capitalism.320

Indeed, despite O’Hara’s sense of humor and his campy world view, there is definitely a pall cast over his life simultaneously. Reading his poems in the order in which they were written, as they are published in Collected Poems reinforces this. O’Hara moves seamlessly between the two states – humor and pathos – easily and naturally. Perhaps this is a commentary common to the

World War II generation, or perhaps it was a particular sensibility for O’Hara. Nevertheless, the veil it shrouds his life and poetry with is obvious to anyone who has considered it.

O’Hara was still in service at the end of the war in September 1945, and wasn’t discharged until June 2, 1946.321 In his admission essay written in the summer of 1946 as a part of his application to Harvard, he wrote candidly and forcefully about his feelings for American foreign

320 Duncan 78. Also see Collected Poems 326. 321 Gooch 90.

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policy – already stretching those authenticity muscles he’d been holding back during his service,

“Watching the botching of Military Governments, the crippling of the UN, the ineffectual

expediency of our national policies, and the mishandling of the Atomic Bomb, has been a bitter

experience for all of us, and almost to a man we all waited for discharge.”322 He also recalls the end of the war in this poem, written while in college. Perhaps more than any other poem he wrote on World War II or on American foreign policy in the more abstract, this poem consolidates his feelings about war, killing, and his generation’s role on the world stage.

. . . a kamikaze in the stack we screened Halsey and the planes struck Japan and the struck Hiroshima and the war was over. Well, the war was over. We are fit only to be what the scum of the earth is, having received the sanction of the worm through function. For my generation there is no hero, only the man aggregate of conflicting psychological tensions. The hero who saves his fellows is the man not strong enough to let them die; the coward is the man brave enough to let other men die when he could save them. we killed the great Japanese architect great German scientist the great Italian musician dropped death on Hiroshima killed killed killed and yes I hate us for it killed killed killed we saved our not-worth-saving world rampant with the injustice cruelty and hate which bred us; we owe ourselves what? nothing? nothing; we are guilty? no guilty? no. guilty (as the heart bleeds dawn-grey with the only killing remorse the pain for that we could not not do)? yes.323

322 Gooch 95. 323 Early Writing 128 – 129.

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For O’Hara, his final nine months in the service, the war over, were what Gooch describes as “a

waiting game.”324 These lines reiterate and continue his long internal questions about killing and guilt, and, for the first time, his disgust over the loss of human lives regardless of nationality.

The text begins with America’s nuclear bomb dropping on Hiroshima and the subsequent end of the war. For many Americans, likely including O’Hara, this was a cause for celebration, but for him it was an ambivalent celebration as the next line proclaims: “we are fit only to be what the scum of the earth is.” Why does he say America is “the scum of the earth,” that his is a generation with “no hero,” only men suffering from “conflicting psychological tensions?”

America shows not strength by bombing non-combatants to win the war, instead that is cowardice. The method of his reversal is awkward to read, but it’s meaning is clear: “The hero who saves his fellows is the man not strong enough to let them die; the coward is the man brave enough to let other men die when he could save them.” If the reader is confused or stumbles over that line, the next lines are crystal clear: “we killed the great Japanese architect great German scientist the great Italian / musician dropped death on Hiroshima killed killed killed and / yes I hate us for it killed killed killed.” As we’ve seen in previous early texts, repetition is one of

O’Hara’s tricks of the trade for emphasis, and this line indicates he deplores that waste of human lives, the individuals sacrificed and silenced in the name of war. He blames America for a solution that spoiled so many lives. It goes without saying that this was not the typical American reaction to the bombings, nor was it representative of Truman’s public reasoning of the bombings costing Japanese lives while they saved Americans lives. He goes on to admit that “we

324 Gooch 89.

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saved our not-worth-saving world rampant with the injustice cruelty and hate which bred us;” implying that “injustice cruelty and hate” begets “injustice cruelty and hate” and he considers that reprehensible. And yet, with those “conflicting psychological tensions” he wrote about above, he capitulates that we (America) owe ourselves nothing, and we are (despite everything he believes) are not guilty – this act was “the only killing remorse / the pain for that we could not not do” – another double negative I translate to mean he understood the argument for the bombings, even though he could never approve of it. I am struck with the maturity and clarity of thought this poem represents and with the life choices and consequences a philosophy about life and death this intense will inform. It’s instructive to point out that this line, written by an undergraduate, so accurately introduces and forecasts the psychological crisis of masculinity that afflicts the greatest minds of the next decade that it almost reads as though he’s chosen the overarching theme of his work – subverting the masculine expectations of the age in which he lives – by the time he reaches graduate school. Driven by his memories and feelings about the war, O’Hara goes on to create his own model of bravery, of heroism, and masculinity. This marks the beginning of O’Hara’s frequent disagreement with American foreign policy and political rhetoric, all emanating from his memories of the war.

This poem, with its raw emotive repetition and language about the consequences of war, particularly its lack of differentiation with regard to who it destroys, illustrates O’Hara’s strongly held view that aesthetic culture is far more important than the trappings of war – boundaries, ownership, domination, or power. O’Hara mentions the vocations of architects, scientists, and musician in this stanza, noting that war made no distinction in who it killed. O’Hara implies here that the loss of humanity in war is not only deplorable for the present, but a huge loss for the

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humanity of the future. Who will make the next scientific discovery to benefit mankind, build the

next Taj Mahal, or write the next great symphony – if we destroy the lives of those with potential

– regardless of their nationality?

O’Hara’s examination of war and killing continues throughout his career, perhaps because he

found his brush with killing during the war so unsettling, or perhaps because his adult life was

peppered with an American foreign policy that begat one war after another: World War II, the

Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. “Lament and Chastisement,” his undergraduate assignment

continues, “I also read two newspapers and the war news was not too good. I read a speech by

President Roosevelt and one by Henry Wallace and a communiqué from General Douglas

MacArthur. I decided that if I ever had to kill someone I should do it for the Tennessee Valley

Authority . . . “325 Student O’Hara communicates in this line that he had carefully considered

Roosevelt, Wallace, and MacArthur’s commentaries about the necessity of war and come to a conclusion of his own about killing. His conclusion? That the Tennessee Valley Authority

(TVA), the Roosevelt government program that created hydropower plants in Appalachia and powered over a dozen power plants during the War, was the only effort worthy of him to ignoring his basic philosophy of pacifism. It is interesting that he chose the TVA, in that this federal government program produced a great deal of energy to fuel aluminum plants for the war effort, but perhaps the ancillary benefits for the people of the Tennessee Valley (electricity, flood control, and so on) was the “one step removed” that provided him enough cover to even imagine killing.

325 Early Writing 117.

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In the same long text, O’Hara addresses Nazism specifically as he continues his exposition

on war and killing. In this passage, he reveals a globally cosmopolitan worldview as he considers

two composers who stayed in Germany during the Nazi regime, and were considered, at the very

least, Nazi collaborators for their work for the Reich. The poem reveals him to be of two minds –

wanting to continue to admire German and Russian composers, but also finding it difficult to do

so based upon the horrors of fascism in Europe:

How can you be right if you kill everyone who is wrong? I admire Walter Gieseking. I admire Richard Strauss. Does the artist do enough for humanity to obviate his fascism? Can you fight ideas without ideas? BUT Is there ever a good without evil? Can I detach myself from Stalingrad? Can I rationalize Franco? Could even the greatest symphony drown out the screams of Jews? Is not lack of formulation progress? 326

For a young man who worships aestheticism as beauty and truth, the compromised Gieseking or

Strauss proved to be a problematic puzzle. It strikes him that “rationalizing Franco” or

“detaching himself from Stalingrad” are more clear-cut mental perplexities. “Could even the greatest symphony drown out the screams of Jews?” is a question he doesn’t feel required to answer in the poem, but the answer, of course, is no. He seems less sure about his earlier question, “Does the artist do enough for humanity to obviate his fascism?” While he doesn’t answer his own question either, he does precede it by claiming his admiration for both

326 Early Writing 125.

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composers. Line six of the poem contains one word in all capital letters, “BUT.” This word is the fulcrum around which these two questions balance – or find imbalance.

The final section of “Lament and Chastisement” is a prayer that begins, “Let us pray” and concludes with, “Amen.” The central theme of the prayer is that of a tired penitent imploring

God for rest and soothing. The final lines of the poem speak again of O’Hara’s conviction that wars are, rather than the will of God, a failing of man. “Weep with us / O Lord / over the fatigue the arduous following of Thy divine precepts hath entailed in us, over the sorrow misery and entertainment of the world, over the snake of Thy humanity swallowing its tail”. His reference to

“humanity swallowing its tail” in the context of the lines around it seems to refer to his belief that war is never justified, that it is a cannibalistic exercise in civil war – humanity killing humanity. Even stronger, in the line above, he refers to the “sorrow, misery, and entertainment of the world,” as if to align wars with entertainment.327 This thought, without any elucidation, seems to question the very necessity of wars and inaudibly ask the question why humanity continues to kill one another. In this poem, O’Hara asks all the right questions without offering an answer, in the guise of asking God. However, as he matures, his views become more and more definite and declarative that war is a human invention that should be abolished forever.

O’Hara didn’t ever write directly about the toll his Navy ruse of heterosexuality took on him, but he does occasionally refer to these two years of a secret life. Fifteen years after his discharge, in 1961, he wrote a comical poem recalling a sexual tryst with a black man during his time stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. With the unlikely title, “Mary Desti’s Ass,” O’Hara describes his

327 Early Writing 130 – 131.

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service as “lying” in the tongue-in-cheek poem, where “lying” – not telling the truth – quickly

becomes “exercise” – his euphemism for sex:

in Boston you were never really standing I was usually lying it was amusing to be lying all the time for everybody

it was like exercise

it means something to exercise in Norfolk Virginia it means you've been to bed with a Nigra well it is exercise 328

Again, in this poem, he resorts to a vernacular pronunciation of the word “Negro,” which he usually uses very respectfully and properly in his work, although he seems conflicted over the course of his life about whether it should be capitalized or not. Here he writes “Nigra” as a southerner – perhaps someone from Norfolk, Virginia – would pronounce the word Negro. In his recollection in this poem, lying “all the time” could refer to dishonesty caused by a secretive sex life – or could also be referencing a proclivity to have a great deal of sex.329 Regardless, his internal machinations recall next a black person he slept with while stationed at Norfolk – the only time his biography reveals he was there. O’Hara doesn’t really care if we follow his logic in these poems, more that we feel his mood as he relives certain memories. For that reason, he never explains himself – it would seem redundant to him: it’s all there in the poem. Nevertheless, inter-racial, homosexual sex between soldiers has so many levels of provocation that it seems unlikely O’Hara’s intentions here weren’t to shock his reader.

328 Collected Poems 401. 329 I write much more about O’Hara’s complicated poetic relationship with race, particularly black men, in the next chapter.

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O’Hara’s residual attitudes about war, already negative in his early college writings, remained bitterly inimical throughout his life when he used the Korean Conflict and later, the beginning of the Vietnam War, as the subjects of his poems. While not an everyday theme in his work, O’Hara could easily be triggered by a political event or a news headline to write a poem about war. For example, in 1963, O’Hara wrote about Vietnam – not “his” war, but one that he couldn’t ignore in his poetic expression. What seems to have spurred the subject matter for this poem, “[The Ancient Ache, Quick False Move],” is the ubiquitous news photo of the self- immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, taken in June 1963 by Associated Press (AP) photographer Malcolm Browne.330

The ancient ache, quick false move fires smoldering today on the plaine des Jarres an apparent failure of the rain forest you have thrust your saber into your left foot

April came and went the advisers were killing more and more persuaded natives and the buildings were loaned to the survivors as they went up in flames for

their principles! their religious principles if you can believe in sitting immolation! an alienated landscape dotted with crisp human torches and smudge-pots

your lace sent across the sea and drowned in salt the piteousness of wracks, pins all stretching and drying devices for the spiders crumpling fistlike in the revolution331

330 Myre n.p. 331 Poems Retrieved 229.

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The poem begins with a lament for Vietnam, particularly the Plain of Jars, a Vietnamese location

heavily bombed by the U. S. Air force from the early 1960s until the end of the war. Following

this stanza, he writes that “advisors,” which is what the United States initially called soldiers

deployed to Vietnam, were killing people – making them seem more like ground combatants

than advisers in O’Hara’s mind. Finally, in the fourth stanza, he gets to the real point of the poem

– the scandalous role the Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem, who had made it illegal

to raise a Buddhist flag, despite the country’s 90% Buddhist population. In May of 1963, a

crowd of celebrating Buddhists was met with governmental armed resistance and a protest

began. Nine of the Buddhists were killed, including two children. Finally, on June 11, 1963, in a

central Saigon intersection, with AP photographer Malcolm Browne watching and shooting news

photos in the crowd that had gathered, one of a group of 350 monks poured gasoline on another

monk, Thich Quang Duc, who then set himself on fire as an act of self-immolation protest over

the deaths. With the crowd watching, but no attempt to intervene, he burned serenely for ten

minutes before his body collapsed, completely silent. The photograph was on the front page of

newspapers around the world the next day, and America subsequently committed to back the

Vietnam nationalists who later murdered President Ngo Dinh Diem on November 1, 1963.

President Kennedy is quoted as having remarked at the time, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”332

In this poem, O’Hara – by now out of the Navy for 17 years – faces his stance of deep

resistance against the intersection of killing during war, religion, and personal morals. His

332 Oliver 2.

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devotion to the Catholic Church gone by his discharge in 1946, he nevertheless held a hatred for killing and acts of social injustice throughout his life. O’Hara’s resolve about the Vietnam War seems certain. He rues that we are our sending “our precious lace,” as he calls America’s young men, across the sea to have it (them) drowned and destroyed – either by getting killed or having to kill others – “crumpling fistlike in the revolution.” Gooch recounts an evening O’Hara spent with his sister Maureen and her family just weeks before he was killed in 1966:

One of the topics with which he was obsessed was the Vietnam War, that spring

having been marked by demonstrations in seven American cities. Midway

through the meal he popped up from the table and said, “It’s just clear that

President Johnson should stand up before the entire world and apologize and get

this over with!”333

During the Korean Conflict, his mood toward war is also defiant about the American military machine - by this time, committed to being the savior of the world against Communism. In “To the Poem” (1952 or 1953), O’Hara taunts the politico-military establishment, writing: “Let us do something grand / just this once Something / small and important and un-American.”334 He apparently doesn’t consider our involvement in Korea “grand” and suggests what would be

“important” would be a rebellion – something un-American. The next lines suggest he doesn’t believe America’s involvement in Korea is a helping hand, but rather a deliberate foreign policy requiring “a military band” or “an elegant forthcoming” complete with “spotlights.” The final lines, “But be In a defiant land / of its own a real right thing” speak of something “real” and

333 Gooch 454. 334 Collected Poems 175.

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“right” in the same phrase as “a defiant land,” suggesting that America’s military policy is neither real or right, and that Americans should be defying it. Considering the times in which this was written adds a level of depth to his sentiment. “Un-American” as a descriptor is particularly charged in the postwar period – it recalls the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in the late 1940s leading to the Hollywood blacklist over a secret infiltration of

Communists among writers and actors in the movie industry, as well as the homosexual overtones in the Alger Hiss / Whittaker Chambers spying case in 1948. He could also have been thinking of Senator McCarthy’s insistence in 1950 that the federal government had been infiltrated by Communists (known colloquially as the Red Scare), which set off several years of suspicion and paranoia about the loyalty of government employees, and eventually led to

Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, a paranoid witch hunt for homosexual employees of the federal government also known as the Lavender Scare. Those who were “defiant” and “un-

American” in these contexts had their livelihoods and reputations ruined. As a gay man, O’Hara would have been particularly incensed about these events in America, especially after serving in

World War II both honorably and at great personal expense. Poems like this one, however, are about as anarchistic as O’Hara’s work gets. His was not the insurrectionist literature of the Beats; instead, O’Hara had a more cerebral approach to what he viewed as the capriciousness of

American Cold War foreign policy. His intellectual approach perhaps belies the strong anti-war feelings he actually held, particularly as he got older.

In fact, for O’Hara, the horrifying and pernicious effects of war that so strongly shaped his adult character were poem subjects for his entire career. In this section of the earlier long-form

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poem “Biotherm,” written between August, 1961 and January, 1962, O’Hara portrays World

War II as an absurd pop culture event, a fictional film produced and directed by Hollywood:

. . . extended vibrations ziggurats ZIG I to IV stars of the Tigris-Euphrates basin leading ultimates such as Kickapoo joyjuice halvah Canton cheese in thimbles paraded for gain, but yet a parade kiss me, Busby Berkeley, kiss me you have ended the war by simply singing in your Irene Dunne foreskin “Practically Yours” with June Vincent, Lionello Venturi and Casper Citron a Universal-International release produced by G. Mennen Williams directed by Florine Steffheimer continuity by the Third Reich

after “hitting” the beach at Endzoay we drank up the liebfraumilch . .335

In this surrealistic poem, O’Hara points to the ridiculousness of war by conflating it with nationalistic parades produced jointly by the pop culture industry of Hollywood and the Third

Reich. The poem re-imagines the War as a product placement for a L’il Abner–monikered citrus carbonated drink and a middle-Eastern fudge made into wheels like cheese. Related somehow to the War is a Busby-Berkeley-produced parade celebrating the end of the War by singing in “your

Irene Dunne foreskin.” Starring in perhaps a remake of the 1944 film, “Practically Yours,” are actress June Vincent, Italian art historian Lionello Venturi, and Manhattan radio personality

Casper Citron. Produced by handsome Assistant Secretary of State for Kennedy, G. Mennen

Williams, directed by the Jazz Age saloniste Florine Steffheimer, and assisted by the Third Reich who supplied “continuity,” the poem section ends with G.I. arrival on an Italian beach and the

335 Collected Poems 437.

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drinking of German wine. The nature of the poem’s content brings together a number of

disparate personalities and events into one text, and the overall tone of the poem is that war isn’t

serious – it’s a media event with newsmakers and governments playing pre-determined roles. It

is not unlike reactionary Dadaist manifesto writing in the interwar period: tongue-in-cheek, an

expression of the futility and ludicrousness of war.

3.8 Harvard on the G.I. Bill

It is important to note that upon leaving the Navy, O’Hara did what most young soldiers did

– he went to college. His early writing - much of it college assignments, as we have seen, reveals

a great deal about his perceptions of the war and his self-identity. This early writing also includes

an introspective diary that he kept during the school year 1948 -1949, apparently the only diary

he ever kept.336 Early in his undergraduate years, O’Hara changed his major from music to

English literature and, upon graduation in 1950, he moved to Ann Arbor to earn a master’s

degree in English at the University of Michigan in 1951. These five years of college proved to be

an important continuation of his Navy years with regard to his identity discoveries and the study

of his early writings serve as a sort of Bildungsroman or “coming of age” confessional.337

Once in Cambridge, O’Hara found that the anti-homosexual policies of the military had had corrosive influence beyond the Armed Services. Harvard University, the bastion of liberal higher education, had become a place where homosexual men were unwelcome. Bruce Dery,

336 The contents of the diary, along with other Harvard assignments, are published in Early Writing. 337 O’Hara believed that his separation from his family when he enlisted in 1944 signified his transition from a boy to a man.

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homosexual illustrator Edward Gorey’s biographer, writes about the atmosphere that O’Hara and

Gorey, who met as freshmen and became roommates and fast friends, found there:

. . . being a homosexual in 1946, or facing up to the fact that you might be, was

surely just a little bit more serious, as problems go, than being heterosexual.

When Gorey (and O’Hara – both matriculated in the fall of 1946) arrived on

campus, the Harvard Advocate was defunct, closed in the early 40s by outraged

trustees who’d discovered that its editorial board was, for all purposes, a gays

only club. When the magazine resumed publication in 1947, it did so with the

understanding that gays were banned from the board (a prohibition everyone

disregarded but that was nervous-making nonetheless). During Gorey’s Harvard

days, a student caught making out with another young man was expelled. Shortly

after he graduated, in the spring of 1951, two Harvard men who’d engaged in

what O’Hara’s biographer [Gooch] calls “illicit activities” got the axe as well—a

regrettable affair that turned into a “horrible tragedy,” says Gorey’s schoolmate

Freddy English, when one of the young men committed suicide.338

The continued institutional disapproval of homosexuality weighed heavily on O’Hara, who was still grappling with societal censure of his sexual orientation and secrecy about his sexual orientation with his family. Nevertheless, he found two outlets for his emotions at Harvard: his poetry, often with campy homosexual undertones, and his newfound group of offbeat friends. He and Gorey, who had quite an affected personhood, developed a circle of highly intelligent and

338 Dery Literary Hub.

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aesthetically interested (and pretentious) friends, which eventually included poets John Ashbery

and Kenneth Koch and playwright Bunny Lang. Dery writes that “Gorey, O’Hara, and their inner

circle shared an affection for the self-consciously artificial, the over-the-top, and the recherché.

Their ironic, outsider’s-eye view of society often expressed itself in the parodiable, highly

stylized language of camp.”339 This affectation for the camp and silly is often seen in O’Hara’s

poetry – specifically that undergraduate poetry when he strays from his writing about his

experiences in the war. O’Hara, Gorey, and their clique developed together the quiet droll

counterculture expression that O’Hara later refined into his very specific and individualistic

poetic voice. Dery writes, “Gorey and O’Hara and their clique weren’t defiantly nonconformist

(although they were obliquely so) or overtly political (though there was a politics to their

pose).”340 O’Hara became more overtly political in his work as he matured, but even then he writes more with an inner dialogue and wit about political subjects rather than espousing big universal political rhetoric, so much so, in fact, that his political criticism is easy to miss on first reading, and was ignored in all early O’Hara criticism. The friendships O’Hara made as an undergraduate became the basis for the way he created a family-of-choice throughout his life.

These people, all eccentrics in one way or another, all creative, all worshippers of aesthetics, gave O’Hara release to express his true self, both in his writing, but also in his life. In January of

1949, then a junior, he wrote, simply, “I love, I create ...... and I almost am.”341

339 Dery Literary Hub. 340 Dery Literary Hub. 341 Early Writing 110.

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O’Hara’s early writings about what he had seen in the Navy provided him with experiential

subject matter which was unique in his circle, and helped him develop and show off a

cosmopolitan attitude about the world that many other undergraduates didn’t have. He was not

only two years older than some of his peers, but he had seen the world. For example, despite all

the challenges of his service years he wrote about, a college prose assignment also shows O’Hara

was capable of writing quite beautifully about some of the places he saw while in the Navy. This

paragraph is an exposition of his first look at New Guinea:

Where there was, so soft and red, ripe from the every afternoon rain, soil fed on

purple, grey and chartreuse leaves, in the rain washed thickly down rock slopes

muddled in pits of coral, quickly into dusty patches by the sun. Elephant ears all

over tangled in grey roped vines with cerise flowers and plumed scatter-colored

birds chattering flatteringly at monkeys heard at night in xylophone confusion on

the bridge over the slow red-bubbling brook; bats swooped from flopping trees,

knocked coconuts and bumped everything with a squeal of surprise like a mouse’s

as the sky oozed onto the grey bay each night quickly when the sun went out and

the flag went down. Oh how like Key West without Wallace Stevens this near sky

by the surf! There were oh what charming cat’s eyes on the beaches where

everybody hunted swam and got ear fungus.342

This description of New Guinea is essentially a verbal painting of a scene he vividly remembered from the Navy. O’Hara begins here a lifelong habit of frequently including color words in his

342 Early Writing 11.

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writing, a perhaps unconscious peek into how he saw the world around him, and a similar visual aesthetic that attracted him to in his painter friends. He’s also included nonsense phrases that become so common in his mature work, made-up combinations of words that somehow work to clarify rather than confuse. Scattering flocks of birds becomes “scatter-colored birds,” their important characteristic being their sudden coordinated movement as a flock, rather than their color. The incessant noise of the jungle becomes “xylophone confusion,” at once melodic but disorganized and chaotic at the same time. Still, his description is entirely aesthetic: sights, sounds, and colors woven together to form an image, a snapshot. Characteristically, he ends with humor – the scene reminds him of his tour of duty in Key West – still missing Wallace Stevens, who was at the height of his career as a poet during this time and vacationed regularly from his insurance job in Key West. Finally, despite all the beauty, a touch of reality – all the sailors got ear fungus. O’Hara’s wicked sense of the ridiculous and the slightly offensive serves to balance the beauty he’s described. No need for sentimentality in this memory, he seems to write.

To cement my claim about his poetic and descriptive ability to use military service memories to set his creative content apart from his fellow undergraduates, one final poem; this one from his year at Michigan earning his masters.

The stars are tighter in New Hampshire though they are deeper in New Guinea. At Key West property is a pair of earrings; you hang your wash out over a cloud.

And at Race Point purple, indigo, green and magenta

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flash knives on waves;

or like Long Beach there’s a ferris wheel to pump the sunset dry. Alcohol! Oh

when I was in the Philippines the mud was yellow as a cocktail

and in the sweet rain the sky was a thumb! Now you see how the sky can be everywhere,

even where we go: I aboard the Jeroboam, you in a white regatta, all bearings are possible.343

This work, entitled simply “Poem,” was included in O’Hara’s master’s thesis. It is a summing up of his life to that point in its locations: New Hampshire and Race Point Beach on Cape Cod from his childhood and New Guinea, Key West, Long Beach, and the Philippines from his two years in the Navy. The color words are in this poem too, as are the nonsensical descriptions: tight stars, hang your wash out over a cloud, a ferris wheel to pump the sunset dry, the sky was a thumb.

There is a musical quality to the verse, despite it being non-metrical. The poem reads as if the author is speaking to someone – perhaps someone he’s leaving behind as he begins a new adventure in New York? He reminds his colleague that “the sky can be everywhere” – even, he writes, where they are going, perhaps attempting to soften his upcoming journey – no matter

343 Collected Poems 43 – 44.

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where they are, they share the same sky. A literary reference helps make his point – he’s sailing on “the Jeroboam” – the ship in Melville’s Moby Dick in which the character Gabriel sails and preaches that to “hunt” the great whale is to wrestle with God Himself. This is the boat on which

O’Hara sees himself sailing, while the person to whom he speaks is in a white regatta, but his final thought is that they might meet again as “all bearings are possible.”

3.9 O’Hara’s Move to New York

When O’Hara moved to New York in August of 1951 to join friends that he had previously made in college, it appears that not only was his homosexual identity already in place, but his unique and individual mature poetic style was developing as well.344 He writes a great deal in these early years about his war experiences and his feelings about America and the Cold War.

However, his interest in American politics and current events is on display long after these early years and his attitudes about these subjects seem unchanged throughout his life. O’Hara’s early poems are also full of homosexual imagery, perhaps as an outpouring of pent-up need for legitimate self-expression from his service years, where this kind of forbidden expression would have had severe and long-lasting life consequences. While these homosexual references and a queer point-of-view continue, as one might expect, throughout his career, frequent references to the war, America, and politics continue as well. The societal pressures against homosexuals were intense and unavoidable during the early years of O’Hara’s life, during the time he was forming

344 Among these friends were John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, who had already moved to New York before 1951. The New York School of Poetry is comprised of poets who lived and worked together in postwar New York City but did not work in a similar style or genre. The School is usually comprised of O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and sometimes Barbara Guest. Ward specifically parses out Frank O’Hara’s The Collected Poems as a “growing and single work” that “document[s] with unparalleled colour and detail the artist milieu of postwar New York” (page 3).

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his identity. It is not surprising to find that his poetic often conflates America with this disdain for his sexual orientation, or that he stays politically aware and critical his entire life, and that this awareness can be found throughout his life in his poetry. While it seems likely that O’Hara had had sexual contact with a boy before enlisting, it’s unclear from his writing whether O’Hara considered himself a homosexual before entering the service. However, one of his earliest surviving poems from his first semester in college, just months after discharge, reveals a coyly homosexual theme. In “Hellschaft,” O’Hara uses the metaphor of, the Roman god of duality, who is usually depicted with two faces as embodying a binary – of both future and past – or, in

O’Hara’s poem, the duality of the homosexual gaze between two men:

Really, said the red-faced axe-layer you have such lovely hair. Janus, said the red-faced axe-layer your skin is so fair.

Really, said the red-faced axe-layer you have flanks like a mare. Janus, said the red-faced axe-layer even clothed you look so bare.

Really, said the red-faced axe-layer I just can’t help but care. Janus, said the red-faced axe-layer we’d make a handsome pair.

Really, said the red-faced axe-layer I desire you in my lair. Janus, said the red-faced axe-layer I’m jealous of the very air.

Really, said the red-faced axe-layer a love like mine is rare. Janus, said the red-faced axe-layer let me; do you dare?

Really, said Janus, nibbling his ear

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I’m not even here!345

This early poem is interesting both for its form and its content. O’Hara experiments with form

throughout his career, but it’s unusual for him to write in rhyme and with a regular meter - five

quatrains in AbAb rhyme scheme, followed by a couplet of cc. The poem represents a dialog

between two voices; both are identified as “the red-faced axe-layer,” and one of them is called

Janus by the other. Despite “Janus” sounding like “Janice,” a female name, the name “Janus”

refers to a male Greek god who exhibits duality – similar to a homosexual man who celebrates

both male and female characteristics in his romantic affairs, or perhaps describing a man who has

sex with men relationship.346 The two exchange flirty complements, including “you have the flanks of a mare (the female of the species),” a rare coded reference to provide deniability if needed. The poem makes little sense unless it is two men flirting with one another, the one trying to bed the other while revealing his lightly lascivious desires. However, at this early point in his undergraduate career, it seems O’Hara is not yet quite ready to forgo the coded homosexual writing styles he’s read – Whitman, Crane, Auden – for a more direct description, but it won’t be long and he is writing much more accurately and sometimes vulgarly about homosexual desires and sex acts. While the poem portrays homosexual desire, it is also interesting to note that the objects of the gazes are hypermasculine “red-faced axe-layer” characters. The reader pictures a soldier-type “man’s man” flirting with the character Janus, who, while nibbling the soldier’s ear,

345 Early Writing 9. 346 “Janus” has also always been used as a code word among homosexuals to identify oneself as a member of the homosexual family. An early Philadelphia homosexual group, established in 1962, called themselves the Janus Society.

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declares his invisibility. Certainly, O’Hara had experience in the Navy with this cumbersome

duality, and with the concept of invisibility for survival, and here he describes the coded dance.

Ironically, despite all the negative and prejudicial policies the military inflicted on

homosexual men, there is little doubt that World War II “created” the modern homosexual.

Berube simply states, “The massive mobilization for WWII propelled gay men and lesbians into

the mainstream of American life.”347 Prior to WWII, homosexual men were much more isolated

from one another and “kept ignorant by a conspiracy of silence.”348 Berube is broadly overstating the facts when he says homosexuals experienced the “mainstream of American life” in the 1950s

(or even for many decades later), however, he is correct that the homosocial environment of the service introduced a generation of homosexual men to one another. Rather than returning home after discharge, many of these men moved together to urban locations to form semi-secret communities, in the same way other marginalized people, like immigrants, had done for generations. Frank O’Hara was one of those men; his history in the service and, later, as a curator at MoMA might be all but forgotten, if not for the fact that he was also a prolific autobiographical poet for the twenty years he lived after his Navy discharge.

Critics have often focused on O’Hara’s urban flaneur lifestyle and his accompanying poetry with particular attention to the occasional nature of the poems: commemorating parties, birthdays, bon voyages; the coterie element and his sometimes exasperating use of first names and obtuse literary or music references as if all his readers lived within his personal aesthetic affectation; and on his flaneur-like documentation of his everyday life as a vanguard of style in

347 Berube 255. 348 Berube 255.

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New York City. Almost no attention has been paid, however, to the pre-flaneur O’Hara, specifically around the question of how he came to possess such an individualistic persona that so easily attracted people into family-like friendships. In this chapter I have shown that young

Frank O’Hara, before he was the Frank O’Hara, struggled as an eighteen-year-old homosexual boy serving in the Navy during World War II, followed by a “coming out” process during his college years. His early writing – immature, uneven, and experimental – is far from the quality of the poet he became, but is valuable nonetheless. Fortunately for us, as a freshman, he switched his major from music to English, as that switch required all the writing assignments that still exist. His coming of age experience included the added, even more difficult, experience of accepting and living his sexual orientation, and, in his case, he negotiated both events in writing.

O’Hara’s Navy experience had such a profound effect on him that he wrote about it throughout his two-decade career. It deeply affected his views on America, foreign policy, and Cold War social pressures, and galvanized him to eschew the “official” mid-century monolithic masculine experience. In fact, one might correctly say he defied the established narratives in his poetry, that he wore his outsider status like a garment on which he had spent a fortune, as he gathered around himself fellow outsiders from the worlds of arts, letters, music, and dance. These individuals, from the most well-known painters of the day to the most obscure gay men and lesbians he picked up along the way, became a family substitute and the subject of poems for him.

It is illuminating to understand the military and social culture in which O’Hara negotiated adulthood and came to terms with his life. The study of these early years makes one wonder - what if he hadn’t enlisted in the Navy? What if he hadn’t met a cadre of gay men when he matriculated in college? What if he had continued to study music instead of literature? What if he

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had chosen to seriously pursue publishing, and therefore censured his writing for proper public consumption? Finally, what if O’Hara had chosen a totally different aesthetic, writing about the human condition, the pursuit of truth, or romantic pastoral lyric poetry? Even though O’Hara’s life was cut so short, it’s difficult to imagine mid-century New York or the Abstract

Expressionist painters without thinking of him. Further, the significance of Frank O’Hara’s poetry continues to be revealed over five decades after his death. In addition to his writing and his contemporaneous influence on his peers – John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch,

Barbara Jones, and Amiri Baraka - O’Hara personally schooled a second generation of New

York School poets who looked up to him, among them Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, and Joe Brainard. O’Hara’s written word also influenced the first-generation Abstract

Expressionist artists with whom he was friends, while he served as muse and confidant particularly for second generation Abstract Expressionists like Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, and Joan Mitchell. His influence on painters extends to figurative painters Larry Rivers and

Alfred Leslie, with whom he collaborated on written word and image works, films, and other projects. In the past decade, he has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, with reprints of his books of poetry, new scholarship in academia and the popular press, and a resurgence of readings, pop culture attention, and gossip. As a junior, his diary entry for October 29, 1948 reads, “On the other hand I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty.”349 And he seems to have accomplished just that.

349 Early Writing 105.

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CHAPTER 4

COLD WAR POETRY: THE COMPLEXITIES OF RUSSIA, RACE, AND GENDER

In this chapter, I examine the poetry of Frank O’Hara through the lens of his political poetry

– specifically poetry that takes Russian aesthetics and politics, race, and gender as its subject

matter. Frank O’Hara was, inescapably, a political poet who wrote poems which subverted Cold

War institutions of domination and power in various non-metric, non-rhyming, even non-

stanzaic forms; poems that were located in a particular place and time – New York City in the

mid-century. What I mean by “political poet” is that throughout his career, O’Hara poetically

criticized the state and other institutional powers that held domination in mid-century America;

in addition, he passionately opposed the rhetorical concept of a monolithic “American way of

life.” “It’s a strange curse my ‘generation’ has / we’re all . . . perpetually ardent,” he once

wrote.350 It is this combative political enterprise in O’Hara’s poetry that interests me in this chapter. O’Hara’s political poetry, which the reader should remember was not written for publication or any sort of public commentary on his opinion about the world, therefore lacks a programmatic set of political goals on purpose. The America O’Hara inhabited had no political champions for homosexuals – both major American political parties contributed equally to the country’s disgust and fear about sexual orientation. Therefore, when I label the poems political,

I am more interested in their response to, or comment on, existing power structures than to any particular ideology. In fact, rather than provoking a particular political ideology, they are reactive, their meaning seems elusive, and deliberately so—they appear to be resistant to the

350 Selected Poems 207.

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attempt to find in them a programmatic set of political goals of any kind. In addition, I examine

O’Hara’s poetry working against a monolithic American experience that includes a handful of poems with racial subjects, and many political poems about gender – specifically about the homosexual man.

In addition to his most well-known poetic form, the “I-do-this-I-do-that” poem, O’Hara was a keen political observer who wrote many poems containing references to America,

Communism, war, and politics. I argue in this chapter that O’Hara’s poetry - particularly that of his best and most prolific period, from the mid-1950s to 1961 – often works directly against the dominant ideology of the period: that of the politically conservative and conformist early Cold

War. In fact, not only does O’Hara’s poetry perform an ideological response to the period, but it should be considered a part of the first post-race, post-gender literature in America. What I mean by this is that O’Hara’s prolific writing engages both race and gender in complicated ways that both reflect and at the same time confront the prevailing cultural attitudes on each.

There is, indeed, a passion in O’Hara’s writing that takes social expectations to task; he constantly works to subvert societal pressures, of which there were many in the early Cold War period. O’Hara, a lifelong Russophile, particularly abhorred the American binary rhetoric against the Soviet Union, a culture that had contributed greatly to some of his most admired aesthetic interests. I have claimed in the previous chapter that the genesis of O’Hara’s interest in these subjects began as a young Navy sailor required to hide his sexuality or face imprisonment because of Armed Services policies. As he grew to accept his sexual orientation, however, he also discovered methods with which to resist domination by the institutions that sought to oppress him, as an American, as a man, and, particularly, as a homosexual. The methods of

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intervention he successfully utilized included writing poetry; the reparative freedom of identity

he gained from writing poetry about his everyday urban life is what interests me in this chapter

and the next. The dominating power-bearing institutions O’Hara criticized in his poetry included

the federal government, the traditional publishing and distribution network, and the strongly

conservative societal expectations of the mid-century. Additionally, his poetry from this period

makes clear that he understood that both gender and race were being used by America as

political pawns. In this chapter, I work to interweave the story of the anti-Communist, anti-

Russian political climate in which O’Hara lived with how his poetic output both resisted political

domination and exposed it; in effect, permitting him to live the life he’d chosen. In the next

chapter, I focus more specifically on the so-called Crisis of Masculinity that so alarmed post-war

America, a crisis that was intricately linked with fears about homosexuality.

4.1 America’s Cold War Strategy

A particularly important Cold War strategy for the United States was the government’s desire

to present the picture of a monolithic and uniform democratic freedom to the rest of the world.

Historian Richard H. Pells notes in his book, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American

Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, that “[Most intellectuals in the early Cold War] presumed

that there was such a thing as the ‘American mind’ or the ‘American character.’” 351 He then effectively dispels the idea that a monolithic American mind ever actually existed – Pells’ view is that the idea was government propaganda. From the government’s point of view, the superiority of the doctrines and fruits of capitalism and democracy were at stake, thus the

351 Pells xv, xvi.

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criticality of the rhetoric. At the same time, America was embarrassed by her citizens who lived

outside that fantasy monolithic experience, people including political critics and pro-

Communists, but also homosexuals, blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities, the poor,

mentally ill, and so on. Russia particularly liked to counter democratic propaganda with

America’s shameful and indefensible record on race relations, and this is an intersecting point for

the subjects of this chapter.

Andrew Falk’s book, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy,

1940-1960, is about the history of American culture industry dissent during this period – the

culture industry that was the heir to shaping American public opinion, having snatched that role

away from intellectuals after the war. Falk reiterates that America’s foreign policy depended on

the world’s perception of America - a projection of strength, decisiveness, and power. Global

impressions of weakness in any arena had to be avoided, both to keep active the claim that

America was the world superpower and to defend the democratic state against Communism. As

such, Falk writes, in every area, but especially culture, America sought to export cultural

programs that held high the ideals of independence, individualism, social equality, civil rights, a

free market, and deep tolerance for diverse opinions and points of view.352 This portrait of

America was, according to O’Hara’s poetry, a sham.

Despite contemporary depictions of the decade of the 1950s as one of stability, prosperity, modernity, and contentment, cultural historians and essayists characterize the decade of the

1950s in harsher terms. Outspoken novelist and essayist Norman Mailer wrote that the 1950s as

352 Falk 149.

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“one of the worst decades in the history of man.”353 Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, writing with a bit more nuance than Mailer, explained that despite the decade being one of abundance, mid- century America was “turbulent.”354 In his essay, “The End of Ideology in the West,” Bell

disagrees with the generally held (or at least projected) idea that the American experience in the

1950s and 1960s was a homogenous one for all Americans. He claims, for example, that

Americans were often not in step with the concerns of the state. When writing about Americans’

absence of appetite for Cold War ideology, in fact, Bell maintains that America in the 1950s so

lacked passion about the Cold War that the ideological shortfall became increasingly problematic

for the American government – thus the title of his essay.355

Historian Stephen Whitfield argues that Cold War American society was so militarized by

the governmental power structure that “citizens were expected to enlist in the Cold War.”356

O’Hara expressed a similar perception in a 1952 poem entitled “Red:” “throughout the world of

Free Men / a supple voice is ringing ‘Join.’”357 Note his ironic use of the moniker “Free Men”

being obliged to “Join.” O’Hara knew from his Navy years that, for him, freedom as a

homosexual man, did not come from affiliating with the American government – in fact, just the

opposite was true. As a homosexual, he engaged in private acts the government had criminalized,

and many homosexuals during O’Hara’s lifetime were harassed by the government, arrested, lost

their jobs, and forced to live in secrecy.

353 Miller 6. 354 Bell lxxviii. 355 Jumonville 195. 356 Whitfield 10. 357 Poems Retrieved 73.

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While the American government endeavored to portray democracy and the American

experience as clearly superior to Communism, American citizens, including O’Hara and his

community, grew more and more weary of wars and the threats of war. Nevertheless, the

government worked to convince Americans themselves that their form of government was

superior to Communism: their lives were better and safer, and they were more affluent and had

more opportunities and freedoms than anyone else in the world, and that this freedom and

affluence was worth protecting by going to war, if necessary. This hyper-patriotic post-war

governmental doctrine, borne in the immediate post-war years, continued throughout the

Eisenhower administration, as the American policy of containment against Communism

depended on convincing Americans that preventing Communism from taking over the world was

the same as saving the affluent American way of life. However, Falk posits that while Cold

Warriors furiously tried to construct this uniform and sanitized national identity, featuring a rigid

demarcation between the U.S. and Soviets, they ultimately failed to do so – both at home and

globally. He insists that persistent American domestic dissent promoted an alternative vision that

was subsequently exported overseas and ultimately prevailed on the world stage.358 Saunders

quotes President Eisenhower speaking at a press conference, “We are trying to get the world, by

peaceful means, to believe the truth. The truth is that Americans want a world at peace, a world

in which all people shall have the opportunity for maximum individual development.”359 The

“maximum individual development” Ike offers here, according to Cold Warriors, could only occur in a liberal democracy like America, according to the government. Meanwhile, America

358 Falk 214. 359 Saunders 148.

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hoped that the rest of the world would ignore her substantial and embarrassing Achilles’ heel of equality and civil rights for black Americans, the stain of slavery, and high incidence of poverty and social inequity that American democracy had yet to address.

O’Hara refused to take the Cold War binary politics that America was selling very seriously.

“A blush, as at a secret enthusiasm, will spread / over the world, the Red World and the White

World,” he wrote in 1953.360 In this passage, O’Hara cleverly uses the common color monikers for the United States and Russia while suggesting there is a third possibility besides the

Communist and democratic poles – the mixing of the Red and White – a “blush” world, and, he writes, there is a “secret enthusiasm” for this third, non-polarized world. Had he called the mixture “pink” or “lavender” instead of blush, all the dominant Cold War colors would have been present in just two poetic lines. Clearly, he had an enthusiasm for a world not seen as so binary.

4.2 Poetry Subverting Mid-Century Politics

O’Hara had developed very strongly held and personally negative feelings about war and

America’s foreign policy while serving in the Navy, and repeatedly refused to buckle under the fears about Communism that America was embroiled in. Into this lacuna of passion about democracy poured many dissident artists whose work exposed their perceptions of the realities of the American experience. Among these writers were the Beats (including Kerouac, Corso, and

Ginsberg), Mailer, Miller, Vidal, Salinger, Ellison, Bradbury, Baldwin, and more – all of whose work, in one way or another, criticized America’s contemporary direction. I argue in this

360 Collected Poems 132.

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dissertation that Frank O’Hara’s poetry belongs to this list of subversive authors, albeit with his

unique twist. O’Hara brings two startlingly new elements to his quiet subversion: his use of the

de Certeau-defined everyday elements of life to highlight his autobiographical reaction to the

social pressures of the times, and his understanding that his very identity as a homosexual man

was an affront to America in the 1950s and 1960s. O’Hara was keenly aware that war was

iconoclastic – a killer of both people and of culture. However, where Ginsberg wrote such lines

as, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb,” O’Hara’s version of the same message in his poem

in Chapter 3 was less belligerent, but no less pointed and angry.

Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara were, in fact, contemporaries and friends, despite the

differences in their poetic styles. It is not uncommon for O’Hara’s counter-narrative on America

and Ginsberg’s to be similar in message, although they often differ entirely in tone. Rather than

cursing the United States for dropping the bomb, O’Hara suggests repentance:

didn't you know we was all going to be Zen Buddhists after what we did you sure don't know much about war-guilt or nothin and the peach trees continued to rejoice around the prick which was for once authorized by our Congress though inactive what if it had turned out to be a volcano 361

I wrote about O’Hara’s significant and frequent inquiries into war-guilt in the previous chapter.

His reaction to America’s mass killing seems unusual for him – it’s almost religious in tone, despite the fact that he had by this time completely separated himself from the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, as he thinks about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he writes that becoming Buddhists

361 Selected Poems 206.

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might be the most logical reaction. Nevertheless, he quickly returns to his insolent self as he writes about an unnamed American Congressional “prick.”

A great deal of O’Hara’s poetry worked to resist American pro-democracy rhetoric and counter corrosive Cold War expectations and paranoias. One of the ways in which O’Hara does this is to use his love of Russian aesthetics – specifically, ballet, classical music, and Russian modernist poetry – to goad American rhetorical hatred of Russia as the evil enemy of freedom.

The fact that this strain of O’Hara’s poetry works so effectively to do just that relies heavily on his biographical love of the Russian aesthetic. So, when he praises Russia, he does it genuinely and from an aesthetic interest, but the praise also curiously works to also put down American hyper-patriotism.

O’Hara and his poet friends absolutely refused to participate in American claims they considered propaganda. Epstein makes this very point when he writes about an artistic statement penned by O’Hara friend and poet LeRoi Jones, who, in 1965 changed his name to Amiri

Baraka:

Baraka’s uneasiness with direct or didactic preachiness in an artistic statement . . .

reveals the proximity of Baraka to O’Hara and Ashbery’s ideas about reducing

art’s richness by saddling it with partisan politics and ideological commitment. He

claims that ambiguity, elusiveness, honest expression of personal emotion and

struggle, and the rejection of convention in the name of exploratory searching--

qualities germane to his own work of the 1950s and 1960s—are more important

acts of subversion and nonconformity than any propaganda can ever be.

Trumpeting your political commitments, no matter how sincere, justified, or

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enraged you are, is ultimately much less important than the sheer individuality

and virtuosity of your performance as musician or poet.”362

This is an important point I want my dissertation to make clear – in O’Hara’s case, his subversion and non-conformity vis-a-vis American ideals was not in the service of a political agenda he was following; instead, his everyday subversion was an expression of the combined and singular life and aesthetic sense he lived every day. As Epstein points out Baraka believed, this individuality and virtuosity is a better way to express an American masculine experience than having a political agenda. O’Hara’s believable expression of sincerity of purpose works to support de Certeau’s discussions of the habitable life as having ascendency over domination.

O’Hara and his friends were working to create de Certeau’s habitable life in their community of artists in New York.

4.3 O’Hara the Russophile

As a lover of Russian culture, aesthetics, and art forms, O’Hara was a political outlier due to the fact that he lived in the era in which America demonized every aspect and reference to the

Soviet Union. Adjectives such as “dark,” “enemy,” “evil,” “Communist,” “threat,” “aggressor,”

“Cold War,” “totalitarian,” and even “heathen,” were among the many negative references commonly used by Americans to describe their singular greatest enemy, the Soviet Union. Part of O’Hara’s interest in Russia, beyond his repulsion to America propaganda, also had to do with his personal belief that aesthetics as a cultural pursuit and goal should trump everything else. An

362 Beautiful Enemies 174.

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interest from a young age of Russian composers, art, ballet, and literature endowed her, aesthetically, with a special place in O’Hara’s life.

What little scholarship that exists on this subject of O’Hara’s Russophilia generally associates his interest as purely a literary one: O’Hara had a particular love for two authors,

Vladimir Mayakovsky, a WWI-era Russian poet, and Boris Pasternak, an older Russian poet and novelist who had a huge, late, international spike in his career with the publication of Doctor

Zhivago in 1958, just two years before his death at age 70. O’Hara wrote many poems over his lifetime in conversation with these authors, or in their admiration. Shaw writes about O’Hara’s literary interest:

Since his time at Harvard in the late 1940s, O’Hara had been intensely interested

in Pasternak and Mayakovsky. Consider his April 8, 1957, letter to Larry Rivers:

“I have a new book of Russian poetry from 1917 to 1955 !!! yes, great new

translations (well, the poems are or seem to be) of Pasternak and Mayakovsky.”

But even by the early 1950s, the proper name of each had . . . made a theatrical

entrance into O’Hara’s poetry. As with most names in O’Hara’s writing, these

proper names were charged with complex and multiple functions. The apostrophe

to Pasternak in “Memorial Day,” for instance, imagines a temporary link across

the Cold War. As such, it presents the problems of audience and community that I

have considered thus far in a very different way . . . “Memorial Day” was written

the year after NATO had come into being and just months after China, fresh from

ousting Chiang Kai-shek, had signed a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet

Union. Including Pasternak with a battery of implicitly influential Modernists

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(Picasso, Ernst, Klee, Apollinaire, Auden, Rimbaud, and Stein), the poem - like

many to follow that would expand this dialog with Pasternak and create one with

Mayakovsky as well - incorporates Russian modernism within O’Hara’s field of

precedents at a time when such an association was politically risky.363

Ever aware of global politics, O’Hara is often prompted to write a poem based upon or inspired

by headlines. In “Memorial Day,” O’Hara includes Pasternak and Rimbaud in a canonical list of

modernists based solely on his interest in them. As for the political risk Shaw mentions, O’Hara

had no interest in whether he was being provocative or not. Shaw goes on to say that, “Critics

have understood O’Hara’s interest in Russian literature and music alternatively as sites for

romantic identifications or as tonal fields from which O’Hara’s poetry borrows.” 364 Russian literature translator Paul Schmidt wrote:

O’Hara’s Russia was “a Russia full of snow and tears” and Mayakovsky makes

the Russian a point of reference for O’Hara’s “rapid transitions from lyricism to

buffoonery.” Though such transitions exist in O’Hara, and through he did write

seven poems titled “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,” O’Hara’s dedicating “Second

Avenue,” his longest, most complicated poem, to “Vladimir Mayakovsky” (whose

work at the time was largely unavailable to American audiences because of his

status as the national poet of Soviet Communism) in 1953 seems a slightly more

charged, even combative enterprise than these accounts would suggest.365

363 Shaw 116, 117. 364 Shaw 117. 365 Schmidt, quoted in Shaw 117.

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Andrea Brady also works to make O’Hara’s Russophilia a purely literary connection when she writes in her essay on O’Hara’s longform poem, “Second Avenue,” that, “A few critics have aligned this poem (“Second Avenue”) with O’Hara’s French and Russian predilections, with the influence of Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, or they have compared it to Cubist, Abstract

Expressionist or action painting.”366 I agree with Schmidt that these references were both legitimate literary interests for O’Hara and also what Schmidt calls “combative enterprises.”

While I also concur with Shaw’s measured statements, and believe that Schmidt’s claim about a

Russian romanticism has truth, I also believe that O’Hara’s repetitive and pugnacious Russian references (what Brady calls his “predilections”) are often directly tied to his disgust with

America vis-a-vis the American propaganda about a binary Cold War, and are therefore also poetic jabs at American war rhetoric. Brady’s attempt to lump together numerous modernist aesthetics as “influences,” however, doesn’t ring true to me. O’Hara’s aesthetic tastes were very specific and well defined by this time, and he writes about influences from time to time. His named influences are very specific, and not necessarily related to earlier modernist movements.

O’Hara mentions often that his poetic ancestry includes Whitman, Crane, Carlos Williams, and

Auden, but doesn’t write about a familial relationship to previous Dadaists or Surrealists as influences. The critics who have mentioned these dubious connections in O’Hara’s work have supported their opinions with, as Brady notes, the idea that what O’Hara invented poetically, “is contending with specific challenges to modernism in poetry, inspired in part by the confrontation between representation and abstraction with the Russian Futurist staged with such passion and

366 Brady, in Hampson 60.

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violence.” 367 O’Hara’s interest in abstraction in poetry seems, to me, more likely to have come

from his association with abstract painters and a desire to experiment with abstraction because of

them.

O’Hara’s Russophilia apparently started completely innocently in his early childhood as an

interest in classical music, but by the time he was a veteran living in the Cold War, he also used

this politically unpopular interest in Russia to challenge American political rhetoric. I read

O’Hara’s Russian literature connection primarily as a Cold War criticism of America, buoyed

additionally by O’Hara’s elitist cosmopolitanism and his desire to show off his international

command of modern literature, which he does as often with French poets as he does with

Russian. Frank O’Hara’s everyday poetry, however, wasn’t written with an activist’s purpose of

calling a large audience’s attention to social issues, nor did he hope to challenge the government

on any kind of a national stage.368 His expression in poetry was just as outspoken and combative

as more revolutionary poets, but somehow smaller, more personal – during the time the poetry

was written, at least.369

Some scholars who write about the Russophilia in O’Hara’s poetry work to suggest that writing about Russia is a way to expand his aesthetic community. Shaw’s attempt to connect

O’Hara’s intimate coterie with Russian modernism from the early 20th century requires, as he

notes, “The imagined space of coterie now becomes international.”370 This jump requires a dissolving of the general thrust of O’Hara’s interests – community, immediacy, in the moment,

367 Brady, in Hampson 61. 368 O’Hara’s expressions about social issues had no public audience during his lifetime except by the friends he shared them with. 369 O’Hara never wrote anarchist or revolutionary poems like some of the Beat poets, but they were contradicting the same political topics nonetheless. O’Hara, at least early in his career, viewed his community as his audience. 370 Shaw 120.

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first-name-laden, here-and-now – and therefore seems to me to be something else. It is not unusual to find critics who repeat these connections, but I don’t believe O’Hara had his sights set on an international community or audience at any point in his career – the specificity of his community existing in New York was one of the aspects of it he cherished.

This poem, superficially about friends at dinner, actually works to focus readers’ attention to bigger concerns of the decade – a technique O’Hara uses frequently in his poetry. It is this method of slipping politics into a simple conversation that both makes O’Hara count as a political poet, but also makes his political references somewhat opaque on first readings:

and we are smiling in our confused way, darkly in the back alcove of the Five Spot, devouring chicken-in-the-basket and arguing, the four of us, about loyalty wonderful stimulation of bitterness to be young and to grow bigger more and more cells, like germs or a political conspiracy371

O’Hara writes about he and his friends having a meal of tavern food at the Five Spot, a jazz bar in the Bowery where his friends often gathered, and they are arguing about – catch this - loyalty.

He writes that they are smiling, but in a “confused way.” The 1950s itself was a decade of political confusion, so this comes as no surprise. However, the fact that they are smiling in the face of confusion indicates that, at least while they are together, they have risen above the world’s confusion of the decade to be happy in one another’s company, unconcerned particularly about governmental paranoias about spying and traitors. This description is entirely in line with

371 Collected Poems 296.

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O’Hara’s belief that value in his life can be found only in a community of artists. In these nine lines, O’Hara cleverly pairs the topics of “loyalty” and “political conspiracy” – both heavy on the minds of paranoid Americans throughout the decade. The word loyalty in the context of the mid- century raises thoughts of McCarthyism, federal employment oaths, governmental fear- mongering, and political smear campaigns often involving accusations of Communism, homosexuality, or both. “Political conspiracy” could easily refer to any number of Congressional hearing topics about Communist or homosexual spies working in the government. In just a few lines, O’Hara has both mentioned a casual gathering of friends, and given us a taste of the concerns of the decade he was writing in and what kind of intellectual bar conversations he and his friends enjoyed. “We are smiling” indicates that they have successfully resisted – at least for that evening – the ubiquitous political pressures that often occupied them, and that they had no paranoid fears about one another. This is an example of the casual-reading method O’Hara often uses to politicize poems about everyday topics. The thread of subversion is so camouflaged by random snippets of daily life that it is almost hidden. What O’Hara achieves with this methodology is to conventionalize his often-resistant political opinions because he’s inserted them in a perfectly benign setting.

Throughout the Cold War, which, indeed, lasted for the rest of his life, O’Hara also persisted in his childhood interest in Russian culture, actively refusing to see Russia as the evil empire as painted by the United States. O’Hara clearly saw the hypocrisies of the state and the ironies of many of America’s foreign policies, but mostly ignored them in regard to his interest and romanticism of Russian. His views on diversity, family, work, art, and culture matured fully during the 1950s, when, more than just becoming a consumer of culture, he became an important

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producer of it as well. Ironically, though, his culture production initially came not through his

poetry as much as through his work in visual art, as an arts writer and exhibition curator. 372 This is partially because his poems were not widely known until some years after his death. Rather than cower with regard to the malignant cultural view of homosexuals, instead, O’Hara thrived in the community of peers with whom he surrounded himself – the New York aesthetic community at large: dancers, theater people, painters and sculptors, other poets, and writers. These were the types of people the government was suspicious of, subpoenaed to Congressional hearings, and, in some cases, even blacklisted. O’Hara’s family-of-choice, his aesthetic community, consisted largely of these “enemies of the state.” It is important to note here that life of Frank O’Hara was entangled in these various societal concerns in complex ways. He was a veteran of World War II, he was an open homosexual, he was a Russophile – loving Russian composers, ballet, poets, and authors. He was, additionally, often sympathetic to the Other represented by many marginalized people in his poetry.

O’Hara was deeply involved in the issues of his times and the subjects of his poems express that. O’Hara put no value on the “warrior male” concept, having served in the Navy and decided that America’s foreign policy was both too aggressive and too personally patronizing for him. In one poem, he wrote, “where is sunny England / and those fields where they still-birth the wars,” apparently in the belief that contrary to the United States, England had a more sensible ambition to actually prevent wars, or perhaps recalling war poetry from the first World War. 373

372 O’Hara’s poetry was not well known, among a large audience at least, until years after his death with the publishing of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. However, his work writing for ArtNews, and especially his exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art had a global audience. 373 Selected Poems 206.

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4.4 The Museum of Modern Art and America’s “Cultural Warfare”

In addition to O’Hara’s social conscience, which he often expressed in his poetry, he was also a curator of the Abstract Expressionist International Exhibition Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a quasi-governmental global exhibition program in service to the

American foreign policy of “cultural warfare.” As a plank in the larger containment policy of the

Truman Doctrine, and continuing throughout the Eisenhower White House years, cultural warfare was a decisive American propaganda program, the idea of which was that American arts and culture would be utilized to convince the world that democracy was the superior political system over Communism.

Of the many reasons the Russophile aspect of O’Hara’s aesthetic life is especially interesting, the two most compelling are these: because of the times conservative anti-Russia times in which he lived, which made his love of Russia at the least, suspect, and at the greatest, traitorous; and uniquely for O’Hara, his Russophilia can be read as problematic because it seems to run counter to the true nature of the anti-Communist art exhibitions he curated, wrote for, and installed globally for over 10 years for MoMA. The International Programs Department at MoMA was, in fact, a thinly veiled CIA-funded, governmental program with the intention of winning the world over to the vicissitudes of democracy and “freedom” – an important strategy in the

Eisenhower administration’s “cultural warfare” policy. This paradox seems not to have affected

O’Hara’s commitment to his criticism of America or his love of Russian culture, nor did it affect the quality of the work he did for MoMA, but the strange juxtaposition of the two career goals - one working to praise Russian aesthetics, the other working to lift up American democracy, both through art - strikes me as somewhat contrary and unusual. Watkin historicizes O’Hara’s

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curatorship by noting that by the time O’Hara came on the MoMA scene, Abstract

Expressionism was already past its prime. He writes that, “Both [Serge] Guilbaut and Dore

Ashton note that 1948 was the key year of success for Abstract Expressionism, and so the milieu into which O’Hara enthusiastically plunged was one tinged with the post-avant-garde nostalgia for a status that the neo-avant-garde had already lost to the all-consuming discourse of a nascent late capitalism.” 374 Watkin writes this in service to the idea that by the time O’Hara came to

MoMA in 1955, a major part of his role was to cultivate interest in a style of art that had already passed its peak. Watkin adds:

In the documentation held in the [O’Hara] archive [at MoMA] it can be seen just

how much O’Hara not only contributed to the international reputation of

American Abstract expressionism with his work on The New American Painting

tour and the Pollock retrospective (both 1958), but also how he helped shape

conceptions of Abstract Expressionism’s breadth through the wide variety of

artists he included (fifteen in total) and of Pollock’s development through his

interest in early Pollock as well as the later, more successful, canvases.375

In other words, O’Hara was up to the task of promoting a style of art that was already waning when he came on the scene. It’s important to note how close O’Hara was personally to all these artists – both the ones who were his contemporaries, but especially to an older generation that included Pollock and de Kooning. Joe LeSueur, O’Hara’s lifelong friend and 10-year roommate,

374 Watkin 129, emphasis mine. O’Hara began curating exhibitions for MoMA in 1955, fully 7 years after Watkin’s “key year of success for Abstract Expressionism.” 375 Watkin 282.

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oversimplifies O’Hara’s role at MoMA to this idea: O’Hara loved this art and these artists, and found a great deal of personal and professional satisfaction in advocating for them. LeSueur wrote, “his [O’Hara’s] passion for painting could only be answered by playing an active role in the art world. A line from one of his poems tells it all: ‘Sometimes I think I’m ‘in love’ with painting.’”376

Lytle Shaw writes about author Serge Guilbaut’s explanation about the complication of

O’Hara’s role in the global evangelism of Abstract Expressionism that MoMA and the United

States government engaged in:

But for Guilbaut . . . O’Hara is part of the problem - one of those who added to

the “miles of pages filled by friends, promoters, and admirers of the abstract

artists” and who thereby obscured the “ink between art and politics, particularly

between abstract expressionism and the ideology of the Cold War.” O’Hara’s

friendship and promotion were, however, not separate from his attempt to explore

these links between abstract expressionism and the Cold War. In characterizing

the links O’Hara makes to these Russian Modernists . . . as a heretical and

extreme account of the rise of post-WWII American art in New York (a topic that

was fundamental to those writing art criticism in America in the 1950s). Most

narratives of this rise were intertwined, of course, with the larger problem of

explaining New York’s increasing control of American cultural life and the vastly

expanded postwar international power of the United States. New York’s

376 LeSueur xx.

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escalating role as a spectacle of culture was, for many, understood in some

essential relation to the United States’ new international position.377

There can be no credible doubt that O’Hara understood that the artists he championed and the exhibitions he curated were, at the very same time, being used by the government to proclaim the supremacy of democracy over Communism. Nevertheless, his commitment to these artists, who he believed were working at the apotheosis of pure aesthetics, apparently negated the tacit collusion he was involved in.

Shaw also has written an opinion on the problem of the dichotomy of O’Hara’s anti-

American / pro-Russian poetry and his curatorship at MoMA, a role that is accurately described as furthering American anti-Communist rhetoric by equating American art and artists with the concept of democratic freedom. Shaw believes, as do I, that O’Hara was knowingly taking advantage of the unprecedented situation by exploiting the government’s secret monetary support in the sole service of helping promote globally the work of his friends, which he truly believed was the best and highest aesthetic art being produced at the time.378 Shaw writes:

O’Hara then appeals to the foundation’s benevolence by explaining that “in

attempting to counteract the prevailing impression of complete sterility in the

visual arts, the United States is at a considerable disadvantage because the U.S.

government, unlike most, has no tradition of funding international ‘cultural

377 Shaw 117. Also see Guilbaut 9. 378 This United States government funding for the arts was unprecedented either before or after this program, and represents the zenith of support for the arts in America, despite the fact the support was carried out in secret.

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activities.’” He then cites the five-year Rockefeller Fund as a significant gesture

“to rectify this situation.” 379

For O’Hara, then, it seems that he believed that the end justified the means; that using his

relationship with Nelson Rockefeller and MoMA to achieve his own ends – that of promoting the

art his friends created – made the undertaking worth it.

Except for Shaw and Guilbart, contemporary O’Hara scholars have focused little on the

obvious inconsistencies presented in O’Hara’s passions: living in Cold War America, loving

Russia, and working in a secretive quasi-governmental program to support democracy through

abstract art. However, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, scholarship on O’Hara’s war

service is also all but non-existent, so the continuing connection I see between these

inconsistencies in O’Hara’s career pursuits continues to these topics and presents much

opportunity for future scholarship.

Many years after his death, O’Hara’s friend and co-worker in the International Program

Department at MoMA, Waldo Rasmussen, said in an interview that he and O’Hara were

unconcerned and uninvolved in any political purposes for the exhibitions they curated and

installed all over the globe; that for them, “it was always about the art, it wasn't about the

U.S.A.” 380 Nevertheless, much research exists with regard to the program and its goals that I think is important to briefly review. In addition to Guilbart’s writing about the government involvement in the success of Abstract Expressionism, historian Francis Stonor Saunders has written the definitive study of the secretive American government efforts in her book, The

379 Shaw 119. 380 Rasmussen 23.

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Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. She writes, “During the height of

the Cold War, the US government committed vast resources to a secret programme of cultural

propaganda in Western Europe.”381 She claims that the role of the American government in the cultural warfare was threefold: first, “to inoculate the world against the contagion of

Communism;” second, to “ease passage of American foreign policy interests abroad, recognizing the ‘Cold War as a battle for men’s’ minds;’” and third, to utilize “a vast arsenal of cultural weapons” to accomplish this, including, “journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibits, concerts, and awards.”382 The political purpose of these exported cultural events was to spread

globally, the official notion that America and democracy espoused such freedom that artists,

writers, musicians, and thinkers were all free to pursue their art without governmental

interference – even when it criticized the government.383

In the immediate post-war period, intellectuals and academics had lost their preeminent role

in leading culture determination in America, having been replaced as thought leaders largely by

the media, Hollywood, and large corporate interests. To that list, the U.S. government now

joined the assortment of “experts” who held cultural authority in America. The political

campaign that carried out the cultural warfare plan was ultimately organized and managed by a

secret organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had various offices in Europe and

was staffed with former World War II OSS, State Department, and Foreign Office employees

who now worked directly for the CIA. During the almost two decades the Congress for Cultural

381 Saunders 1. The Central Intelligence Agency continues to deny any involvement in the program, but Saunders’ research and sourcing is impeccably done. 382 Saunders 2. 383 The genesis of this plan was a study of the fate of art and artists under both fascism in Europe and under Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Modernist art and artists had suffered censure and outright destruction under these regimes as a degenerate art form.

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Freedom was in existence, it ran some 20 prestigious literary and cultural intelligentsia

magazines throughout the world, hosted art exhibitions, ran a news and feature service, published

books (over 1000 books by 1967, according to Saunders), and staged European concerts and

musician or artist prizes and/or performances. 384 The money for these endeavors was CIA money “laundered” through various American foundations. In other words, the CIA would ask a foundation like the Hoblitzelle Foundation if they would “help their government win the Cold

War” by serving as a pass-through for CIA funding for a particular art exhibition, event, publication, and so on. This CIA-sponsored cultural warfare program was all executed without the knowledge of the American people or even many in government – which was the primary problem with it, and the reason for the secrecy. Saunders writes at length about why all this was an issue, but the core of her thesis is that secret funding violates the very nature of both a transparent democracy, and, of course, intellectual and artistic endeavors, especially when it is a government agency doing the funding and no one is aware of that fact. After a two-decade run, in 1966, the New York Times revealed the CIA tie to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in an investigative report, and this reporting effectively ended the propaganda campaign. By that time, however, tens of millions of dollars of government money had been funneled by the CIA through both dummy and legitimate “elite” American family foundations.385

The International Programs Department at MoMA (and therefore, O’Hara) became involved

in the secret governmental policy only after conservative American citizen groups complained

384 Saunders 245. 385 Saunders 368 – 390. These foundations included the Hoblitzelle Foundation, the Kaplan Foundation (Welch’s grape juice empire), the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Time/Life Foundation (Henry Luce - The American Century author’s foundation), and the Gardner Cowles Foundation (Iowa publishing money), among many others.

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that their government was supporting Communist artists in traveling art exhibitions. The United

States Information Agency (USIA) was a State Department organization that ran libraries in

Europe and was the first American government agency to try to exhibit traveling shows of modern American art in the post-war period in the early 1950s. Its first traveling exhibition, however, produced accusations that the organization was “pink” for showing artists like

American Ben Shahn and others who had either been Communist USA members or were left- leaning.386 This criticism lead to the strategy to move the sponsoring institution of the exhibitions to MoMA, thereby removing the criticism that the American government was sponsoring pink artists. The USIA also carried out a book banning in their European libraries that included such authors as Thomas Mann. Mann, who had the distinction of having his novel, The Magic

Mountain, banned by both the Nazis and later the USIA, had emigrated to the U.S. during Nazi rule of Germany and lived in Los Angeles in the post-war period. Saunders writes that, during the Cold War, “he [Mann] longed to leave America, which he called ‘an air-conditioned nightmare.’”387 Other authors like Dashiell Hammett (whose career and reputation was destroyed by Senator McCarthy), Hemingway (who was investigated for years by Hoover’s FBI), William

Carlos Williams (who failed the security clearance after being nominated in 1952 for the Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry), Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller (whose passport was revoked so he couldn’t attend an opening of his play in London), and dozens of others who wouldn’t

“name names” at House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings all suffered under the witch hunt atmosphere that America’s Cold War politics propagated at home and abroad.

386 Saunders 256. The Congress of the United States called the exhibition “un-American” and “subversive.” 387 Saunders 194.

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Saunders writes that the secret CIA programs in Europe escalated as the political circus in

America began to, more and more, influence and determine American culture.388

Saunders further details the ways in which the art exhibitions (after 1955, curated by

Rasmussen and O’Hara, among a few others) sent around the world to evangelize for American modern art moved from under the auspices of the USIA to the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1950s. This quasi-governmental program marks perhaps the only time in American history that the government supported art with any significant enthusiasm, albeit for political purposes.

The conservative political climate in the United States prevented the government from exhibiting many modern artists who had been linked with leftist or left-leaning causes. In response to the criticism, Nelson Rockefeller, who, during the War, had been in charge of the Office of the

Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), which oversaw all espionage in Latin America, used his former government employees Rene d’Harnoncourt, who Rockefeller (as President of the Board of MoMA) had placed as Director of MoMA in 1943, and Porter McCray, who became Director of International Programs for MoMA after the war and O’Hara’s boss, to curate and manage the exhibits. 389 Saunders writes, “there is no prima facie evidence for any formal agreement between MoMA and the CIA,” but concluded after exhaustive research that “it (a formal, written agreement) simply wasn’t necessary.”390 The MoMA International Programs

Department operated “at a remove from the CIA for plausible disguise,” and all the parties

388 Saunders 194, 199. 389 In addition to his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, having been a co-founder of MoMA, Nelson was always a trustee of the museum, from Junior Advisory Committee Member from 1929, later President of the Board (1939 to 1957), and, in 1957, elected Chairman of the Board of Trustees. He was known to refer to MoMA as “Mother’s museum.” 390 Saunders 264.

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involved denied until their deaths that the exhibits were CIA fronts for cultural warfare.391

Saunders concludes in her book that she believes it was just not possible that none of the

principals knew that the exhibitions were part of a CIA campaign. However, neither Waldo

Rasmussen or O’Hara, both of whom reported directly to Porter McCray while he was at

MoMA, admitted to knowing this or to being concerned that the exhibitions they curated and

installed had any governmental relationship. Saunders quotes Rasmussen, who was O’Hara’s

colleague: “The main emphasis of the International Program was about art – it wasn’t about

politics and it wasn’t about propaganda; even suggestions that it was associated with the CIA . . .

I can say categorically [are] untrue!” 392 Alfred Barr, who had been the Director of MoMA from

1929 to 1943 and appointed by Nelson Rockefeller’s mother, who was a founding Trustee of

MoMA, and d’Harnoncourt, Director during O’Hara’s career, both wrote, however, that

American modern art was anti-Communist art. President Eisenhower was, of course, aware and supportive of the program, and said, in a speech on MoMA’s 25th anniversary in 1954, that

MoMA was “a great museum,” and that “freedom of the arts is a basic freedom, one of the pillars

of liberty in our land.”393 Nevertheless, there is no evidence that O’Hara ever admitted that his job contributed to Cold War politics, but there is plenty of evidence that the exhibitions he curated and travelled with were a carefully planned propaganda campaign for the vicissitudes of democracy.

391 Saunders 219. 392 Saunders 268. 393 Patell 360.

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My belief about this intricate entanglement is that O’Hara was a true devotee of the Abstract

Expressionist artists and movement, and therefore viewed with pride the important role he played in introducing their art to the world, ignoring the government’s involvement. He saw the

Abstract Expressionist artists as practicing the highest and purest form of aesthetics in their art; and he saw it as an honor and duty to promote them in his official role at the Museum.394 His personal friendships extended from Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, Robert Motherwell,

David Smith, and Franz Kline to the so-called “Second Generation Abstract Expressionists” –

Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Porter Fairfield, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de

Kooning, and so on. He argued aesthetics with them, drank and partied with them, included them in his poetry, and spent weekends at their homes on Long Island. He wrote the first monograph on Jackson Pollock at the request of Lee Krasner, and curated exhibitions – both

International exhibitions, and later in his career, retrospectives at MoMA, for many of these artists. I believe he thought that the secretive nature of the government program was inconsequential to his devotion to showing these artists’ work to the world. This devotion to the

Abstract Expressionists endured beyond their vanguard years – indeed, his biggest and best retrospectives for Nakian, Motherwell, and (in planning at his death) for Pollock and de

Kooning, all occurred after the art world had already become enamored with Pop Art.

One final note about this fascinating subject. Finberg observes that the knowledge we now have about these secret programs can easily confuse the historical role of the artist in hindsight,

394 It’s also worth noting that O’Hara’s circle of friends grew substantially in 1953 and 1954 when he wrote exhibition reviews and features for ArtNews. His subsequent appointment at MoMA permitted him to expand his efforts to advance the work he found so deserving.

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“On the other side, many critics argue that abstract expressionism, and modernism from this

time, is apolitical or suggests a radical politics opposed to mass culture and the status quo.” 395

However, I believe both can be true – the artists were themselves, if not “apolitical,” certainly far

to the left politically than America at the time, and their art was, for the most part, created for

non-commercial and purely aesthetic reasons. The fact that the government co-opted a pure

artform for political gain shouldn’t necessarily cast aspersions on the artists themselves or their

motivations, or for that matter, the curators of the exhibitions. The artists and their art were used

– probably without their knowledge and certainly without permission – for Cold War

propagandistic purposes.

4.5 O’Hara’s Russophile Poetry

The obvious clash in ideologies O’Hara’s relationship with the cultural warfare program

presents is that O’Hara was not only opposed to America’s foreign policies in the early Cold

War, but that he was also a virulent Russophile, an identification point he had claimed since

childhood. Among his poems are seven birthday poems over ten years, all entitled “On

Rachmaninoff’s Birthday.”396 One of these poems begins, “Blue windows, blue rooftops / and the blue light of the rain, / these contiguous phrases of Rachmaninoff / pouring into my enormous ears / and the tears falling into my blindness / for without him I do not play.”397 The poem goes on as O’Hara imagines himself as Rachmaninoff’s pupil, calling him “dearest Father

395 Finberg 116. 396 O’Hara wrote his “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday” poems in 1953, 1954, 1961, and 1963. Collected Poems 159, 189, 190, 321, 418, 419, 474. Oddly, O’Hara wrote these in various months of the year, despite Rachmaninoff’s birthday being April 1. 397 Collected Poems 189.

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of all Russians.” While in college, as O’Hara additionally cultivated literature interests to add to his favorite classical composers, he discovered a love for Russian poets Mayakovsky and

Pasternak, subsequently mentioning them frequently in his poetry. O’Hara also became enamored with Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago on its publication, with editor Donald Allen included a lengthy essay O’Hara wrote on Dr. Zhivago in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara.

In a poem from 1958, O’Hara (the poet) has the Sun wake up O’Hara (the subject of the poem) on Fire Island, the Sun complaining that O’Hara was difficult to awaken: "’When I woke up Mayakovsky he was / a lot more prompt’ the Sun said / petulantly.”398 The Sun has awoken the poet just to tell him He likes his work, and that the poet should keep on. However, having visited both Mayakovsky and O’Hara implies a kinship between the two poets that O’Hara was proud to make. The Sun continues his praise of O’Hara’s poetry:

“Frankly I wanted to tell you I like your poetry. I see a lot on my rounds and you're okay. You may not be the greatest thing on earth, but you're different. Now, I've heard some say you're crazy, they being excessively calm themselves to my mind, and other crazy poets think that you're a boring reactionary. Not me. Just keep on like I do and pay no attention.” 399

It is not uncommon for O’Hara to include moments of self-praise in his poems – he was actually quite sure he was the best poet writing during his time, and many of his friends, poets themselves, thought so, too. John Ashbery, for example, thought O’Hara’s disregard for the style

398 Collected Poems 306. 399 Collected Poems 306.

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rules of traditional poetry was one of his strong suits: “to ignore the rules is always a

provocation, and since the poetry itself was crammed with provocative sentiments, it was met

with the friendly silence reserved for the thoroughly unacceptable guest,” he wrote about

O’Hara’s lack of critical success during his lifetime.400 Kenneth Koch, recalling reading O’Hara

poems for the first time as a fellow undergraduate at Harvard, told Ashbery at the time they were

“sassy, colloquial and full of realistic detail.”401 Ashbery, by far the most career-serious about poetry of the two, nevertheless always had praise for O’Hara’s work. In a reprint of Poems

Retrieved, Ashbery is quoted as calling O’Hara’s work as “both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it.”402 Having the Sun compare him to Mayakovsky, then, was a not unexpected sign of O’Hara’s poetic ego.

In another poem about his love for Russian authors, O’Hara writes: “You say that everything is very simple and interesting / it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel does.” 403 He doesn’t reveal in the short poem to whom he’s speaking, but whoever it is has made him feel “very wistful,” a feeling that he equates with reading “a great Russian novel.”

In addition to Russian music and fiction, O’Hara’s love of Russian culture also extend to ballet - he was an enthusiastic ballet patron and connoisseur, and wrote about ballet in numerous poems, including in this one where he considers going to the ballet as the sole activity for which he can look forward in a dreary New York February:

It’s the day before February 17th it is not snowing yet but it is dark and may snow yet dreary February of exhaustion from parties and the exceptional de-

400 Gooch 300. 401 Poems Retrieved xxiii. 402 Poems Retrieved xxiv. 403 Collected Poems 429.

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sire for spring with the ballet alone, but extending its run has made bearable, dear New York City Ballet company, you are quite a bit like a wedding yourself!404

As a homosexual in Cold War America, O’Hara couldn’t look forward to ever having a wedding

– homosexual men in the 1950s were unlikely to even imagine a life-long romantic love that resembled a marriage; it was simply unthinkable. As a homosexual, you had friends who were like your family, and you had sex with friends or with strangers. Marriage or couple hood was understood to be outside the realm of open homosexuality. However, as ideal as that might have seen, he could express “exceptional desire” for the spring season of the New York City Ballet

Company, the company formed by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein a few years after the

War. O’Hara’s point of view on the Cold War in many of these poems takes the position that it would be boorish to forgo the beauty of Russian culture because of something as pedestrian as politics or the Cold War. In addition, perhaps the only real reciprocated love affair of O’Hara’s life was with Vincent Warren, a young ballet dancer, with whom he had a two-year romance from 1959 to 1961.

O’Hara expressed his love of things Russian as he also took an unusually affable point of view about Russian politicians – particularly Nikita Khrushchev. Rather than demonizing

Khrushchev, as was the fashion in American politics at the time, he seemed to feel sympathetically towards him – particularly as it related to Khrushchev’s treatment by American politicians. No poem illustrates this better than the following one, written on September 17,

404 Collected Poems 266.

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1959, the day Khrushchev took a train from Washington, D.C. to visit New York during his first

American visit:

Khrushchev is coming on the right day! the cool graced light is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind and everything is tossing, hurrying on up this country has everything but politesse, a Puerto Rican cab driver says

Ionesco is greater than Beckett, Vincent said, that’s what I think, blueberry blintzes and Khrushchev was probably being carped at in Washington, no politesse

where does the evil of the year go when September takes New York and turns it into ozone stalagmites deposits of light so I get back up make coffee, and read Francois Villon, his life, so dark New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing up the street I wish it would blow off though it is cold and somewhat warms my neck as the train bears Khrushchev on to Pennsylvania Station and the light seems to be eternal and the joy seems to be inexorable I am foolish enough always to find it in wind405

This poem memorializes an interesting Cold War historical moment of the late Eisenhower

Administration when Nikita Khrushchev became the first Soviet head of state to visit the United

States. Khrushchev’s two-week trip began in Washington, D. C. on September 15, 1959. On the day O’Hara wrote this poem, Khrushchev was on his way from D. C. to New York where he visited Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park and spoke to the United Nations.406 Throughout the trip,

405 Collected Poems 340. 406 Mrs. Roosevelt had also been painted as a Communist sympathizer in the post-war hysteria.

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Khrushchev’s speeches advocated for peace and trust, as he subsequently visited Los Angeles,

San Francisco, a farm in Iowa, and Pittsburg, before returning to Camp David for more talks

with Eisenhower.407 Eisenhower was set to reciprocate by visiting Moscow in 1960, but his visit was cancelled after the infamous U-2 Incident on May 1, 1960, when U.S. U-2 spy plane pilot

Gary Powers was shot down and captured by Soviets. During Khrushchev’s American visit,

Eisenhower had assured him that no spy planes were flying in Soviet airspace. Indeed, after

Powers was shot down, the Eisenhower administration continued to lie and, at first, claimed that the Soviets had shot down a weather plane. Subsequently faced with evidence - Powers had survived and was in Soviet custody - Eisenhower finally admitted the truth, but the damage to his relationship with Khrushchev prevented his planned visit to Russia from occurring.

In this poem, O’Hara seems to show more courtesy to Khrushchev than to his own American government. He seems excited when he writes, “Khrushchev is coming on the right day!” and has a conversation with a Puerto Rican cab driver who tells him that America has no politesse – formal politeness or courtesy. O’Hara must agree with the cabbie, because in the next stanza after a disjointed remark made by his lover Vincent about the relative worth of Ionesco versus

Beckett, O’Hara opines that he supposes that Khrushchev had been “carped at” in Washington due to a lack of American politesse. He seems to be consciously setting the time of year of

Khrushchev’s visit in his mind as he vacillates between comments on the changing New York weather, the wind (“everything is tossing”), and the temperature. The poem doesn’t disclose if he is a particular fan of Khrushchev, or if he simply wants to recall the visit as a famous day, or if,

407 While in Los Angeles, Khrushchev was famously refused a trip to Disneyland, something he very much wanted to see, because of “security concerns.”

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perhaps, he just noticed a newspaper headline. Regardless, he doesn’t have anything but positive

thoughts about Khrushchev visiting New York. Davidson also notices the well-practiced method

O’Hara often uses in his poems that reverse a stereotype of commonly held belief:

O’Hara’s ironizing of an important historical event does more than dismiss its

authority in a cold war narrative; it provides an alternate register - insouciant,

queer, celebratory - to contrast with the instrumentalized voices that monitor

Khrushchev’s visit.”408

What Davidson refers to as O’Hara’s “alternate register” is the source of much of his strength to reverse epithets, to dispel (or magnify) stereotypes, both for the sake of his fortitude of personality and for accentuating moments in his poetry. I agree with him that O’Hara’s queer take on many historical events very often provides a reversal of the state viewpoint of the event.

In a final example of O’Hara’s frequent, sometimes histrionic, sometimes amusingly excoriating criticism of American political life, this poem is one of the latter:

when you went I stayed and then I went and we were both lost and then I died oh god what joy you’re here sob and at the most recent summit conference they are eating string beans butter smootch slurp pass me the filth and a coke pal oh thank you 409

408 Davidson 70. 409 Collected Poems 442.

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In a passage that seems to desire to point out how much happier and better his life is than the

politicians who are at “the most recent summit conference,” O’Hara playfully suggests that the

person he’s speaking to pass him “the filth” – a reference to the conversation at the summit,

perhaps – and pass him “a coke.” It’s commonly held that his friend Larry Rivers had a drug

habit, but hasn’t ever been a part of the O’Hara legend, so perhaps he’s writing about Coke here,

and forgoes capitalization as a stylization.410 Nevertheless, the ubiquity of Coke, the soft drink, as the representation of American capitalism, is a feature in a number of O’Hara poems, and in many cases, O’Hara has the capitalist success of the product actually stand in for America.

4.6 America Constantly on the Brink of War: Homosexuality and Patriotism

From the end of World War II to the end of O’Hara’s life, one constant was America’s involvement in war or the threat of war. Just as the government’s campaigns to “enlist” citizens in the Cold War was less than successful, O’Hara also noticed the general lack of interest on the part of his fellow citizens and commented on it in a handful of poems. “A / bomb falls, but everyone is cheerful and the stores / stay open,” he wrote. 411 In a line from a poem during and about the Suez War in 1956, O’Hara sums up the state of American’s growing banality about war, and the lassitude brought by a constant and unending threat of being on the brink of war.

Writing about a friend’s sightseeing trip to Boston, he wrote, “Today we / have seen Bunker Hill

/ and the Constitution, / said George. Tomorrow, / probably, our country / will declare war.” 412

Being at war, being on the brink of war, anxieties about war, and patriotism were all conflated in

410 For more on drug usage among O’Hara’s coterie of friends, see Gooch 234 and 385. 411 Collected Poems 263. 412 Collected Poems 21.

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this laissez-faire commentary on mid-century Americans’ consciousness; the topic seemingly

always a ready subject for O’Hara’s poems.

Beyond the anxiety of constantly being on the brink of war, O’Hara noticed that the world

itself had changed, turning ugly from the times he remembered as ones of peace and goodwill

from childhood. He seemed to sense that wars brought out the worst in everyone, creating an

environment generally devoid of generosity and kindness. “A trumpet bursts into night, /

announcing / no war but our eternal hate,” he wrote. 413 Continually scanning the news for a declaration of the next war, this announcement simply reinforced America’s hatred – for what, he doesn’t say, but hatred nonetheless – a feeling of eternal ill will.

From his very earliest poems about war, O’Hara announced his disapproval and disgust about it. One of the reasons for his criticism appears to be the attitude of winning at all costs that

America had embarked upon following World War II, and especially the way the Pacific front had been won with the use of the bomb. He emphasizes the postwar American attitude in these lines: “perhaps at the end of a very strange game / you won? (?) ! (?) / and that is important

(yeah) to win (yeah).414 The question marks in the second line seem to indicate that the winner of

this “very strange game” is debatable in his mind, as the win in the case of World War II

simultaneously unleashed the monster of nuclear war. O’Hara often didn’t make a distinction as

to who was the aggressor or who was defending their nation when he wrote about war – he saw

all war as bad, an evil that, once unlocked, could never again be put away again. “Like the

passion of a nation at war it moves quickly / provoked to defense or aggression / unreasoning

413 Poems Retrieved 52. 414 Collected Poems 437.

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power / an instinct for self-declaration,” he wrote, calling war an “unreasoning power.” 415

These warring passions incite nothing good, he writes, power that is not subject to reason or an instinct for self-declaration. As a homosexual man who had no desire to prove himself a

“warrior,” O’Hara was perhaps uniquely able to express these feelings about the subject of war without either worrying about his masculinity or being perceived as unpatriotic.

Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has a particularly significant opinion on the unlikely mid-century connection between homosexuality and patriotism:

The un-natural, can-not-be-helpedness of homosexuality makes the homosexual’s

apparent choice to love man over country a passive rejection of the political love

that underwrites modern nationality. The presumed passivity of the corrosive

homosexual desire is the abjection of a new kind of masculinity that dare not

speak its name, only name what it refuses. The homosexual emerges not as a

communist invader pursuing a world order, but as an obsessive, neurotic

masculinity that has failed to integrate subnational identification into a national

identity. 416

Sedgwick here identifies one of the unconscious rejections Americans probably felt in their gut

about homosexual men – that, at the same time they were “choosing” men, they were rejecting

their nation. It is perhaps this interrelated instinctive attitude that ties homosexuality to a turn

against patriotism. O’Hara, of course, proved his patriotism by serving in World War II, as did

415 Collected Poems 309. 416 Novel Gazing 336.

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many homosexual men – at great personal cost in identity formation.417 Similarly, many of the

homosexual federal government employees had come to Washington with idealized visions of

serving their country – particularly during the New Deal era. Rejecting homosexuals for who

they were, however, it is the federal government who bears the full weight of the culpability for

the anti-patriotic accusations. Homosexuals in the mid-century had no choice but to see the

American government as unhospitable to them.

O’Hara was often quietly disturbed by what he saw happening in the world and recorded it

simply with outspoken language. In the following poetic lines, O’Hara writes about the

tediousness of the continuing threats, and his disappointment that democracy itself couldn’t stop

these constant wars. “. . . you are ruining your awful country and me / it is not new to do this it is

terribly / democratic and ordinary and tired.”418 The next poem is inexplicably titled in German:

“Kein Traum,” which translates into English as “no dream,” as if to say, this feels like a horrible dream I can’t wake up from, but in actuality, it’s not a dream at all.

Awakening, now, the war has broken out everything is vicious and cruel as it really is we are back in reality out of cigarettes dying gorgeously for an unknown principle // and the Austro-Hungarian empire was initiating trouble a lot of trouble there was a germ of outrageous desire it lodged in our hearts

417 One could argue that the cost of service was actually greater for homosexual men than heterosexuals in that they had all the burdens the heterosexual soldiers did, with the additional burden of hiding who they really were at great risk, and having no “sanctioned” release for their sexual tensions. 418 Collected Poems 434.

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it will never succumb it is within us it will never die but we shall die and awaken from our torment in a storm of anguish which is just octaves of war pound through my willing brain and everything is right again419

One of the captivating aspects about the dismay with which O’Hara writes about war is that he constantly writes about “us” rather than “you” or “they.” I believe that his service in World War

II impressed upon him that he was a global citizen and that while nobody he met liked war; the wars continued anyway. In this poem, he writes that this warring impulse “lodged in our hearts,” regardless of where it started. He blamed America for starting the nuclear race that began the

Cold War, but he also understood that these warring inclinations were an unsavory part of the human condition. In this poem, he again mentions the cusp between night and day, dreaming or sleeping, and awakening to a new war. However, the new “reality” that America would always be at war, and at war “for an unknown principle” seems to be a fact he takes for granted. The pattern has already been set. The world is a vicious and cruel place, and here we are again, he writes. “Dying gorgeously” is O’Hara’s way of commenting that the people dying are young men

– the adverb “gorgeously” referring to the fact that these young soldiers are the very men he could be ogling on the street or having sex with. For some reason, O’Hara thinks about the genesis of World War I – not his war certainly, but he perhaps reasons that it doesn’t matter which war we think about – they are all the same. There is something lodged in our hearts to kill

419 Poems Retrieved 198.

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– and while it won’t die, it certainly does kill a lot of the men in whose hearts it is lodged.

“Storm of anguish” – these waves of the agony and misery of war reminds O’Hara of octave intervals – perhaps one level of anguish, replaced by the next octave, higher than the first by a factor of 8, replaced by the next, and so forth. The poem ends with this ironic reference to music

– the “octaves of war” pounding in his brain, and then his sudden poetic reversal, almost as though the chord has been resolved - “and everything is right again.” He’s already written that the states of “vicious and cruel” are reality and so he ends the poem on the same note.

After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which O’Hara despised vociferously, other tactics of war seemed to pale in comparison – nuclear weapons could indeed destroy the world.

America made much of their winning role in World War II, defining herself as the world superpower who supported peace. However, despite the appearances the American government advanced for the sake of the rest of the world, the decade was, for many Americans, a complicated, foreboding, and suspicious one. Newspapers and magazines constantly reminded the American public that annihilation was at hand. America’s foreign policy of containment against the spread of Communism, built upon the assumption that Soviet Communism was a spreading threat that wouldn’t stop until it had achieved global domination. After the first successful test of a nuclear weapon by the USSR, America realized with fear that the next World

War could indeed mean the annihilation of the planet. This fear of a nuclear showdown drove

Cold War relations for the next several decades, but it rose to panic levels in the 1950s. The turbulence, anxiety, and paranoia surrounding Cold War politics was like nothing America had ever seen before, drawing the country into frightening world geopolitics in spite of herself.

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O’Hara observed all of this and commented on it often in his poetry. The ironies of the age didn’t escape O’Hara:

It really is amusing that for all the centuries of mankind the problem has been how to kill enough people and now it is how not to kill them all420

The paradox of the hydrogen bomb race America and Russia were involved in was not lost on

O’Hara. Within just a few years of America initiating the age of nuclear war to end World War

II, Russia showed their nuclear weapon capability and the race began. The national dialogue quickly morphed from the power of the bomb to kill entire cities to how to stop Russia from doing the same thing to America that she had done to Japan. The mood of the country, O’Hara wrote, was like the end of summer, as he wrote yet another poem about the relentless war headlines:

Summer is over, That moment of blindness // from a big melancholy about war headlines and personal hatreds.421

O’Hara remembers “that moment of blindness” in August, 1945, when the bombs were dropped.

Like a season change, it seems to remind him that the summer was then over, as well as the war, but somehow the promise of the end of the war – peace – never came. Instead, more “war

420 Poems Retrieved 192. 421 Collected Poems 109, 110.

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headlines” and “personal hatreds.” Americans hated the Russians, the Russians hated

Americans, and, for him, Americans also hated Communists, spies, traitors, and homosexuals.

Despite Americans being laser-focused on war, traitors, and political enemies, a much more

subtle Cold War fear than the fear of nuclear annihilation was the very personal and prevalent

fear about one’s individual identity – a new societal fear about whether or not one was normal,

better than average, well-adjusted, or mentally fit; a new kind of post-war ontological hysteria.

Americans aspired to being “average,” as if average, a part of the crowd, not an outlier, was

something worthwhile to attain. Goodman observed that the decade of the 1950s was a season

that was “extraordinarily senseless and unnatural - a Closed Room with a Rat Race as the center

of fascination, powerfully energized by fear of being outcasts.”422

While America desperately wished to be viewed as a country of peace, opportunity, and

freedom, America’s marginalized people: immigrants, homosexuals, blacks, and people in

poverty were not living in peace and freedom on America’s streets.

If I turn down my sheets children start screaming through the windows. My glasses are broken on the coffee table And at night a truce with Iran or Korea seems certain while I am beaten to death by a thug in a back bedroom.423

Vulnerable populations like his fellow homosexuals were frequently on O’Hara’s mind. That he mentions children screaming indicates the level of vulnerability he felt as a gay man. So, while

422 Miller 6. 423 Collected Poems 110.

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America’s foreign policy rhetoric was about peace-making, she wasn’t doing a great job with

that at home. In addition to crime in the streets against susceptible populations, the very real

global fear that an escalation of the hydrogen bomb race would actually end the world was

present in the country’s atmosphere.

O’Hara often used humor as a poetic device to diffuse various societal pressures about which

he was moved to write. In a poem entitled “A Warm Day for December,” the title itself

indicating a mundanity related perhaps to an off-handed comment at the newsstand, O’Hara

makes fun of the fear of nuclear war by writing, “a hydrogen bomb too tiny / to make an eye

water” – war is on his mind, but he’s busy window shopping instead of worrying about it: “and

yet I toddle along / past the reverential windows of Tiffany / with its diamond clips on paper

bags.” 424 What deserves our reverence, he writes, isn’t nuclear war, but the windows of Tiffany’s

– where the highest-class patrons of the city shop for baubles. Tiffany’s is so hip that they don’t need anything but paper bags to display their exclusive and expensive diamonds and attract the moneyed crowd. As he walks, he notices another mid-century New York City attraction – the emerging artist galleries of Sidney Janis and Betty Parsons as well as art dealer Knodedler’s on what he calls “the street of dreams painterly.” Mid-century New York was, for the first time, the artist capital of the world, and O’Hara and his friends – both the poets and the painters – were always aware of the distinction of the place and time they inhabited. Tibor de Nagy’s gallery was where many of his painter friends exhibited, the exhibitions often accompanied by

424 Collected Poems 376.

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mimeographed booklets of poems by O’Hara and his friends.425 The poem continues with a

space-age reference:

so I get in a phone booth on a corner like a space ship I like the people passing noisily by blasting off “I love you” “I love you too” then I open the door the sounds rush over me the people but I am in the air yet I follow 57th meeting Roy and Bill I drink Vermouth we talk about the pleasantness distractions of New York you’re almost there 57th Street426

The next stop on his walk is a phone booth, which reminds him of entering a space ship, both cut

off from the passing foot traffic, and yet, still in it. The space race was already on and yet another

example of the “war” between Russia and the U.S. While Sputnik literally translates as

“satellite,” O’Hara gave it another translation in a poem: “sputnik is only the word for ‘traveling

companion’ / here on earth,” he wrote.427 He calls his boyfriend Vincent to say “I love you,” and when he steps out of the soundproof booth, the street sounds rush over him, but he still has the feeling he’s in the atmosphere, having lifted off in his phone booth spaceship. He’s on his way to meet a friend, Bill (probably Bill Berkson), to have a drink (“Vermouth”) and await Vincent’s arrival. The subject of their conversation is the pleasant distractions of New York – which might also describe many of O’Hara’s poems.

425 de Nagy later formed a publishing house and published, among others, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Barbara Guest. 426 Collected Poems 376. 427 Collected Poems 475.

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4.7 O’Hara and the Entanglement of Race

A final poem demonstrating O’Hara’s interest in American and Russian relations, Russian

literature, and, an unexpected identification with American blacks transitions this chapter into a

brief discussion about O’Hara’s poetry and his writing about black men, an area with much

opportunity for more scholarship. O’Hara’s love of Russian authors notably did not extend,

however, to younger Russian poets Andrei Voznesensky or Yevgeny Evtushenko, who he

eviscerated in an historically dense poem, “Answer to Voznesensky & Evtushenko.” In what

Neil Corcoran calls as “an uncharacteristically vituperative poem,” apparently incited by the

Russian poets’ criticism of American blacks on a literary tour of America, O’Hara takes the

noteworthy and racially complex stance in this poem that he himself is an American black man.

428 O’Hara wrote:

We are tired of your tiresome imitations of Mayakovsky we are tired of your dreary tourist ideas of our Negro selves our selves are in far worse condition than the obviousness of your color sense 429

In addition to the poets’ comments, which must have been reported in the newspapers, Russian critics of America also often gleefully brought up America’s hypocrisy with regard to black

Americans at every opportunity to show Communism’s superiority to democracy; America’s treatment of black citizens being a significant Achilles’ heel. In this poem, wanting to criticize

428 Corcoran 145. Magee wrote that O’Hara directed his criticism toward "two Russian poets he felt had drawn simplistic political cartoons of the American race situation.” Magee 700. 429 Collected Poems 468. In other poems, O’Hara identifies as a Jew, despite the fact he wasn’t – he was of Irish Catholic ancestry. This identification with other minority groups is one of the methods in which he is successful at subverting social power structures.

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both the young poets and Russia, O’Hara uses the first-person plural “we” to jab back:

as we poets of America have loved you your countrymen, our countrymen, our lives, your lives, and the dreary expanses of your translations your idiotic manifestos and the strange black cock which has become ours despite your envy430

This section serves to throw Voznesensky’s and Evtushenko’s criticism about American black

men back in the Russian poets’ faces. The line “and the strange black cock which has become

ours despite your envy” suggests that O’Hara’s identification with black men, however, rather

than being a function of solidarity, is instead a function of homosexual men’s enamored fantasies

about the size of black men’s penises and tales of prowess. This tasteless stereotyping on the part

of homosexual men is, it seems, a legacy of the times in which O’Hara was writing, a vulgar and

racist dehumanization of black men, and one that he quickly reverses as he continues:

we do what we feel you do not even do what you must or can I do not love you any more since Mayakovsky died and Pasternak theirs was the death of my nostalgia for your tired ignorant race since you insist on race you shall not take my friends away from me because they live in Harlem you shall not make Mississippi into Sakhalin you came too late, a lovely talent doesn’t make a ball I consider myself to be black and you not even part431

In this stanza, O’Hara goes a step further and identifies as black. I have written in previous pages that O’Hara occasionally identifies with other marginalized groups – notably Jews – when his sense of social and moral justice is enraged. Nevertheless, identification as a black man when

430 Collected Poems 468. 431 Collected Poems 468.

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you are a Caucasian reads jarringly in the 21st century and deserves some further inspection.

Peter Stoneley writes that this line:

seems to confirm the argument of Nielsen and others that O'Hara is much too

casual and entitled in how he engages with blackness. Magee, though—one of the

few to offer a sustained reading of "Answer to Vosnenesensky and

Evtushenko"—sees this as O'Hara proposing an "ideal democracy" in opposition

to the rigidity to be found in some elements of Russian art and politics.432

These authors, Nielsen and Magee, represent the two extremes of opinion in the limited scholarship on O’Hara and race. Because I tend to read O’Hara as a political homosexual poet who regularly subverted gender roles and expectations, among other disruptions, my belief about this surprising appropriation is that his identification with black men (or other minorities) shouldn’t shock readers too much considering that mid-century America demeaned and marginalized both blacks and homosexuals, and identification with other marginalized people is one of O’Hara’s most successful forms of resistance.433 In this regard, I agree with Magee, who writes:

Our recognition of O'Hara's concern with the politics of poetic form and his

engagement with the downtown jazz culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s

provides the groundwork for a new understanding of O'Hara as, among other

things, a consciously political writer.434

432 Stoneley 510. See also Magee 701, Nielsen n.p. 433 For more scholarship on the identification O’Hara draws between American blacks and homosexuals in this poem and others, see Gold, Shank, Stoneley, Revely-Calder, Goble, and Merritt. 434 Magee 695.

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Nevertheless, O’Hara’s occasional identification with blacks is curious and difficult to explain.

My belief about the identification is that O’Hara successfully, if awkwardly, relates to the common societal hatred and marginalization that American blacks suffered with homosexuals.

To finish my analysis of this poem for a moment, this stanza also contains a rare reference bragging about America’s freedom. Apparently only possible because he was so incensed at the two Russian poets, O’Hara, in a rare moment, actually defends America’s freedom of choice against Russian totalitarianism. “We do what we feel” is exactly representative of the democracy rhetoric America propagated throughout the world, “you do not even do what you must or can” is a further excoriation of the Russian poets’ bad behavior. Further, he writes, his Russian poets are dead, so he’s done with his Russophilia (which wasn’t true). The people he affiliates with in the poem – his black friends in Harlem or even in Mississippi (although he wouldn’t have lasted

5 minutes in Mississippi in the mid-century because of his effeminate persona) – are artistic hipsters who are far above the two Russian poets.

He continues:

where you see death you see a dance of death which is imperialist, implies training, requires techniques our ballet does not employ you are indeed as cold as wax as your progenitor was red, and how greatly we loved his redness in the fullness of our own idiotic sun! 435

435 Collected Poems 468.

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O’Hara was a huge ballet fan, so much so that in this stanza he appears to be saying that Russian

ballet is a dead art form having been surpassed by American ballet. Magee writes that O’Hara’s

poem corresponds with the Balanchine production of Stravinsky’s Agon, which O’Hara had seen.

Balanchine’s controversial and revolutionary integrated casting included black dancer Arthur

Mitchell in the pas de deux with white dancer Diana Adams, which O’Hara represents here as a

proud American addition to the ballet.436

O’Hara goes on to makes it clear in this poem that he’s tired of Russian manifestos and imperialism, even making fun of Lenin’s wax effigy. While American poets loved the previous generation of Russian poets – even “their redness” – neither Voznesensky or Evtushenko make the cut for him. His fury with the pair may have also been fueled in part by Robert Lowell’s high praise of Voznesensky as O’Hara considered Lowell a rival throughout his life. Regardless, the poem is an interesting glimpse at one of the few criticisms of Russia O’Hara ever wrote, and a rare personal identification with African Americans.437

I’d like to examine in more depth here the complexities of O’Hara’s identification and sexual

attraction to black men. In the first place, I believe I should make clear that I agree with

biographer Gooch that O'Hara "never swayed in his condemnation" of racism, from his first

mention of Southern sailor’s racism in the Navy at the age of 18 which I wrote about in Chapter

1.438 Epstein writes, “O’Hara, who was dedicated to racial integration and suspicious of identity

logic – he had insisted several years earlier that ‘dying in black and white we fight for what we

436 Magee 702. 437 For more on the association between the hipster, the homosexual, and the Negro in 1950s America, see Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” and Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp.” 438 Gooch 75.

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love, not are.’”439 I agree with Epstein that I find no evidence of racism or segregation in

O’Hara’s life, in fact, just the opposite is true – he often identified as a marginalized gay man with other marginalized populations. Yet from time to time he writes dialogue in a black vernacular, or writes what can’t be mistaken as a vulgar sexual remark about black men. I’m not interested in simply giving O’Hara a pass on these remarks or what appears to be a derogatory vernacular term, but on the other hand, given his frequent writing about equality and racism, it is difficult to balance reading these contradictory references. I don’t wish to leave the reader with the impression that, because of O’Hara’s relatively frequent positive mentions of racial minorities, I believe this necessarily reflects his personal views on the subject. O’Hara’s biography presents a confounding dichotomy of experience – he was an effeminate man by his own description and that of his contemporaries, he was an unapologetic homosexual, all of which contribute to a personal marginalization in society; but at the same time, he was a white, cis man with an elite education who worked in a cultural industry that was primarily white, as were most of his friends. I found no anecdotes about a personal racism in any of the literature on O’Hara, and therefore, his poetry must speak for itself on the issue of race. My observations are based solely on his texts and my understanding of the intersectionality of race and homosexual men.

O’Hara’s references to black Americans, particularly black men, represent just a handful of his 800 poems, so I in no way wish to construe that this was a dominant or even frequent subject for him. Nevertheless, the subject deserves some investigation because civil rights was an important and emotionally politicized issue during the time O’Hara was writing, and

439 Beautiful Enemies 229. See also Collected Poems 305.

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additionally, equality for marginalized groups like homosexuals was tangentially related to

equality for blacks. In “Just As I Am Not Sure Where Everything is Going,” O’Hara lists four

beaches, seemingly random choices – a beach art installation at the Stedelijk Museum by Martin

Raysse, an island beach on St. Thomas, a beach on Long Island, and Newport Beach in Virginia.

He asks, “What negroes have lain down deep in your black under-sand?” – a question that seems

to be pointing out that blacks would likely not feel welcome in any of these elitist places. The

following reads as a nonsensical line: “Stands lubricrushkandoolamperanthusian-sloop—all

negroes,” followed by an O’Hara reversal: “All white fools for the negro,” which seems to

reverse the roles of the races – at least from the white perspective. The next two lines revert to

the vernacular again: “an iffen yo cain’t ketch ‘em / understand, Willy?”440 By way of analysis, I think this poem is about a collision of class: the bourgeois beaches, the question about how many blacks have enjoyed them, the “white fools” for the negro, and finally, O’Hara’s imitation of a black voice, which taken alone sounds like a disrespectful caricature. In a second poem about elitism, “Here in New York We Are Having a Lot of Trouble with the World’s Fair,” O’Hara wrote about planned highway blockades by black citizens on the opening day of the 1964

World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows – Corona Park in Queens. The blockades ultimately didn’t take place but the NAACP and CORE did stage protests inside the fair, with chanting that drowned out President Johnson’s opening speech.441 O’Hara seems to be on the black protesters’

side when he writes:

If every Negro in New York cruised over the Fair

440 Poems Retrieved 234. 441 See Tirella Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World’s Fair and the Transformation of America for more.

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in his fan-jet plane and ran out of fuel the World would really learn something about the affluent society.442

The civil rights groups had promised to shut down the opening day of the fair by cutting off traffic, which prompted a large number of police, tow trucks, helicopters, and command centers on every major road in and out of Queens. This plan to stop the promised protests turned out to be a huge over-reaction by Mayor Wagner, but the so-called “stall-in” nevertheless reduced the number of attendees on the opening day from a planned 250,000 to just over 90,000. The

President and Wagner saw the protest as a major embarrassment to New York City. 443 O’Hara

seems to be on the side of the blacks in his poem, with the suggestion that New York blacks

could get to the Fair in personal jets, mocking affluent white Americans who might travel that

way, and then suggesting that if they all dropped out of the sky after running out of fuel, forcing

the affluent fair-goers to interact with them, that we’d learn something about the white Fair-

goers.

In “I Love the Way It Goes,” O’Hara mocks suburban 1950s culture in various ways, and

then includes this:

and then she saw a Negro bum getting kicked out of a church later he ate her he was handsome444

Again, a nonsensical reference to a black man, who is violent in this poem, but, despite that, the

442 Collected Poems 480. 443 Tirella n.p. 444 Collected Poems 481.

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poet feels obligated to tell readers, “he was handsome.” In other references, O’Hara wrote about

black Americans being seen as the Other, “Blue negroes on the verge of a true foreignness,” “the

shrouded verses of Negroes,” “a certain ebony king,” and “our country’s black and white past

spread out before us.” 445 These non-sexual references clearly refer to O’Hara’s awareness of the

plight of black Americans with regard to civil rights. In another poem, “On the Vast Highway,”

he celebrates diversity by mentioning other New York minorities:

I am told of the infidelities of the Puerto Ricans and the meanness of the Jews by an Irish cab driver it is good that there are so many kinds of us446

In this poem, O’Hara notices that even minorities stereotype one another – Puerto Ricans behave

with infidelity, Jews are mean, and Irish cab drivers repeat these conceptions, but O’Hara sums

up his feelings that “it is good that there are so many kinds of us.”

Magee writes on the topic of O’Hara’s identification with blacks, that “it should be obvious

that this [O’Hara’s infrequent identification as a black man] was a rather thin tightrope

attempting to walk, but I would argue that the attempt was a successful one.”447 I concur with

Magee that one must consider the sum of O’Hara’s writings on blacks in order to come to a conclusion about his literary intent. O’Hara was, after all, a product of his times – despite the fact that he was out of step with the hegemonic majority in many areas of his life. With regard to his infrequent vernacular writing, what immediately comes to my mind are the few videos that exist

445 Collected Poems 141, 156, 304, and 399. 446 Poems Retrieved 199. 447 Magee 705.

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of him reading his poetry. O’Hara had an extremely pronounced, stereotypical, and distinct

Boston accent, a fact that couldn’t have been lost on him. Nevertheless, he didn’t, to my

knowledge, ever write in a Boston vernacular, but his accent may have interested him in others’

to the extent that he wanted his poem to sound like them. Hazel Smith comments on this

curiosity as well, and notices that O’Hara scholars seem to differ about what these rare, but still

present, instances in O’Hara’s poetry mean. She writes:

Sensitivity to racial difference is present in O’Hara’s poetry, but it is also difficult

to disentangle from some racist stereotyping of the period. This complex mix of

attitudes is reflected in the different stances critics take towards O’Hara on race.

Geoff Ward, as mentioned earlier, sees a favourable attitude to ‘black style and

self-expression in the poems.’ On the other hand Aldon Nielsen finds O’Hara is

guilty of both primitivism and exoticism, and accuses the poet of ‘wholesale

adoption’ of racial stereotypes, though he conceded that O’Hara is less

stereotypical when dealing with individuals he knows or whose work he has

read.448

O’Hara’s poetry is replete with descriptions of the homosexual gaze, and that this gaze included black men is one of the sticking points here. Outside the references that included the gaze or sexual experience, O’Hara writes about a wide variety of ethnicities – Jews, Puerto Ricans, blacks – without any obvious racist intent; just the opposite is true. As I have written previously,

O’Hara’s personal values make room consistently for non-whites in his version of America

448 Smith 35.

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appearing in his work. Stoneley believes that the misunderstandings about the sexual nuance between O’Hara and black men has everything to do with the early 20th century theme of “the primitive,” which scholars seem to read in O’Hara’s homoerotic poems:

[in previous literary references] primitivism was a widely-shared practice of

projecting desires and fears. It was a cultural mechanism that elicited and

contained that which was inherent to the norm, but which could not be recognized

as such. There is, then, a self-conscious futility in O'Hara's engagement with the

primitive, in that the desire for escape still takes place within—is sponsored by—

the "national home." Yet it is this sense of futility that makes O'Hara's primitivist

routine interesting and important, and markedly different from the primitivisms

that had come before.

It is precisely this “marked difference” that I claim transforms O’Hara’s (and other homosexuals) aspirational sexual interest in the phallic superiority of black men from simple racism – of which there was plenty in mid-century America. Is this fetishism racist? In the regard that the desire assigns certain characteristics to an individual because of the color of their skin, yes, I’d agree they are racist fantasies. However, I’d add that O’Hara’s non-racist and inclusive values in his life are easily defensible, between his hundreds of poems about his life and the witness of his friends.

Stoneley quotes Michael North in his consideration of the way that early 20th century avant- garde figures such as Gertrude Stein, Picasso, or T. S. Eliot used primitivism. He writes that they:

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“became modern by acting black" [and] how "linguistic masquerade" or "racial

ventriloquism" enabled a rebellion against established models of language and

literature. O'Hara's rebellious gesture was not to approximate and usurp black

languages and modes, but to focus on the fantastical element of primitivism. His

embrace of blackness is, I want to suggest, worked out in part as a reaction

against the norms that he has failed to meet.449

Despite the fact that Stoneley invokes previous avant-garde artists interest in primitivism as the explanation for O’Hara’s interest in the black phallus, I find his explanation to be interesting, but overly psychologically driven and complex. Future scholarship in this area focusing on the relationship between homosexual men’s sexual fantasies about black men and the intersection of that research with fiction written during the Civil Rights period could work to tease out these various meanings and points of view in a way that hasn’t yet been researched – at least with

O’Hara and the New York Poets. On the subject of primitivism, Magee agrees with North:

I would say that, like Ellison, O'Hara and Creeley made African American

cultural expression the prime mover behind the "experimental attitude" the

American avant-garde-not only because they believed that was in fact the impetus

behind much advance-guard art, but because doing so kept the connection

between that art and social activity such as the Civil Rights movement operative

and in the foreground.450

449 Stoneley 497. 450 Magee 701.

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I am fascinated that O’Hara can be read either way, especially because the passages in his poetry,

while at first appearance might seem racist, upon both contextual reflection and a close reading

of his entire poetic oeuvre reveals, in my opinion, just the opposite. Smith continues:

Despite some stereotypical allusions, then, O’Hara’s poetry is permeated by a

strong regard for racial difference. . . . he is asserting that recognition of

difference creates mutual respect. Our identities cannot, and must not, be reduced

to the colour of our skins, or to racial stereotypes such as ‘cool jazz,’ hence ‘dying

in black and white we fight for what we love, not are.’ 451

Smith’s final O’Hara quote comes from a poem entitled “Ode: Salute to the French Negro

Poets,” in which O’Hara writes, in addition to Smith’s choice of quote, “for if there’s fortuity it’s in the love we bear each other’s differences / in race which is the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles.” 452 Alexandra Gold has also written about the complexities attendant in the discussion of Frank O’Hara and race using his poem, “Salute to the French Negro Poet, Aime

Césaire,” as a clarifying moment. Her comments are insightful and tend to support my idea that, for O’Hara, who also belonged to a marginalized community, there existed a feeling of brotherhood with the American black community. Gold writes:

I suggest that the connection between O’Hara and Césaire runs deeper than these

superficial connections can only, of necessity, begin to indicate. I will argue here

that O’Hara’s attraction to Césaire in “Ode: Salute” is more broadly based on the

poets’ shared struggle to poetically reconcile their peripheral identities to

451 Smith 38. See also Magee 707. 452 Collected Poems 305.

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exclusive social landscapes. For though the French Negro Poets were titularly

aligned with France, their connection to that country remained uneasy. These

Negro Poets’ marginalized position within the Francophone world likely

resonated with the homosexual O’Hara, enmeshed as he was in his own virulently

homophobic 1950s milieu. Accordingly, these poems occupy an intrinsically

politicized and inevitably personal stance. Césaire and O’Hara poetically

deconstruct the discursive hegemony of power regimes that not only reinforce

colonial submission or normative sexuality, but that also attempt to define these

poets as ‘Other.’ Yet their malleable presentations of self refuge coherence,

therefore defying inscription; the plasticity of identity that crucially underlies both

“In Memory” and “Notebook” exposes prescriptive rhetoric as an indefensible

“ruse” (to borrow O’Hara’s term). My aim here will therefore be to clarify the

resiliency of O’Hara and Césaire’s depictions of selfhood.453

In addition to identification with blacks, O’Hara also occasionally mentions his sexual fetish

for black men – but, curiously, not for a particular black man.454 Magee sees this simply as

evidence that, for O’Hara (and for many homosexual men), the “usual lack of distinction

between the artistic, the personal, the sexual,” means that it is difficult to interpret these

references with any kind of certainty.455 Nevertheless, O’Hara poetry also contains a handful of references to black phallic depictions, stereotypical depictions that today read as overtly

453 Gold 258-259. 454 In some of these poems, O’Hara’s appropriation would be classified, in the 21st century, as writing in “blackface,” an offensive and inappropriate writing technique. 455 Magee 721.

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insensitive and problematic. Peter Stoneley, one of the few scholars who has written extensively

about this issue in O’Hara’s poetry, writes about these references in his article entitled, “O’Hara,

Blackness, and the Primitive.” Specifically, he notes that:

O'Hara had an interest in sexual encounters with seemingly heterosexual African-

American men. Among the anecdotes of his adventures in the 1950s, Gooch

relates that O'Hara invited the black postman into his apartment for sex, and he

fellated a black token clerk in a change booth in Queens. O'Hara cast the black

man in an emphatically sexual role, and this was also a significant feature of the

poetry. He frequently wrote of the black man as a fundamentally—even a

violently—sexual being.456

Stoneley also notes that other O’Hara scholars have made brief mention of his poetic interest in black men. He writes:

Nielsen notes that O'Hara's imaginings of blackness are far removed from his

relationships with and writing about black individuals. Andrew Ross also sees

"fantasies of the atavistic Other," while Benjamin Friedlander comments,

"O'Hara's interest in race is less didactic than libidinal, less a matter of sociology

than sex." 457

The fetishization of black men’s’ sexual prowess was as much a part of mid-century homosexual lore as it was a long-standing part of more generalized heterosexual racism in

America. The difference, however, was significant in that homosexual men saw no violent threat

456 Stoneley 495. Also see Gooch 195, 196. 457 Stoneley 511.

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from black men – just the opposite, in fact. Homosexual sex with a black man was something to

fantasize about, an aspirational sexual goal, if you will, for many homosexual men. I disagree

with Stoneley in his description of O’Hara’s vision or depiction of black men as “violently

sexual.” Homosexual sex with a black man, for O’Hara, would have been a feather in one’s cap,

a sexual conquest, something to brag about at the bar with fellow homosexuals. Readers should

keep in mind that, for O’Hara, particularly in the early part of his life, his sex life consisted

entirely of consensual anonymous sex, or casual sex with male friends, and therefore not

“relationship sex” in that sense.458 Therefore, most of his sexual encounters, unless they were

with friends, would have had this fetishization of anonymous, random sex partners attached to

them. Nevertheless, Stoneley notes that O’Hara’s sexual poems about black men have proved

problematic for critics. He writes:

These lines and comparable lines in other poems have been taken as offensive

racist clichés. It is easy to see why Aldon Lynn Nielsen, among others, has

written of "an imagined aura of primal eroticism" in O'Hara’s writing of black

men.459

Epstein addresses the issue of race with regard to O’Hara and his coterie of friends by providing their reaction to fellow poet LeRoi Jones’ life conversion after the assassination of

Malcolm X in February 1965. Jones suddenly left his wife and two daughters, changed his name to Amiri Baraka, and abandoned his white friends, including O’Hara. Epstein continues with

O’Hara and Joe LeSueur’s reaction:

458 The one exception to this statement would be his two-year romantic relationship with Vincent Warren. 459 Stoneley 495. Also see Nielsen 222.

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Those he [Baraka] had left behind downtown were understandably confused and

stung by his departure. As Joe LeSueur recalls, ‘the community of artist and

intellectuals who had taken LeRoi up . . . felt stabbed in the back.’ . . . [and]

deplored his old friend’s newfound commitment to racial separatism as a

distressing step backward. Soon after Baraka’s departure, O’Hara wrote to

Ashbery [who was living in Paris at the time]: ‘LeRoi seems not to be interested

in us-all any more (sic) and is reported to have removed himself to Harlem.

. . . I find it so personally disappointing, it reminds me only of 1868.’”460

What I believe can be said about O’Hara’s poetic presentation of race is that in O’Hara’s

America, he often sees and comments positively on racial differences, inviting people with

ethnic and racial differences to share the streets of New York with him. Therefore, I believe, on

balance, that O’Hara finds brotherhood with other marginalized peoples. The reason I describe

his relationship with race as complicated is that he occasionally uses vernacular speech in his

poems, and while that reads in the 21st century as racist, I don’t believe that was his intention.

My take on his use of written vernacular is not that it’s a racist or a mocking insult; instead that it was a reference to a speech pattern he found interesting or useful to create a certain characterization in a poem. His references to the black phallus, I read simply as vulgar,

meaningless homosexual braggadocio. However, I believe that more scholarship is required on

the issue of O’Hara, race, and Civil Rights in order to make a more nuanced argument.

460 Beautiful Enemies 229.

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Despite the scholarship on his racially complicated poems, there is no doubt that the aesthetic social circle O’Hara inhabited included little racial diversity, and he showed little personal interest in the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960s. Another way to read O’Hara’s career as a museum curator, and his circle of aesthetic friends would be to view the whole of his life as aesthetically elitist, regardless of whether you’re talking about their early, emerging, and often poverty-stricken careers, or referring to his coterie after they began to have commercial success.

Nevertheless, O’Hara’s poems contain frequent references to racial differences in Cold War

America and various ethnicities that comprised New York City. As a member of a minority community himself, O’Hara was especially aware of the prejudices of the times, and his poetry generally depict him welcoming the diverse city he lived within. His negative views on other

Americans’ treatment of blacks goes back to poems from his service days, where he was first introduced to outright racism and bigotry in his fellow soldiers – especially those from the South.

Here, I turn to Stoneley once more, who observes:

The dark other seems finally to have been cast up in prejudicial terms, and

exploited and consumed. With such objectifying and usurping of racial others, the

poet emphasizes his privilege as a white man . . . But, again, O'Hara unsettles

"everyday life" in America by entering into these mainstream racialized fantasies

with an explicit libidinal energy that threatens to unmask them, to unveil some

suppressed truths about white desire in popular culture. O'Hara approaches racist

mythologies in a questioning and shifting way, and he both inhabits and punctures

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them. For him the primitive is not a finite and knowable other, but an opportunity

for a polymorphous experimentation . . . 461

Stoneley returns us to Magee’s previous observation that, for O’Hara, and perhaps for many

Cold War-era homosexuals, the lines between anonymous sex, friendship, and romantic love,

were constantly moveable and shifting. In addition, homosexual sex was highly political in the

mid-century, a fact with which O’Hara was keenly aware. In this poem, he conflates “politics”

with prejudices, inclusion, and acceptance in the United States:

it’s just like this here honoring the arts on political occasions who could like it except if’n you been lugging those rocks (not necessarily in jail) and you got this burning to be a part of your bloody society like a spinster or something and finally you get to travel and what happens you can’t even see anything that’s politics for you462

O’Hara here opines that just like America honors the arts only when it is expedient to do so, “on political occasions,” if you are black in America, you might be used politically, but other than that, you’re worse than forgotten. In fact, as a black American, you are not even free to move about the country “if you got this burning / to be a part of your bloody society.” Note O’Hara’s use of the word “your” in this line. Rather than include himself with black America, as he often does, in this line, he decidedly points out that the struggle he’s describing in this poem is one in which black Americas alone struggle. Written in 1961, O’Hara memorializes in this poem a chasm between races in America so deep that travelling blacks were more than unwelcome –

461 Stoneley 504. 462 Poems Retrieved 208.

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they were actually unsafe travelling through large parts of the United States, having to rely on the

so-called “Green Book” for guidance on where it was safe to get gas, dine, or what hotels at

which they would be welcome. While it is interesting in itself that O’Hara is aware of this,

what’s really key in this poem is that he blames politics for this inequality – intimating that if

equality was politically expedient, American blacks would already have it. O’Hara uses the

example of blacks in this poem to represent both the worst of America’s discrimination of all

races - the totality of it as well as its hypocritical political roots.

4.8 Sexual Orientation as a Cold War Political Liability

Ultimately just as hysteria-producing as other Cold War topics of Russia, identity, racial

politics, and nuclear annihilation, the topic of American military readiness was a needling

political and social concern ultimately encompassing many topics, including the very essence of

masculinity itself, which I write about at length in the next chapter. If America had to man a war

again, could she? Were her young men ready to go to war? Kyle Cuordileone addressed this

concern in the opening chapters of her book, Manhood and American Political Culture in the

Cold War, in which she asks this question: If America’s men had been weakened by what she

calls, the forces of mass society, what would it take for America to meet the Cold War

challenge?463 What were these “forces of mass society” suspected of weakening America’s men?

Astonishingly, the “force” that seemed to be on the everyone’s mind most was a heightened but unfounded (and untrue) fear that homosexuality was growing among the nation’s male youths, categorically making them unfit as soldiers or as employees in the government. Masculinity itself

463 Cuordileone 14.

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became a societal concern of the decade of the 1950s – present in unprecedented ways in the

political campaigns of 1950, used to smear opponents - and woven throughout the Eisenhower

administration in the form of employment policies, Congressional hearings, police actions, and

whisper campaigns. Literary critic Michael Davidson, in his book, Guys Like Us, notices the

frequent communal forgetfulness of Cold War historians about the prominent role sexual

orientation played in the politics of the mid-century, noting correctly, “Those histories [of this

era] . . . seldom deal with issues of sexuality and gender that often underwrote narratives of

national security.”464

During the 1950s, in remarkable and unparalleled ways, homosexuality was an unlikely subject of government personnel policies and the political philosophies, particularly those of conservatives. New Deal liberals were painted as feminized – bleeding hearts, “men of affluent

Ivy-League backgrounds, cultured and vaguely aristocratic, cosmopolitan in thought and demeanor and thus suspiciously un-American.”465 Starck’s anthology, Between Fear and

Freedom, is concerned with this very subject – that of the outsized role of masculinity in politics

during the early Cold War. Her thesis speaks to the concern of the age regarding America’s men,

studying the heightened sense of the era that venerated “hard masculine toughness,” “sanctioned

use of aggression, force, and violence,” or war as “a chance to prove one’s manliness,” and how,

during this period in American history, these concerns became odder and odder subjects of

American political theater.466 As polar opposites in this philosophy, two-time Democratic Party

464 Davidson 5. 465 Cuordileone 39. 466 Starck 167-169.

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Presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, suffered the epithets and whispers associated with the role of a so-called limp-wristed, lavender candidate both in 1952 and 1956. Slightly earlier, but overlapping with the Stevenson smears, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, architect of the so- called “red, pink, and lavender scares,” styled himself in opposition to Democrats as “a real man’s man who went straight for the ‘groin.’”467

At the height of these governmental witch hunts, O’Hara wrote a poem mocking the various- colored political dust storms McCarthy and others had been stirring up. Entitled “The Weekend,” he cleverly inserts McCarthy’s “dangerous” colors into a somewhat nonsensical poem as a kind of dog whistle for readers who might notice:

Who are you looking for, pink book? All the locomotive engineers have rose fever and Long Island, the Siberia of the tourist, is sounding like Old Faithful in a bus. Tonight we improvised a conversation between two drunkards with lisps and afterwards made jello but it had pineapple in it. The trains hate pineapple, it just won’t burn. In London I read your Naples diary, in Frisco I didn’t have time to read, how are you!

The snow was whirling like a picture frame but I bought the tie anyway and gave it to the snarling helicopter, but it passed me by. O lavender kitchen equipment, aren’t you the seriousness that passed me by? the cloud of tools clanging, that will keep coming back like Old Faithful in a bus? who asked you anyway? It’s too late to become a priestly transvestite because all the shops are closed and the candles are hid. And who wants to monkey around with monkeys?468

467Cuordileone 46. 468 Poems Retrieved 113.

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I’ve included the poem in its entirety here to reveal O’Hara’s strategy for working the stand-in

colors for epithets regarding political leaning and sexual orientation: pink, rose, and lavender.

His mention of “rose” is perhaps a literary ruse – rose and pink could be construed to be the

same color, although pink was the shade used to signal that a person was soft on Communism,

and lavender (“O lavender kitchen equipment”) signified a homosexual. O’Hara also mentions

lisps, the use of the sibilant “s” so commonly a homosexual stereotype. The final phrase in the

last line of the first stanza should perhaps read with an exaggerated accent, “how are you?,” the

cocktail party exaggerated artifice of camp conversation. In the second stanza, O’Hara writes

about kitchen appliances and men’s accessories (a tie), both indicative of a shopping trip, very

feminine, and finishes the poem with a reference to a priestly transvestite.469 O’Hara had been raised Catholic, and actually thought about becoming a priest when he was a child, but by the time he wrote this poem had long since given up religion. “Transvestite,” a common mid-century term that refers to men who dress as women, not because they are transgender, or performers – drag queens - but because, for them, cross-dressing is a kind of sexual fetish. I find no references of O’Hara (or any of his friends) participating in a habit of cross-dressing, but perhaps he threw this into the poem to be deliberately irreverent or just to create a ridiculous visual – a priest dressed as a woman.

By the 1960 Presidential election, however, red, pink, and lavender smear campaign political techniques no longer seemed to win elections. It’s possible the citizenry had, by this time, seen through the attempts to tarnish a reputation with innuendo, or the politicians had simply worn the

469 The tie and the kitchen equipment are both also emblematic of the 1950s organization man concerns – gadgets for the home and the uniform of the corporation. More on the organization man in the next chapter.

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issue out. McCarthy had drunk himself to death by then, disgraced, and the new discriminatory

political issue was whether a Catholic, if elected, would be beholden to the Pope or to his

American constituency. Whatever the reason, the liberals, out of the White House for eight years

by 1960, had finally found a candidate who had a unique political combination - both the perfect

liberal credentials and the perfect Cold War masculinity credentials. In JFK, they had a candidate

who met all the touch points: he was a World War II hero, he was masculine (a womanizer even

– all the better), hard on Communism, bookish, self-assured, and surrounded himself with

thinking intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorenson. His opponent, Richard Nixon,

on the other hand, was anti-intellectual, lacked culture and taste, was obsessed with his own

image, and needed a lot of personal gratification.470 Despite the previously held “unattractive” liberal characteristics associated with being an east coast Ivy Leaguer and having a patrician birthright, and the fact that he was a Catholic, Kennedy overcome these potential political negatives with his youth, good looks, obvious charm, and political savvy, narrowly winning the popular vote and the election.

4.9 The Lavender Scare

As a New Yorker, and additionally somewhat insulated by both his friendships and his work in the arts community there, neither O’Hara nor anyone in his circle of friends were personally arrested or harassed by police during the 1950s for being homosexual. Nor did he write poems specifically about the hysteria over homosexual government employees that imperiled homosexual men in Washington, D. C. during the late 1940s and 1950s, despite that every

470 Cuordileone 180 – 201.

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homosexual in America was aware of what was happening there. D.C. was the political stage on which long-ranging ripples of disgust and panic about homosexuality played out; ripples that, of course, affected O’Hara (and all homosexuals) throughout his life indirectly, in the form of public opinion. What was happening in Washington regarding the paranoia over Communists infiltrating the federal government and the concomitant assault on homosexual federal employees, then spilled over to District homosexual civilians, as well, in the form of police altercations and legal turmoil. 471 Sedgwick notes that the layers of paranoia present at the time are, strangely, an adverse feature of paranoia itself, so central a part of post-War America. She wrote: “Part of the explanation lies in a property of paranoia itself: simply put, paranoia tends to be contagious.”472 In Washington, the contagion continued throughout the decade with inflammatory newspaper headlines and weekly magazine stories that stirred public fear about homosexuals throughout the nation. Cuordileone proposed the term, “pink, red, and lavender trinity,” to describe the panic, referring simply to “the trinity” when writing about the reckless scapegoating of liberals, Communists, and homosexuals who worked in the federal government that was rampant during the early Cold War period. Based on the idea that these infiltrating individuals (Communists and homosexuals) could “pass” - that is, look like everyone else –

Senator McCarthy and other conservative lawmakers set out to expose “political, moral, and sexual subversion” in the government.473 Rhetoric around the unlikely political topic of manliness and masculinity became the political whisper campaign weapon of the decade.

471 Sodomy was a crime in every state in America during this time. 472 Novel Gazing 6. 473 Cuordileone 37.

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Liberals were painted as “pansies,” while conservatives espoused the idea that the best Cold War politicians demonstrated a hard-masculine toughness and had gone to war to prove their manliness. Liberals were “on notice” to overcome their reputation of being soft on Communism despite the small number of actual members of the Communist Party of the United States of

America never actually posing a serious threat within America; yet liberal politicians struggled to defeat this distinction all through the Eisenhower years. Homosexuals were targeted specifically by those in power, and expelled from the both the Truman and Eisenhower governments by the hundreds because they were seen to be soft on Communism and/or easy blackmail targets due to their supposed uncontrollable sexual appetites. Testimony given in the infamous Chambers / Hiss spy trial heightened this conclusion, when a homosexual story arc compounding the treason charge was revealed in court. Whittaker Chambers, who had become a

Communist in the 1930s, apparently had begun a homosexual relationship with Alger Hiss which ultimately led to U.S. secrets finding their way to Russia. Cuordileone writes that during the trial,

Hiss was painted as weak-willed, effete, and treacherous; an eastern establishment liberal who was “transgressive in politics, morals and sex.” 474 The celebrated case, which was daily national news during the course of two trials, worked to substantiate the link between liberals, homosexuals, traitors, and Communists for anyone looking to make that connection. O’Hara even mentioned Hiss in a poem, wondering aloud during the reading of an occasional poem at a party, “did you give a kind thought, hurrying, to Alger Hiss?”475

474 Cuordileone 44. 475 Collected Poems 265. Hiss had just published his book, In the Court of Public Opinion, when O’Hara wrote this poem, so perhaps that explains why Hiss was on his mind..

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Despite the fact that O’Hara wasn’t personally targeted by the state for his homosexuality,

his point of view on America, war, politics, Communism, and the binary political environment

had already been borne out of his military service, and, as such, he wrote about these subjects for

the rest of his life. A brief discussion of the heightened paranoia about homosexuality in the

country in general, however, often finds itself a subject in O’Hara’s poems. “There’s no need to

look for a target you’re it,” he writes, recalling childhood scuffles by bullies, perhaps a similar

relatable feeling to being targeted by one’s own government because you’re a homosexual. 476

O’Hara’s most explicit poem passage about the targeting of homosexuals by the state is this one:

I am appearing, yes it’s true accompanied by my criminal record my dope addiction and my sexual offenses it’s a great blow for freedom the Commissioner said when he gave me my card, you have proved that Society contaminated you, not you it and we’re proud to have you on the boards not to say the records, again but try not to spread the infection like Billie and Monk and the others be a good whatever-you-are and keep clean and I’ll pick you up after the show477

Just as homosexuals were being arrested, fined, their identities recorded and shared with other governmental agencies in many cities, but at a fever pitch in Washington, D.C., O’Hara writes a parody of the criminality applied to homosexuality in the 1950s. Noting the narrator’s criminal record consisting of “dope addiction” and “sexual offenses,” he records an imaginary scene whereby a Commissioner opines “it’s a great blow for freedom” to give the narrator his “card,”

476 Collected Poems 391. 477 Collected Poems 375.

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presumably his authorization to exist. Despite the Commissioner’s officious concern, he’s bound

to admit that the narrator has proven that “Society” contaminated him, not the other way around,

and therefore he welcomes the narrator back “on the records.” Homosexuality in the early Cold

War period was considered a pathology and often looked upon as a disease or pathology, so the

subsequent warning by the Commissioner is also in keeping with the times. “Try not to spread

infection,” he warns, “like Billie and Monk and the others,” conflating greats Billie Holiday and

Thelonious Monk and the 52nd Street blues clubs and jazz joints and the public health problem of venereal disease, often demeaningly associated with blacks and jazz musicians. “Keep clean” also refers to the belief that homosexuals (and other marginalized communities) were diseased.478 The Commissioner can’t even say “homosexual,” in the poem he refers to the narrator as “whatever-you-are,” effectively completely removing even his humanity. Such was the public conversation on homosexuality in the mid-century.

In a poem written to his friend John Ashbery, who, at the time, was living in Paris, O’Hara

seems to be offering advice to Ashbery about speaking out about injustices, particularly those

which face fellow homosexuals. O’Hara writes:

It is because you are silent. Speak, if speech is not embarrassed by your attention . . .

What is the poet for, if not to scream himself into a hernia of admiration for all paradoxical integuments: . . .

478 Another possible reading of this line is that O’Hara here references an endemic drug addiction problem among jazz musicians, and the destructive consequences of drugs in that community.

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It is unusual for O’Hara to write a poem that reads like an admonishment, but it is a fact that

Ashbery’s poetry was not as straightforward about homosexuality as O’Hara’s – in fact, Ashbery was more likely to revert to the coded language of a previous generation than to write conspicuously about homosexuality. Epstein reads this as advice to defend the brotherhood with his poetry:

But there is an even more specific, revealing subtext here: speaking ‘poet to poet’

in this missive, O’Hara also seems to be covertly advising Ashbery in how to

proceed as a poet, and in particular as a poet who is also homosexual. Faced with

a world where flamboyant ‘color[ful]’ people are ‘arrested’ for ‘exposing

themselves’ and their true nature (in gay bars, for example), the poet must not

withdraw into evasiveness and silence. Implicit in the poem, then, is a sly critique

of Ashbery’s silence, his withdrawal in the face of homophobia.479

It’s possible, I believe, that Ashbery, living in a much more accepting post-war society in Paris, felt no need to be as out-front with his sexuality as O’Hara. I also read a little jealousy into this poem – Ashbery left an extremely complicated American society who hated and feared the homosexual – to go to Paris to write a dissertation. However, once there, he stayed for ten years, and O’Hara was perhaps disjointed at this moment, that he was carrying the torch for out and open homosexuals alone, when Ashbery could have also been contributing. It is a curious poem for all these reasons, and advice that Ashbery ultimately ignored.

479 Beautiful Enemies 243.

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Falk claims that Cold War cultural diplomacy was nurtured in a cradle of dissent as

American Cold War critics continually carved out a cultural space for free expression and

foreign policy dissent from during the war and well into the 1950s and 1960s. His book

challenges the idea that the Cold War was simply a bipolar contest for control and influence over

the rest of the world by revealing the history of dissent in the U.S. cultural industries – primarily

Hollywood, the nascent television industry in New York, and theater. He posits that although

Cold Warriors tried to construct a uniform, monolithic, and sanitized national identity that

created a rigid demarcation between the U.S. and Soviets, that they ultimately failed because

persistent domestic dissent constantly promoted an alternative vision – and also took that

alternative vision overseas, where it ultimately prevailed. Poets like O’Hara, Ginsberg, Corso

and novelists like Mailer could be added to Falk’s list of cultural dissenters, albeit with a smaller

audience than film or television.

O’Hara’s poetry often finds humor in the “denial politics” or the paranoia Americans

invested so much energy in, as in this example:

exceptional excitement which is finally simple blindness (but not to be sneezed at) like a successful American satellite . . . 480

Blindness to your government’s political abuses – “not to be sneezed at” – can, of course, lead to

“exceptional excitement.” His mood in this poem is this: America is an affluent, peace-loving, monolithic place, isn’t it? What’s not to be excited about? And the technology race with Russia?

480 Collected Poems 297. Explorer 1, the first American satellite to circle the globe, had been launched on January 1, 1958. This poem was written during that month – January, 1958.

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We’ve now got satellites looking over our enemies, haven’t we? The truth, however, as O’Hara

well knew, was far more complicated and darker than this stanza let on.

4.10 Gender as a Political Weapon

I end this chapter by looking specifically at O’Hara’s poetry involving politics and gender.

Chapter 5 looks specifically at societal expectations about the performance of masculinity, often in the guise of the new “organization man.” However, masculinity played an important and driving role in American politics in the early Cold War period as well, and I examine O’Hara’s poetic subversion of those politically tinged ideas here.

With regard to O’Hara responding to a post-gender America, O’Hara fully engages an

America that is not merely heteronormative, and this post-gender America which he inhabits is extremely well-developed in his poetry. O’Hara belongs to the generation of American authors who began to write fiction that tackled race and gender differences, living as they did in an era when both topics were, at least in some nascent sense, beginning to be formally addressed by the power structures in America – for good or for bad.481 This period includes, of course, the blossoming of civil rights laws in America, and a significant resurgence of urban communities of gay and lesbian citizens who chose to live, at least partially, without hiding their sexuality, but also heightened racial tensions and the lavender scare in the nation’s capital.482 My dissertation tackles the mid-century gender issues around masculinity in the next chapter. As I explain in this

481 Hazel Smith does a good job addressing the gender issue in O’Hara’s oeuvre in her book, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography. 482 While full legal and societal equality for neither group has yet to come about, the awareness that these citizens were going to demand equality in America was at least being talked about in one way or another in O’Hara’s lifetime. See Chauncey for more.

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chapter, O’Hara’s cosmopolitan attitude, garnered in the Navy as a very young man, always

informed his poetic style, his choices of subject matter, and his refusal to submit to the societal

constraints of the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, whether about race or gender. O’Hara’s own

sexual orientation and his decision to live authentically as a homosexual is personal evidence that

he saw the world in a post-gender way. However, in addition, O’Hara saw his version of

America as one which welcomes and celebrates a large inclusive group of ethnicities, religions,

and racial ancestry. In Chapter 2, I wrote that refusal is at the heart of O’Hara’s poetic, and is the

very aspect that transforms it from lightweight, low art to a position of transcendent power.

Politics was of great interest to O’Hara and features prominently in his oeuvre. The post-war

years in which he matured were a time of turmoil on many fronts, and O’Hara’s poetry often

comments on the turmoil of the decade – at times reflecting aspects of it, but most often rejecting

the conservative, racially-segregated, anti-homosexual, anti-Russian political age in which he

lived.483

There was this significant “problem” – homosexuality – that O’Hara, and so many other men and women, had to find a way to reckon with, not only for their personal identity and happiness, but in the mid-century, sexual orientation was also mixed up with the country’s sense of honor, heightened moral values (for show, anyway), and levels of patriotism. In this poem, O’Hara addresses that odd relationship:

among the relics of postwar hysterical pleasures I see my vices lying like abandoned works of art

483 O’Hara lived for just twenty years after his discharge from the Navy in 1946, and while he wrote poetry from 1946 through 1966, the vast majority of his mature oeuvre (some 500 poems) were written from the time he moved to New York in 1951 to the end of his love affair with Canadian dancer Vincent Warren in 1961. Therefore, when I write in terms of “the decade,” unless I specify, I am referring loosely to the 1950s.

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which I created so eagerly to be worldly and modern and with it what I can’t remember I see them with your eyes484

Postwar hysteria is, in fact, the way many historians describe American attitudes on homosexuality, so O’Hara isn’t guilty of hyperbole here. He refers to “his vices,” perhaps thinking of more than his sexual orientation. He might be thinking about his drinking, his street sex; or perhaps all of them. These, he writes, he sees as “abandoned works of art,” he created his mature self – he, himself, is a work of art. These “vices” were meant to make him seem “with it,” modern, and worldly, hip – not vices at all, really, but simply characteristics of his life. And yet, if he forgets about his sexual orientation, in particular, even for a moment, he sees the reminder in others’ eyes.

O’Hara was certainly not a lone literary voice writing in the mid-century about where

America had gone wrong. There is something endearingly heartfelt about his writing, however, knowing that his ambition was not to gain a following or create a national persona with his poetry. He wasn’t writing to shock the nation either, with literature about nihilism or revolution – even at his most vulgar or sexual. His statements about his audience all suggest that he wrote for his clique – the people who already loved him, and often shared his point of view. In fact, most of his poems ended up in drawers or coat pockets, all but forgotten until after his death, when his friends and fellow poets, particularly Kenneth Koch, immediately swooped down on his

484 Collected Poems 347.

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apartment and gathered every scrap of paper they could find, filling two suitcases with poems

and fragments of poems so that nothing would happen to them.485

Despite the size and friendship of O’Hara’s contemporaneous audience, his poetry would have been long forgotten, on top of everything one could write about, if it wasn’t brilliant and incisive avant-garde work. O’Hara provides for readers a look at how he found America during a particularly transgressive time for men in general, but particularly for those men who didn’t fit easily into the accepted mold. In the next chapter, I look more specifically about the “Crisis of

Masculinity,” a major American pre-occupation during the early Cold War period.

485 Gooch 466.

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CHAPTER 5

AN INDOMITABLE REBEL IN THE DECADE OF THE CRISIS OF MASCULINITY

In this chapter, I’m particularly interested in O’Hara’s poetic works on these two topics:

O’Hara’s non-political poetic commentary about his homosexuality, alternative sexual

orientations in general, and sex – one might accurately describe these works as his writing about

otherness versus assimilation; and his complex interaction, mostly resistance, with the cultural

subject of the so-called “organization man,” the young post-war college graduate and his mid-

century expected career and life trajectory.486 Facing the corrosive masculine angst of the post- war period, O’Hara, admittedly an outlier in issues about men due to his homosexuality, nevertheless worked intensely after college to create a life that suited him individually, rather than a life created to please either a corporate or societal group; an action that paradoxically shielded him from much of the American masculine angst of the age. By accepting (and even glorifying) his homosexuality, O’Hara made his daily life virtually immune to the very tenacious social pressures most American men felt during this time. Despite subsequent societal stressors to conform to norms of heterosexual behavior, O’Hara accomplished this immunity by staking out – and creating - his community of friends, actually more of a family of choice, the members of which were as unconventional as he was – either by token of their sexual orientation or their occupational pursuits in the arts. Among this community, he (and they) flourished. New York

City was a common post-war choice for homosexual men – a city large enough that their

486 William Whyte’s seminal book on the World War II generation of men and what was happening to them is entitled The Organization Man.

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anonymity was insured, but also the aesthetic capital of the world in the post-war period and an

important and exciting city for artists, poets, authors, dancers, actors, and musicians. O’Hara’s

poetry became his lifeforce, and despite publication of most of it only posthumously, his poetry

serves as an important historical signpost for the times in which he lived. Through poetry and the

arts, O’Hara lived a very unconventional life in the midst of a post-war society built strictly on

normative conventions. There is a magical quality to his life: the very exemplification of those

who were ostracized in society - a weak-appearing and effeminate homosexual - not only thrived

in the mid-century, but effectively criticized and surmounted the society that would have

expunged him through his poetic art form.

5.1 O’Hara’s Avant-Garde Community

O’Hara’s family-of-choice was the center of his life, and he was always the center of theirs.

Author Andrew Epstein explains that this “found community” was essential to O’Hara and his

friends because of the anti-homosexual American societal politics during the time, while David

Lehman identifies this group of poets as “the last avant-garde,” and writes about their

community-building as an essential component to any avant-garde group in history.487 Both are correct, of course, but there was a particular seminal moment in which O’Hara’s realization that his friends would become his life that bears further investigation. O’Hara already had enough life experience and artistic experience to understand that both his personal life and the kinds of poems he wanted to write were far from the mainstream. In his Kenyon Review essay that

487 O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, and Guest became known as The New York School, found in Lehman’s book, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets.

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became a roadmap of sorts for O’Hara, Paul Goodman described the 1951 world as “shell- shocked” and offered a salve for that condition: a community of artist peers. Further, he suggested that the members of the community use each other as subjects for poetry and visual art. “This is to solve the crisis of alienation in the simple way: the persons are estranged from themselves, from one another, and from their artist; he takes the initiative precisely by putting his arms around them and drawing them together. In literary terms this means: to write for them about them personally.” 488

As soon as O’Hara arrived in New York, he very deliberately set about to create this

Goodman-described community. O’Hara understood that an avant-garde artist needed a community for the support that was lacking in society toward boundary-pushing art; in Ashbery,

Koch, Freilicher, Hartigan, and many other artists and poets, he discovered his community.

O’Hara felt as though he had been in-exile in Ann Arbor during his 12-month master’s program, despite the fact that he visited New York several times in that year. John Ashbery wrote later about O’Hara’s arrival:

The one thing lacking in our privileged little world (privileged because it was a

kind of balcony overlooking the interestingly chaotic events happening in the

bigger worlds outside) was the arrival of Frank O’Hara to kind of cobble

everything together and tell us what we and they were doing. This happened in

1951.”489

488 Goodman 375. 489 Gooch 188.

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Ashbery is far from the only friend who wrote about O’Hara’s central role in their coterie –

O’Hara was recognized as the hub of their world by many. In a wonderful stanza O’Hara wrote

early in his New York life, he reiterates his emotional need for these friends:

Like a crazed dog that hears someone else’s trumpet I go yapping after pals and cannot bear to pant alone for I can imagine how the hermit dies490

In another poem, he memorializes a friends’ moment at the poet’s bar, the San Remo:

I remember JA staggering over to me in the San Remo and murmuring “I’ve met someone MARVELLOUS!” That’s friendship for you, and the sentiment of introduction.491

JA is, of course, John Ashbery, who was also gay (mutual friend Kenneth Koch was not), so he was the friend who introduced O’Hara to the gay bars and the homosexual scene once he arrived.

Koch later wrote, “Frank in his first two years in New York was having this kind of explosive effect on a lot of the people he met.” 492 Ashbery wrote that “when Frank moved to New York it

was difficult to see him alone. New York discovered him and his radiant magnetism almost as

soon as he moved there. Everybody wanted to be with him, so that it was difficult to get a private

audience.” 493 O’Hara deliberately identified a brotherhood with which to live, and, in such a

way, fulfilled an important part of Paul Goodman’s advice to avant-garde young artists.

For the first ten years of his residence in New York, O’Hara wrote approximately 500 poems

– on average, one a week for ten years. From 1961 to the end of his life in 1966, his poetic output

490 Poems Retrieved 31. 491 Collected Poems 267. 492 Homage 20. 493 Homage 21.

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slows to fewer than an average of one poem a month. The commonly believed reasoning for this

is that his career at MoMA was becoming more and more demanding, preventing him from

having the time to write poetry. Curiously, he wrote no poems about his art curator career,

beyond mentioning going to work or writing a poem when returning to work. The Frank O’Hara

character he had created in many of his poems was a free-wheeling flaneur and didn’t work. The

person Frank O’Hara, however, for years, managed a very demanding and extreme social life

and a 9 to 5 job. This must have been inordinately difficult given his active social life; the vast

majority of his friends didn’t have a daily grind with which to contend.

Bill Berkson’s recently published Notebook contains an anecdote showing that the central

role O’Hara played in the friends’ world continued for many years – well into the 1960s.

Berkson, who was younger than O’Hara by 13 years, writes the story of how he met O’Hara

through Kenneth Koch, who was Berkson’s teacher in a poetry seminar at Columbia University.

One day Koch took Berkson aside and invited him to a party at Jane Freilicher’s brownstone.

“He added that Frank O’Hara would be there and therefore I would meet Frank. ‘He’ll probably

become something of a germ in your life,’ is what I recall Kenneth saying, though ‘germ’

certainly is an odd word for him to have used — though, too in retrospect, pretty exact.”494

Goodman’s exhortation that one should write for one’s community, and about them, heavily guided O’Hara’s career and ultimately lead to the critical moniker “coterie” that is often applied to his poetry. O’Hara had already begun to think that perhaps he would find his niche writing about and for his friends, who understod him, rather than writing for commercial or critical

494 Notebook 138.

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success.495 In the same essay, Goodman also wrote that once the artist has his community and

begins to write about and for them, “the advance-guard at once becomes a genre of the highest

integrated art, namely Occasional Poetry - the poetry celebrating weddings, festivals, and so

forth.”496 Goodman also refers to Goethe’s opinion that occasional poetry of this kind is the

“highest form of poetry.” All of this was critical for O’Hara to hear precisely at this stage in his career. His experience in the Navy had convinced him to live as an out gay man, his experiences in college had shown him the joy of having friends with which one could live honestly, and, with this essay, Goodman was providing a blueprint of how to live successfully and happily as an artist.497

5.2 Mid-Century Public Attitudes About Homosexuality

To live as an open homosexual in the 1950s was a very difficult life choice. Historian Allan

Berube’s book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War

Two, examines the fate of the post-war homosexual man, encouraged and emboldened by meeting other homosexual men in service, in their attempting to forge communities of friends in

American cities, despite the obvious societal difficulties. During the first decade after the war, for example, almost half the United States enacted sexual psychopath laws that supplemented the sodomy laws still on the books. These new laws targeted personality types – people – rather than acts, so that homosexuals became associated in the minds of Americans with “child molester, . . .

495 Poems Retrieved xv. Donald Allen, O’Hara’s editor, notes with irony that it was Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. which published The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara in 1971, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1972. 496 Goodman 376. 497 Unfortunately for O’Hara, meeting Goodman personally after moving to New York wasn’t nearly as positive an experience. Gooch described it as “an example of the disappointment that sometimes follow upon meeting a cultural hero in person.” Gooch 187.

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sex offender, sex psychopath, sex degenerate, sex deviate, and sometimes even communist.”498

Whereas sodomy was the only homosexuality-related crime on the books before World War II, now homosexuals could be arrested for simply being who they were – “consensual sodomy, sexual perversion, and public indecency, . . . patronizing a gay bar, touching in public, or wearing the clothing of the other gender” – some homosexuals actually ending up in prison or mental institutions and forced to register as sex offenders.499 Note that the majority of these laws

used to criminalize homosexuality were enacted after World War II, at least in part, as a response

to homosexual men’s assertion of their identity and the emancipation gained from service. These

men, O’Hara included, suffered different degrees of life intrusion and disruption depending on

where they lived, where they worked, and how authentically they presented themselves. O’Hara

certainly understood the consequences many homosexuals were facing, even if his individual life

choices – among them living in New York, working in the arts, having a strong community of

support - had prevented him from experiencing some of the worst of these societal consequences.

“No one could have guessed their secret pleasures / that ardent profile whose public expression is

hate,” he wrote in a poem, referring to those homosexual men who feigned hatred for other

homosexuals as a method of staying hidden.500

For the homosexual man, there was no clear-cut way to express patriotism or national

identity without remaining hidden. Admitting homosexuality and living as a homosexual was

seen as an abomination against America. This attitude had precluded homosexual men from

498 Berube 258. 499 Berube 259. 500 Collected Poems 153.

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participating as soldiers, as we have seen in previous chapters, but also prevented homosexual men from serving in such professions as politicians, policemen, public school teachers, or clergymen. The risk that their peers or clients would “find out” their secret was simply too great.

National identity was certainly complicated when you were someone who self-identified as

“other,” particularly when the othering was supported by an American legal system that had largely declared the other illegal. In this regard, homosexual men and women had something in common with American Jews or African-Americans – homosexuality or mixed-race marriage, for example, were seen as abominations; Jim Crow laws were the standard fare in housing, education, and employment. Indeed, how could “othered” people in the mid-century embrace being an American? Treated as they were, why would they want to?

O’Hara’s relationship to the topic of employment, or career, is one of the more complex topics in this analysis. On the one hand, O’Hara had, in fact, fashioned himself into a version of the organization man – from 1955 until his death, he put a suit on and went to work at MoMA every day, where he gradually assumed more and more authority, received promotions, and earned a salary on which he relied.501 This part of his life was, in fact, identical to the organization man’s dream. Among all of his friends, O’Hara was the only one who had this kind of 9 to 5 job.502 The emerging artists and poets he associated with (and often wrote about), each cobbled together a meager living doing menial hourly work only until the time that their primary activity – their art – provided enough of an income that they could quit their “day” jobs.

501 For more on the organization man, see William Whyte’s seminal book of the same name. Even more complicated was the fact that O’Hara’s occupational duties were, in effect, helping the government with its cultural warfare efforts. 502 Only one other of O’Hara’s friends, poet Kenneth Koch, had a “job” – he taught at Columbia University beginning in 1959 after spending much of the decade earning a Ph.D. This career trajectory differs significantly from that of the organization man, however.

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O’Hara’s career, in fact, also started this way – he joked that he had taken a job “selling postcards” at MoMA shortly after arriving in New York, so that he could see the famous Matisse exhibit, which ran over Christmas 1951, as often as he wanted. He then left MoMA for two years in the early 1950s to work for editor Thomas Hess at ArtNews, where he wrote both features and exhibition reviews along with painters Elaine de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, and later, John

Ashbery and James Schuyler. This endeavor widened his circle of painter friends and contributed greatly to his career-long reputation as an arts writer. O’Hara returned to MoMA in 1955 to work in the new International Programs Department, and was subsequently promoted repeatedly until his final promotion to Associate Curator, no longer for the International Programs department, but for the Museum at large, in 1966. It was rumored that, at the time of his death, he was being groomed to be the successor for Curator of the Museum Collection, Dorothy Miller, who wanted to retire.503 O’Hara was preparing two important shows at the time of his death – retrospectives for Jackson Pollock, and for Willem de Kooning, who had agreed to the exhibition only if

O’Hara was the curator.

To discount the MoMA positions he held in those eleven years before his death wouldn’t portray an accurate picture of O’Hara’s daily life. However, curiously, he doesn’t mention his work at the Museum or his co-workers in his poems. This seems puzzling considering the importance the institution played in his life, in his acquaintances and friendships, and in his public reputation. He occasionally mentions wearing a suit, and, later in his career when he was travelling internationally to install MoMA exhibitions or to choose work for exhibitions, he

503 Miller did retire in 1969.

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sometimes wrote poems about the countries he visited, but there is an absolute lacuna in his

poetry about his work at the museum. This observation begs many questions. With regard to a

mid-century art / life literary consolidation, it would seem that O’Hara inhabited the work world

containing usual organization man pressures – bosses, work gossip and politics, salaries, raises,

promotions, and so on – but he simply chose to eliminate these things from his poetry. It appears,

then, that O’Hara’s poetry is, at least partially, about a curated life, a projected or illustrated one,

rather than about his actual life – a practice that runs counter to the mid-century predilection for

a literature of real life. Perhaps O’Hara chose poetic subjects in areas of his life in which he felt

he had control and ignored the rest. This chapter looks specifically at that contradiction in his

work, which can be interpreted in itself as an artifice in a poetic otherwise presented as reality.

Maggie Nelson, who wrote about contemporary poet Alice Notley in her book, Women, The

New York School, and Other True Abstractions, recalls this exchange with Notley: “I wanted to write something like O’Hara’s Lunch Poems,” she says. “They have a serenity to them which seems to emerge from the rather strict borders of his work at the museum; the hours, the suit and tie, the office, etc., as if the fact of being a rather anonymous worker like that was the condition that lit up the poem.”504 While I don’t agree with Notley that O’Hara’s museum work was the

work of “a rather anonymous worker,” I think her comment about the contrast between O’Hara’s

organization man position and his poetry is a valid one. 505 It is this compartmentalization of

504 Nelson 142. 505 During his career at MoMA, O’Hara curated many important exhibitions, including the United States representations at the IV Sao Paulo Bienal, the IV International Art Exhibition in 1957, and Documenta II in Kassel, Germany, in 1959. He organized a Jackson Pollock retrospective exhibition after Pollock’s death, and the exhibition toured Europe in 1958. That same year, for the United States representation at the XXIX Biennale in Venice, O’Hara chose works by Seymour Lipton and Mark Tobey; Tobey’s work subsequently won the International Jury's Award. O’Hara also organized both the Robert Motherwell and the Reuben Nakian exhibitions that became part of the United States Representation at the VI Sao Paulo Bienal in 1961. In 1960,

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O’Hara’s “work life” that is particularly fascinating because of the prevalent life-collapsing trends of post-war literature.

Many authors of fiction in the early Cold War period worked to unify life and art in a way that refused to romanticize what it was to live in the post-war period in America. It has generally been claimed that O’Hara did the same; that his poetry is autobiographical and revelatory of a charmed and care-free life that consisted mainly of friends, parties, and writing poems. On the one hand, this conclusion seems relatively accurate – hardly an O’Hara poem exists that doesn’t mention at least one of his many friends by the first name only, and the content of his poetry often consists of events, parties, shopping, wandering around New York, or weekend visits to

Long Island. Noticeably missing, however, is content about his work at the Museum of Modern

Art, which also occupied his daily life for much of this prolific period of his life. Further, the very nature of the work he did at the museum – curating exhibitions of American abstract art meant to tour the world as a part of America’s so-called “cultural warfare,” a policy intended to show the world the clear supremacy of democracy over Communism – seems to be in direct conflict with the political poetry I presented in previous chapters; poetry that questioned

America’s rhetoric and trajectory as the superior global superpower.

O’Hara seems, in large part, to have escaped a personal crisis of masculinity, in favor of his celebrating a different form of masculinity than what society expected. His artistic habit of writing poetry everywhere, all the time, seems to have contributed to this avoidance, that is, the

O'Hara curated and wrote the monograph for the exhibition The New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, which was shown at MoMA before travelling to nine cities in the United States and Canada. At the time of his death, two exhibitions curated by O’Hara were circulating nationally. One was a solo sculpture exhibition of David Smith’s work, and the second was an exhibition of paintings by the Surrealists Rene Magritte and Yves Tanguy.

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act of creation actually served to help him ignore, resist, or make fun of societal pressures.

However, interestingly, some of his poems read less as autobiographical than as fiction. For

example, in some works, “Frank O’Hara” appears as a fictional third-person character rather than

an autobiographical one. In these works, O’Hara seems led by the artifice I mentioned above –

the portrayal of a desired life, rather than his actual one. He clearly didn’t want to be pigeon-

holed into a masculinity he considered toxic. O’Hara also wrote, “my force is in mobility,”

suggesting that he was free and had choices, life elements many mid-century men felt they

lacked because conformity was such a highly valued quality in the early Cold War period. 506 To

conform was the easier of the two choices, but many men who did conform found the

expectations placed on them to be suffocating, often leading to stress disorders, alcohol

addiction, heart disease, and an early death.

Epstein writes about O’Hara’s seeming pre-occupation with motion, observing that numerous

O’Hara mentions about moving has a relationship to his homosexuality:

For O’Hara, there is no emergency or catastrophe of living that cannot be

assuaged by getting a move on: ‘I don’t care how dark it gets,” he says in one

poem, ‘as long as we can still move!’ And there are few things more dangerous

than assuming one has found a place to stop, that one has arrived at ‘a rest for the

mind’ because for O’Hara ‘no such things [are] available’.507

I am intrigued by Epstein’s read on O’Hara’s understanding that, in the decades in which he lived, there were a number of desirable aspects of a life that O’Hara understood “weren’t

506 Collected Poems 345. 507 Beautiful Enemies 88. O’Hara quotes are from Collected Poems 394, 396.

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available to him.” However, in another line in “To Canada (for Washington’s Birthday)” from

which Epstein quotes, O’Hara also writes, “I’m so tired of the limitations of immobility / all of

America pretending to be a statue.”508 For me, this line expresses O’Hara’s thought even better – the idea that mid-century America desired to express a monolithic experience about manhood.

This idea felt confining and immobilizing to O’Hara, like he was being ordered to stand still – to be a statue. In contrast, as Epstein and I have pointed out, O’Hara desires constant motion. And despite his declarations about motion being freedom, I also believe that conversely, he is expressing an internal fear about what his life would become if he was immobile. The metaphor is an expansive one for a life such as O’Hara’s – a life that was solidly built around a dizzyingly active social life, a prolific poetic, and a successful career as a museum curator during a time of tremendous aesthetic change.

5.3 The Decade of the Crisis of Masculinity

It is important for the points I wish to make in this chapter that I briefly review the cultural temperature of the decade and a half in which O’Hara lived in New York after college. The

1950s in America has been referred to with the sobriquet, the “Decade of the Crisis of

Masculinity.” While the decade is often remembered now as an affluent and stable one, in actuality, the mid-century in America suffered a strong undercurrent of confusing concerns, tensions, and paranoias - particularly around the performance of gender roles. The perception of

American masculinity, specifically, related to three corresponding impressions: first, American men seemed to have lost the warrior characteristics that would be required of soldiers should

508 Collected Poems 396.

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America go to war again; second (and closely related), American men had become “feminized”

since World War II – largely due both to expectations of a emasculating group dynamic in their

corporate jobs (the “organization man”) and to the domestic expectations of their wives and

family life; and third, and also related, homosexuality among men appeared to be on the rise in

America.

It is an irony of history, that, at the height of the era in which America heavily promoted the

superiority of democracy’s freedom, liberty, market economy, affluence, and choices, American

men were feeling more and more trapped in a system that required them to conform, choose the

group over individualism, live according to the expectations of norms, and stifle every bit of

their individuality, trading it instead for a pre-planned and hegemonic normative life trajectory.

While these particular societal pressures were specifically focused on men, American women

who eschewed the traditional homemaker role also felt great pressure and scrutiny.509 The young

American man, at the same time as he pursued these societal roles, was expected to be ready - at a moment’s notice - to go to war to defend America and democracy anywhere in the world.

These antipodean expectations unsettled and wore down an entire generation of young men. One of the many ironies of American men’s pressure to conform their identity is that it so closely resembles American rhetoric about what Communism looked like – lock-step, with a lack of choices, and personal freedoms. Despite this hypocrisy, America claimed a moral imperative of

509 Heterosexual women who eschewed the homemaker and wife role were subject to their own societal stressors which ultimately erupted in the 1960s, ensconced in Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Lesbians faced challenges similar to homosexual men, although even the federal loyalty oaths initially focused solely on men.

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superiority to Communism in every way and vowed to use force to keep it from spreading in the world.510

I observe in this chapter that the freshness of O’Hara’s poetry seemingly comes from the juxtaposition of his identity with the counter-current of societal presumptions – in particular, about the “normal” masculine roles expected in mid-century America. In addition, his contrary attitudes about standard presumptions on the primacy of existing publishing and distribution channels available to poets set him apart. O’Hara breaches both these societal expectations in some key areas of his life due to the strength of the identity he had begun to craft years before.

The synthesis of identity and community were so intense for O’Hara that the societal tensions to conform to a normalized masculine role didn’t significantly touch him. This fact is remarkable in the age in which he lived, where a non-normative life almost certainly led to ostracization and solitude, or worse. He didn’t seem give much thought to whether his was a normal or average life – rather, he lived the life he wanted to - urban, single, with a “family” he’d chosen that consisted of other poets, artists, dancers, theater and ballet people, all of whom were living and beginning to thrive in New York City. His life and his poetry seem to meld with regard to his sexual orientation in a way that nourished him; curiously, in a way his work at MoMA didn’t seem to.

As a homosexual man in the post-war period, O’Hara’s poetry regularly comments upon his version of masculinity rather than the expected heteronormative one, which, for many American men, was so fragile and yet, so critically observed during the 1950s. Despite the overwhelmingly

510 For detailed contemporaneous analysis of the decade of the 1950s, see Schlesinger, Leonard, Whyte, Genter, Kammen, King, Courdeleone, Nittel, Pells, Miller, May, and many others.

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paranoid American fearfulness of appearing different, Frank O’Hara’s poetry subverts that by

celebrating difference, moreover, often vulgarly proclaiming homosexuality in a poem that could

never have been published during his lifetime. “YIPPEE! I’m glad I’m alive,” he wrote, “’I’m

glad you’re alive / too, baby, because I want to fuck you.’” 511 In another poem, he is more

pensive, writing about a romance:

yet I do not explain what exactly makes me so happy today any more than I can explain the unseasonal warmth of my unhabitual heart pumping vulgarly the blood of another I loved another and now my love is other 512

Describing his love as “other” reflects an understanding of the societal disapproval he felt throughout his life, from the time he was a bullied child through to adulthood and episodes dodging epithets on the street or the subway in his adult life. He is most assuredly aware, but nevertheless undeterred, by society’s disapproval of his sexual orientation.

5.4 Frank O’Hara, the Anti-Organization Man

One of my claims in this chapter is that O’Hara refused the career and life trajectory expected of successful American men – described as the “organization man.” And yet, viewed another way, he also participated without being devoured by it. American men in the mid-century were expected to graduate from college, go to work at a large corporation, wear a suit to work, get married, move to the suburbs, have children, accumulate consumer goods, and join clubs and churches. That list of life progression events defined the correct or expected life for a successful young college-educated man in America. However, O’Hara didn’t subscribe to this expected

511 Collected Poems 294. 512 Collected Poems 403.

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trajectory. Like thousands of other former soldiers, he earned a graduate degree on the G. I. Bill,

and he eventually did have a job that required him to wear a suit to work. However, that’s where

the similarities between O’Hara’s life and the typical man ended. In fact, he makes fun of the

typical masculine life often in his poems. “I purchased a spanking new Fiat” he writes in one

poem, showing both his pretend mid-century masculinity - men like cars - and his cosmopolitan

taste – men like fast foreign cars. 513 After a few years of living in New York City, he wrote:

“And if / some aficionado of my mess says ‘That's / not like Frank!,’ all to the good! I / don't

wear brown and gray suits all the time, / do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera, / often.514

What he divulges in these lines is that he is aware of the hegemony of “normal” masculinity, but that he deliberately wears clothing antithetical to expectations whenever he can pull it off.

Wardrobe planning to create a personal style was, in itself, outside the norm for men. It was not considered masculine in the mid-century for men to care about stylish attire, or even to spend time shopping for themselves. Yet O’Hara constantly recorded in poems that he shopped on his lunch hours, on flaneur walks around the city, displaying both a freedom he felt and an elevation of the consumer role previously inhabited by, and relegated by society, to women.

O’Hara was un-troubled by his perhaps effeminate love of shopping and consumerism, as evidenced in this funny, campy stanza about shopping at a drugstore:

A man walked into the drugstore and said “I’d like one hazel eye and a jar of socket ointment, salted. My mother has a lid that’s black from boredom and though we’re poor—her tongue! profundity of shut-ins! And oh yes, do you have a little cuticle scissors?”

513 Collected Poems 457. O’Hara never owned a car, Fiat or any other make. 514 Collected Poems 231.

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Purchase to dream, green eyeshadow, kohl, gonorrhea, of the currents at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.515

Sounding almost like the opening line for a joke, this poem is about “a man,” not O’Hara himself. In the first five lines, the man is shopping for his shut-in mother for a surreal list of products. The sixth line contains items a drag queen might buy in a drugstore: green eyeshadow and kohl for eyeliner – purchased “to dream.” The dream must include fixing himself up for a sexual encounter, because the next item on the list is gonorrhea, the sexually transmitted disease that every sexually active man in World War II would have known about, so common among soldiers during the war, and yet decidedly not for a shopping list. The poem combines O’Hara’s love of the spectacle of shopping with the subjects of the feminine products, gonorrhea, and the grotesque idea of walking into a drugstore and buying “a hazel eye” and “socket ointment.”

He’s poking fun at the feminine pleasure of consumerism, understanding that men aren’t supposed to enjoy it, despite the fact that he obviously does.

Author Hazel Smith has an interesting opinion about the intersection of O’Hara’s consumerism and his anti-capitalism. She writes:

O’Hara’s poems might sometimes seem to be uncritical representations of a

consumer society but their relationship to consumerism is ‘double-coded.’ The

celebratory allusions to shopping, fast food and mass media are often

accompanied by an undertow of sadness which suggests that material goods do

not ultimately satisfy, or allay, loneliness.”516

515 Collected Poems 223. 516 Smith 31.

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While I appreciate Smith’s connection between the rush of shopping and a sadness, I don’t find

this connection in my reading of O’Hara. As I mention elsewhere, I think melancholia is almost

always just a thought away for O’Hara, but the connection specifically with an emptiness related

to consumerism is not a connection that resonates with me. On the contrary, I think O’Hara is

energized and highly entertained with his shopping trips, and may actually use shopping as a

method to buoy his spirits. Most of his “I-do-this-I-do-that” poems, in fact, do include shopping;

either for himself or for gifts for his friends; shopping seems to energize him.

Regardless of his success as a poet or an art museum curator, O’Hara never forgot that his

sexuality made him a societal outlier. This excerpt is an unusually contemplative stanza for the

poet who preferred to make fun of life, or cover heartache with vulgarity:

to be exile in your homeland is far worse than the concert emigration of a thousand sounds at night in the open air when the airplanes crash and the sleeping poet wakes517

While his metaphor is perhaps deliberately confusing, an “airplane crash” is always a disaster, a catastrophe, a horrifying, life-taking event. This, he writes, is what it feels like “to be exile in your homeland” – unwelcome, banished, displaced, and reviled. The stanza concludes, however, with a line that feels like it relates his charge and his salvation – to write poetry. Perhaps as a way to live with the exile, or as a method of documenting it; nevertheless, “the sleeping poet wakes.” O’Hara wrote one of his well-known dialogue poems demonstrating his awareness of an

Orwellian governmental desire, written as though he’s speaking to America: “what are you

517 Collected Poems 314.

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trying to do control / our thoughts / yes and I still am / with my divine verse.”518 The American patriotic doctrine of the mid-century was indeed sold as divine truth, despite some Americans who didn’t buy the propaganda.

Like William Whyte’s Yale Class of 1949, the men (and their wives) he studied for his book,

O’Hara had also used the G.I. Bill to fund his education, and he eventually settled into a form of an institutional career, although an art museum is far afield from I.B.M., and perhaps that’s where the similarities end. O’Hara’s undergraduate transcripts show no evidence of the business class offerings that had become so popular with undergraduate men returning from the war.

Early undergraduate poems he wrote, from the first one we have, already had homoerotic subjects, and his befriending other homosexual and artistic men during his undergraduate years, who all subsequently lived as a loose community in New York, surely impacted his choices about employment. It is interesting that among all his friends in New York, he alone took a “job” at the Museum of Modern Art, rather than attempting to earn his living as a poet. Despite pursuing a career in art curation and writing, his life, however, bore little resemblance to the grey flannel suit corporate man who lived in the suburbs - that young man we have come to associate with the decade. In fact, he often mocked the corporate lifestyle in his poems: “I got $820. $820?

Yeah dollars. I kind of like having property,” he wrote, obviously making fun of the American

Dream mentality that to own property is the apotheosis of a man’s life. 519 In another poem, speaking to an everyman character, “You find me tentative and frivolous, don’t you? / and I

518 Collected Poems 379. 519 Collected Poems 485.

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don’t own anything. Oh yes, you are in doubt.”520 In these and many other ways, O’Hara’s chosen life did not match the mid-century American male mold.

An O’Hara poem enunciates this very conundrum about masculinity, only slightly tongue-in- cheek:

“You think,” Larry says, “that you’re safe because you have a penis. So do I, but we’re both wrong.”521

“Larry” is undoubtedly painter Larry Rivers, with whom O’Hara had a complicated but life-long relationship.522 Rivers’ comment refers to the acknowledged crisis of masculinity, with Rivers

recalling a day, since past in his estimation, when being a man, having a penis, meant that you

were “safe.” There is a recognition here that he believes this is no longer the case, and Rivers

wants to make sure O’Hara realizes it. It seems the world seemed was becoming a much more

complicated place in which to be a man.523 This poetic dialogue is made even more complex by the fact that Rivers was a bisexual man who had an on-again, off-again sexual relationship with

O’Hara for his entire life. When they met in the early 1950s, Rivers had already been married and divorced, had two sons, and lived with them and his former mother-in-law. He and O’Hara consummated their sexual attraction for one another early in their relationship, but Rivers went on to re-marry, perhaps disappointing O’Hara’s dream of romance. Nevertheless, they continued

520 Collected Poems 240. 521 Collected Poems 278. 522 Rivers had been married when he and O’Hara met in 1950, and he already had two pre-pubescent boys. He and O’Hara had an on-again, off-again sexual relationship for much of the rest of O’Hara’s life, despite the fact that Rivers married again and had two more children in the early 1960s. Rivers painted O’Hara in a monumental nude of O’Hara in 1954, and many other times, they collaborated on a series of lithographs entitled “Stones.” They remained friends throughout O’Hara’s life; Rivers famously eulogized O’Hara at his burial by saying O’Hara had been his best friend. 523 American women in the 1950s would probably have disagreed with Rivers, as the sexism and patriarchy of the white heterosexual man was still very much in place.

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a friendship which included O’Hara posing for a monumental nude that Rivers painted, and a

collaborative set of lithographs with images by Rivers and text by O’Hara and entitled Stones.

River’s comment in this stanza seems to sum up the charged atmosphere of gender in the 1950s –

who, after all, was safe from the confusion of the gender roles?

5.5 Frank O’Hara and Mid-Century Male Health Concerns

Despite the all freedom of movement in life he glamorized, nevertheless O’Hara also

exhibited some symptoms of the noxious 1950s cultural stressors – his biography reveals that he

suffered some of the common chronic health problems of men of the time, particularly those

relating to alcohol and cigarettes. He also frequently admitted depression in his poems, often by

describing a melancholy feeling using a color word – “blue.” Fully over a quarter of his poetic

output, some 200 poems, contain the word blue, often in his usage to mean sad or depressed. So

often had he used the world blue to describe sadness, that, in 1959, when he wrote it in a line

about looking at clouds, he followed the word immediately with the line, “for once not a

melancholy color” in clarification. 524 I offer two poem fragments here to reflect O’Hara’s range of emotion about his life. The first refers to his friends (“they”) and their worry about him and in it, he refers to himself in the third person. O’Hara doesn’t do this often, so it is remarkable when he does because it draws attention to the question of whether his poetry is about his life or that of the life of a character he writes about in first person, a distinction not always easy to discern.525

They say I mope too much but really I’m loudly dancing.

524 Collected Poems 342. 525 In the Epilogue of this dissertation, I look at contemporary poet Tommy Pico’s practice of writing poetry about a character who he calls Teebs.

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I eat paper. It’s good for my bones. I play the piano pedal. I dance, I am never quiet, I mean silent. Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara. I think I’ll be alone for a little while.526

In another poem, he writes the following line encapsulating his propensity for vulgarity, hilarity,

and melancholy: “naked we dance toward the silliness of our pain.”527

O’Hara and his coterie of friends, like much of the American population, were heavy drinkers, and some of them also used drugs recreationally – parties were very frequent and could become raucous.528 One of the more destructive habits that came from his partying was a

dependence on alcohol that O’Hara seems to have developed over the years. He often jokes

about it in poems, and he hated his mother’s own dependence on alcohol, but biographer Gooch

documents that friends of O’Hara’s were concerned at one time or another about his developing

habit of drinking upon waking in the morning, and then throughout the rest of the day.529

LeSueur wrote about O’Hara’s morning routine:

And the next morning - I’m talking about the later years now - he’d cough his

lungs out, light a Camel, read a little Gertrude Stein, have a cup of coffee, sip an

orange juice laced with bourbon while he shaved, get on the phone for fifteen or

twenty minutes, then go off to the museum, where he’d work with extraordinary

526 Collected Poems 242. 527 Poems Retrieved 42. 528 For details on O’Hara and his friends’ alcohol and drug use, see Gooch for well-supported description, LeSueur for eye witness accounts, and Curtis for accounts by Elaine de Kooning and others. 529 O’Hara’s adult relationship with his mother was so strained that he didn’t visit her or his childhood home, even once, in the last 14 years of his life.

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efficiency for a couple of hours before going out for a two-hour lunch preceded

by at least one (but usually more than one) martini or negrone.530

O’Hara’s drinking habit progressed and worsened up to the end of his life, and, in addition, he is rarely photographed without a cigarette.531 At his death, O’Hara probably suffered fatal

internal wounds from a relatively minor vehicular accident due to the poor condition of his liver

and the general state of his health.

O’Hara’s poems usually treat his growing dependence on alcohol in a humorous manner, “so

gulp down that vodka and orange juice / and maybe things will clear up a little,” he wrote – a

characteristic off-the-cuff joke.532 In another revealing vignette, Gooch recounts an anecdote told him by an O’Hara associate who had traveled to Los Angeles with him in early 1966, the year of his death, where O’Hara was schedule to give a talk about a traveling exhibition he had curated.

O’Hara’s associate found him that morning, “nursing a tomato juice and fingering the slides for his talk, which he had not yet quite organized, O’Hara murmured campily while glancing at himself in a mirror, ‘I’m not as sylphlike as I was wont to be.”533 The effects of a couple decades of heavy drinking and smoking had begun to show on his face and body, despite being a man in just his late 30s. However often he joked about it, in a rare introspective poem in which he mentions alcohol and its hold on him, O’Hara wrote:

I drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won’t stare away I drink to kill the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it I drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm

530 LeSueur xv, 531 There has always been speculation that if O’Hara had had a healthier body, the accident that caused his death would not have been fatal. His internal injuries, which ruptured his spleen and lacerated his liver, were apparently worsened by the condition of his liver, among other things. See more on O’Hara’s death in Gooch, Berkson, and LeSueur. 532 Collected Poems 422. 533 Gooch 445.

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can appear and win its flickering little victory over noise I drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment and then I am going home, purged of everything except anxiety and self-distrust now I will say it, thank god, I knew you would and the rain has commenced its delicate lament over the orchards534

This poem seems to be written for himself, rather than an external reader, and perhaps that intimacy allowed him to write with some honesty about his alcohol problem. He seems to be aware that he uses alcohol to turn on a “certain spurious charm” in social situations in order to lubricate his feelings of social anxiety or self-doubt. He also seems aware that drinking is self- destructive, but that’s not surprising – he was witness to so many friends with drinking problems who acted out, said things they regretted, or even, like Pollock, had fatal car crashes while drunk.

The final two lines, however, seem to turn off these honest feelings with an imagined voice telling him he should slow down, and O’Hara writing as though that’s what everyone tells him.

Rather than just writing about being depressed or sad, this stanza actually feels convincing, which makes it all the more poignant in that his alcoholism probably contributed to his early death from what should have been a non-fatal accident.

However, O’Hara usually used humor to diffuse concern about his consumption of alcohol.

He treated the subject in his poems as though it were a college-aged indulgence that he somehow never gave up. In this excerpt, he seems to anthropomorphize the alcohol itself, as if it is the alcohol making the two people in the poem partake of it. “The rye / I just bought will scream when / the top comes off, making / two people ugly, but I must / get to the dinner. To work / tomorrow will be amusing, all / witless faces on their Saturdays.535 Notice that he both expects

534 Collected Poems 330. 535 Poems Retrieved 89.

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the alcohol consumption to make “two people ugly,” and that having to work the next day

hungover “will be amusing.” These contradictory observations about his alcohol consumption

apparently permitted him generally to pretend the habit wasn’t a problem. In another poem, he

presents an example of his morning routine where he and his long-time roommate Joe LeSueur

stumble wordlessly through a morning routine featuring two white mice, O’Hara’s favorite

raspberry sweater (featured in other poems), and O’Hara’s hangover:

“Two Dreams of Waking” I I stumble over furniture, I fall into a gloomy hammock on a rainy day in Cape Cod years ago. It is a black hardoy chair. I reach the kitchen and Joe is making coffee in the dark. I can’t face him, because we both have to go to work and we hate work. I look into the corner of a shelf. “Work interrupts life,” he is muttering as he splashes in the sink. I can’t remember what he’s doing, just that his back was pale gold. I don’t look at it. Two white mice, big, are running through the hole in the sleeve of my raspberry sweater. They seem to be harming it. I shout at them. I appeal to them, “It’s already wearing out,” to Joe. He looks at me coldly. “Leave them alone. They’re playing. They have to live, too, don’t they?” I have a hangover, and he hates me for it, and we start for work536

This poem is a rare one in which he writes negative thoughts about his having to go to work, “it interrupts life;” his favorite raspberry sweater, fairy tale mice, and O’Hara’s thoughts about what

Joe is thinking. O’Hara has a hangover and he believes Joe disapproves, but the treatment is light, even funny – very typical for an O’Hara mention about his growing alcohol consumption.

In 1962, by the time his own drinking had become more and more problematic, he jokingly made reference to another news story he’d seen – this one about screen legend and one of

536 Collected Poems 277.

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homosexual men’s favorite diva, Lana Turner. In writing about the news story, he also finds a

way to joke about his own alcohol problem: “Lana Turner has collapsed! / and suddenly I see a

headline / LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! / there is no snow in Hollywood / there is no

rain in California / I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful / but I never

actually collapsed / oh Lana Turner we love you get up”537 Having been writing about the weather earlier in the poem, then seeing that Turner collapsed at a party, O’Hara is reminded that they don’t have rain or snow in California (at least in his idealized version of California), that he himself has “acted perfectly disgraceful” at parties, but has never “actually collapsed.” It’s worth noting that O’Hara affords no negative judgement toward Turner’s boorish behavior, rather, perhaps happy that he’s never collapsed, he offers his love for her and poetically helps her right herself.

5.6 Mid-Century Aspiration for Normalcy

It is important to realize the exalted place that “normalcy” had come to inhabit Americans psyches during O’Hara’s lifetime. Historian George Hutchinson notes that, especially in the

1950s, Americans:

. . . resisted minoritizing discourses in favor of universalizing ones, to borrow

terms from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. . . They did this because they came to

believe, in an era shadowed by fascism, that all forms of minoritization and

oppression interconnect (being tendencies in the human heart), and therefore that

the battle for liberation must be fought on broader grounds than what one’s

537 Collected Poems 449.

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precious identity alone provides, even when oppression operates by

particularizing identity—marking the Jew, the Negro, the homosexual, and the

Japanese American for subordination or worse.538

There was societal hegemony in universalism – being normal – that simply didn’t exist with individualism, much less with characteristics despised by society – like homosexuality. This white male hegemony seemed to be why Hutchinson notes “the Jew, the Negro, the homosexual, and the Japanese American” would never dominate the culture – in fact, these identifying characteristics marked them for “minimization and oppression.” For the American male, difference in any form was, therefore, looked upon with disdain and scorn. Sedgwick makes the points about universalizing and minoritizing very specific to homosexuality when she writes in

Epistemology of the Closet about the homosexual panic legal defenses that began to be successfully used in the courtroom in the 1970s. Her point is that not only was the overt homosexual considered immoral, but so was the homosexual who lived in secret – in the closet.

She writes that these legal defenses, “[show] how the overlapping aegises of minoritizing and universalizing understandings of male homo/heterosexual definition can tend to redouble the victimization of gay people, and a second minority, equally distinguishable from the population at large, of “latent homosexuals” whose “insecurity about their own masculinity” is so anomalous as to permit a plea based on diminution of normal moral responsibilities.” 539 O’Hara

understood that homosexuals and Jews shared the same discriminatory disgust – he had written

about his World War II connections with Jewish sailors while in college. In this line, he

538 Hutchinson 395-396. 539 Epistemology 20.

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identifies as both a Jew and a homosexual: “I must be a pansy / myself, they say all the Jews are

really.”540

Alex Espinoza’s recent article, “Like Writing, Cruising is an Exercise in Introspection and

Perseverance,” expands on the experiences O’Hara wrote about in his only poem entitled

“Homosexuality.”541 Espinoza writes that cruising for men was the way he personally revolted

against societal expectations about how a man should act, and that he “found solace and

acceptance, a function in those anonymous spaces, where I met up with men for brief and intense

encounters.”542 Like O’Hara intimates in this poem, Espinoza explains, "a cruising space became

an opportunity for me to turn the tables on a society that sought to turn my body and my

sexuality into a spectacle . . . it is how I learned to resist . . . how I fought back.”543 His

explanation works to suggest the subversion that O’Hara was actively involved in six decades

ago is still a method of resistance to societal expectations for gay men.

5.7 Homosexuals as a Minority Class

As masculinity continued to be contested throughout the decade of the 1950s, a new minority

class person – the “out” homosexual man - emerged.544 These men had been emboldened by discovering one another while serving in the War and subsequently refused to live in secret when they returned, instead choosing to live semi-visibly in urban gay communities in cities like New

540 Collected Poems 47. O’Hara was not a Jew, he was born and raised as an Irish Catholic. However, the prejudice he felt as a homosexual man connected him spiritually to Jews. 541 “Cruising” referring to picking up anonymous men for sex. 542 Espinoza n.p. 543 Espinoza n.p. 544 My discourse in this dissertation about homosexual men reflects simply O’Hara’s reality and poetry and the research I’ve conducted. It in no way indicates that lesbians weren’t also subject to discrimination and marginalization during the Cold War period as well, but the study of lesbian discrimination and survival techniques is beyond my scope.

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York, Washington D.C., San Francisco. Sexuality, sexual orientation, and sexual fetishes

titillated Americans in the media, and representatives of various “deviant” groups became

infamous. Writing about American transgender woman Christine Jorgenson, for example, an

early elector of sex reassignment surgery (and later something of a talk-show celebrity),

Schlesinger referred to the 1950s and 1960s as an “age of sexual ambiguity.” 545 Truman Capote, who, like O’Hara, presented as a small, effeminate homosexual writer, was first a literary sensation, and then became a pop culture icon. Historian Douglas Miller explains the interest in these celebrities when he writes:

A fascination with what was felt to be sexual ambiguity also marked the decade.

To be a homosexual, transsexual, or bisexual meant not fitting into that natural

state of sexual polarities. Straight men and women who failed to conform to those

opposites were subject to vicious pressures in the fifties. But for people who were

not even sexually straight, the pressures were far more intense. Since they did not

fit into conventional sex-role perceptions, they were regarded as sick and, of

course, as terribly unhappy. 546

Miller here refers to a common belief, that homosexuals were “mal-adjusted” or unnatural, even

“sick.” Historian Anna Creadick takes the description one step further by noting that the “cold

war was a sex panic – an active persecution of a perceived homosexual menace,” noting that

“queer was a perversion, abnormal, pathologized, and criminalized.” 547 While all this is true,

545 Cuordileone 15. 546 Miller 166. 547 Creadick 93.

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Creadick doesn’t also mention that heterosexual men were also unsure how to play their roles during this period, and they were terrified that they would be seen as sexually ambiguous, or worse, heterosexuals themselves. The so-called Crisis of Masculinity was troublesome for all men, no matter their sexual orientation.

O’Hara often flaunted these societal masculine fears by writing about his body, body parts, and bodily functions – sometimes vulgarly, sometimes pragmatically, and sometimes, as in this case, philosophically – as if in deep thought about his sexual orientation:

my body gave pleasure that was not mine to become famous for, not yet a disgusting air, nor ambiguous in fault.548

He seems to be saying here that he didn’t expect to be famous for the pleasure he got from his body, perhaps because he didn’t expect to be famous at all, given his decision to forgo trying to publish his poetry. And yet, despite the times he was living in, and the general public’s reaction to homosexuality, he didn’t feel his body gave a “disgusting air,” either. Finally, there was no ambiguity about O’Hara’s homosexuality, and if it was a fault, he writes, at least I’m not ambiguous, which, indeed was the state for anyone in the closet. As a defense against the societal pressures, and sometimes just to be funny, O’Hara frequently reversed homosexual epithets when he wrote. In this fragment, he takes on the epithet, sissies, and reverses it’s sting by owning it:

We do not know any more the exquisite manliness of all brutal acts because we

are sissies and if we’re not sissies we’re unhappy and too busy. Be not

548 Poems Retrieved 110.

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discouraged by your own inept affection. I don’t want any of you to be really

unhappy, just camp it up a bit and whine, whineola, baby.”549

Humor and camp are the primary literary methods O’Hara contradicts gay societal disapproval.

We are sissies, he writes, and therefore don’t know about achieving masculinity with “brutal acts.” Notice that he places the words “unhappy” and “busy” in close proximity to the word

“sissies.” In many of his poetic observations about homosexuality, he includes both an expected psychological state, in this case unhappiness, but also a note of humor or a method of conquering that state. Most of the country believed what they were told in the mid-century about homosexuals: that they were perverted, deviant, and miserably unhappy. O’Hara acknowledges that perception here – he’s aware of it, but advises that a bit of camp and whining will surely reverse that.

Despite his propensity for writing straight up about sex, O’Hara also wasn’t averse to additionally couching sexual metaphor in almost coded language occasionally. However, his writing about sex acts, body parts, and desire doesn’t have the same density or plausible deniability as, say, W. H. Auden had used in his poetry. Here’s an example of the level of opacity O’Hara sometimes wrote in: “O at last the towers! / that pierce the steaming sky, / I love power. // Those swollen towers pulse / with music and are hard, / like the heart.” 550 Here

O’Hara uses an architectural metaphor for his erect penis, with which he feels powerful. But so the reader doesn’t misunderstand, that power also reminds him of his hard heart – a heart hardened by the hatred the country felt for homosexuals. This poem fragment is about sex,

549 Collected Poems 93. 550 Poems Retrieved 131.

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which, for O’Hara, is always different than romance. Mid-century homosexual men rarely expected romance when they were out looking for sex: romance with sex was something heterosexual people did, and, even if they desired it – even yearned for it, it was not for them as gay men. O’Hara had many infatuations with men over the years, and had a lot of sex, but probably only fell in love once. For about two years, from 1959 to 1961, he and Canadian ballet dancer, Vincent Warren, had a love affair that O’Hara treasured. We get many beautiful love poems from O’Hara during that period of his life – but during other times in his life, he is writing about desire and sex, not love. He got his love and acceptance in other ways – mostly from friends. O’Hara’s frequent use of vulgar double-entendre also doesn’t replicate the coded references to homosexual sex of his predecessor poets. Double-entendre in his poems is more likely to simply reflect the way homosexual men talked to one another. Coded language is an attempt both to communicate and to hide; O’Hara had no reason or desire to hide who he was in his poetry.

5.8 The Performance of the Middle-Class

Artifice was a large part of the daily lives and the aspirations of the organization men and their families. It straddled both work life and community life in the suburbs, and revealed itself in the look of their houses, the clothes they wore, the model and year of the car they drove, the size of their television set – indeed, almost in every way, Americans were performing what they believed the middle class looked like and did. As unconcerned as O’Hara was with the middle class, he must have noticed some of these hypocritical behaviors, because he writes about them sarcastically in a number of poems. “My wife . . . / she likes her shrub and hedge trimmer and her / thirsty lawn,” he writes, apparently not understanding that taking care of the lawn was the

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husband’s job in Middle America.551 Next, he takes a very circuitous route to connect the obsession with a lawn to the suburbs:

there’s a Norwegian cargo vessel in this vicinity

I don’t want to fire on the Pleiades before the iceberg has a chance to sink them

anything yet, sir? post double lookouts!

it’s not a ship, sir, it’s too big. It’s a lawn! it’s her, my addled wife, she’s limping and writing again.

She sank, finally, she didn’t want to, but she sank she drowned her shrubs and sank her lawn and then she saw a Negro bum getting kicked out of a church later he ate her he was handsome it was almost completely satisfying and the Pleiades sailed on in her tight mind, in her grotesque print dress the album as usual contained a pubic hair 552

“The Pleiades” he refers to in the poem translates to the constellation of stars known as “the

Pleiades” or the seven sisters – a sisterhood of middle-class suburban women perhaps. They are

all watering their lawns, which are bigger than ships, and they don’t stop until they all “sink,”

drowning their shrubs and sinking their lawns. It’s interesting that O’Hara finds lawns and

watering so outrageous in an era when environmental concerns were far from the public’s

551 Collected Poems 481. 552 Collected Poems 481, 482. Another way to read this poem would be to notice the

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mind.553 The mock-up middle class suburban wife O’Hara has imagined then sees a “Negro” bum kicked out of a church. The suburbs, of course, had no black Americans living in them, and even the selection of which church denominations were allowed to build was determined by the developer of the planned community. So, of course, a black man didn’t belong in her church, but the bum came out on top in O’Hara’s version of suburban society: “later he ate her.” O’Hara goes out of his way to compliment a fellow outlier – “he was handsome” – and to comment that eating the housewife was “almost” satisfying for the bum. Nevertheless, he writes in the last four lines, the wives “sail on,” their “tight mind” worried about being normal or average – nothing out of the “ordinary.” They each wear “a grotesque print dress” – probably one just like their neighbor’s dress, but as clean and artificial as they’ve made their lives, their careful housekeeping has, unfortunately, missed a pubic hair stuck to an album. This is O’Hara’s way to coarsely humanize these suburban wives who he finds so foreign to the women he knows – painters and fellow poets. Suburban housewives may hardly be the same species as he and his friends, but they do occasionally shed a pubic hair, which, in his mind, makes them like him, although it would mortify and embarrass the suburban housewife.554 In another poem, he writes about lawns, “Oh landscape dewy with sequins, / we’re not artificial are we?” 555 The streets of

New York that O’Hara loved inhabiting might have been filthy and strewn with garbage, but they were not artificial.

553 Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published in 1962 and is generally recognized as a watershed moment in environmentalism. 554 Another possible reading of this poem would tie together O’Hara’s mentions of shrubs, pubic hair, and the line “later he ate her” as references to female anatomy and oral sex. If this is what O’Hara had in mind here, it would be an extremely rare O’Hara reference to heterosexual sex. 555 Poems Retrieved 73.

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5.9 O’Hara, Double Entendre, and Sex

Friend and fellow poet Bill Berkson wrote that friends often compared O’Hara to Peter Pan –

the character who refused to grow up – in a similar way that Davenport writes about Baudelaire

– that he was “childhood perfected and sustained.” 556 The quote comes from Every Force

Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays by Guy Davenport writing about Baudelaire’s belief that genius involved not losing the intelligence of childhood. O’Hara’s friends may have been on to something with that thought - O’Hara seems comically defensive about his sexual orientation in this poem – as if he’d want to be straight, he seems to say.

(so fuck you, you can’t put me in a ‘false’ position—anyway all you ever talk about is Robert Lowell any more) nyaaaaa! piss on your adaluvian head I think you have a suspicion I’d like that, damn that private eye for squealing oh god it’s hard for anything to get dirty enough any more . . . oh god it’s hard . . . and if you think that’s the typewriter you’re nuts . . .557

O’Hara’s use of double entendre here is different than coded language – double entendre is simply the way homosexual men often talk to each other. Someone has apparently apologized to him for putting him in an awkward position, and he takes that to mean a sexual position and says

“fuck you, you can’t put me in an ‘false’ position.” He then insults the other person by telling them he’s tired of hearing about well-known Robert Lowell, an elite confessional academic poet

556 Notebook 250. 557 Poems Retrieved 217.

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of the time with whom O’Hara had a kind of life-long feud.558 Berkson wrote that O’Hara’s read his quickly jotted poem about Lana Turner’s collapse at a party going “mano / mano with Robert

Lowell.” 559 O’Hara follows the Lowell reference with a joke about a “private eye” having

revealed that O’Hara was into the sexual practice of urinating on your partner, and then

sophomoric homosexual talk about “dirty” talk, erections, and mistaking his typewriter for his

penis. O’Hara delighted in writing cheeky, coarse indecencies – probably especially because he

knew poets like Robert Lowell couldn’t or wouldn’t – and it set his poems apart from other poets

who did actually seek to be published and find a large audience. O’Hara also delighted in talking

and writing about homosexual sex practices, as if rather than writing a poem, he was trading

locker-room jabs with homosexual friends at a bar.

O’Hara and his friends had no interest in the phallic male warrior considerations common in

1950s political rhetoric. In addition to the more seriously toned poems he wrote about war I

discussed in the previous chapters, the following poem, entitled “Washington Square,” recollects

local architectural monuments to war, and mocks the whole idea of war and war symbols as

desirable or masculine:

That arch bestrides me, French victory! the golden staff of the savior

with blue lids. The soldiers filing at my feet hiss down their drinks

and are savagely decorated, savagely turned, their gentle feathers torn to medals

558 O’Hara mentions poet Robert Lowell in a negative light in several poems. Lowell enjoyed a level of fame in the 1950s for his confessional poetry, which O’Hara despised. Lowell also once rejected O’Hara’s application for a fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which may have added to his vitriol. 559 Collected Poems 554.

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in the air. Gold falls upon them, because there is no love, and it is not the sun.

Jane and Mark flutter along the plaza underneath the fainting gingko trees

and are cheered by pearly uniform horses, still, at parade rest. The guns ejaculate

into clouds abstractedly, and the day is in danger of passing without wickedness.560

Serving up visual references to the monuments of war found all over New York City, O’Hara notices an arch signifying victory (French, at that!), “savagely” decorated soldiers, and “pearly uniformed horses.” These symbols, because they are related to war victories, equate with “no love” to him. In high contrast, he adds sexual overtones for contrast – the war arch “bestrides” him, Jane and Mark “flutter” along the plaza, and, most visual – the “guns ejaculate” into the clouds. This is how he feels about war monuments, he writes, as he interprets them sexually rather than as a sign of a higher masculine calling. In another gun-as-phallic-metaphor poem,

O’Hara writes: “Just as he’s about to rise, he erupts; / or he is showing you the repetitions of his rifle?” 561 Davidson recalls Eve Sedgwick’s thoughts about identity formation and “otherhood” in this passage:

Eve Sedgwick makes this point by speaking of the variety of ways in which

national identity is formed, based on the ‘others’ who are excluded: ‘Far beyond

the pressure of crisis or exception, it may be that that there exists for nations, as

for genders, simply no normal way to partake of the categorical definitiveness of

560 Collected Poems 83. 561 Collected Poems 203.

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the national, no single kind of ‘other’ of what a nation is to which all can by the

same structuration be definitionally opposed.’562

O’Hara and his fellow homosexual men were excluded from all but their own national identity statements.

With regard to the performance expectations surrounding masculinity, O’Hara mostly resisted by flagrantly being himself – bawdy, combative, funny, and unconcerned about his readers’ sensitivities. His 1953 poem, “Grand Central,” expresses a young man’s (O’Hara was just 27 when he wrote this) absorption and obsession with sex and provides a glimpse into

O’Hara’s world of quick, anonymous, random, public sex in 1950s New York. With this poem,

O’Hara announces his decision to write poems about homosexual sex in an extreme and maverick expressionistic style:

The wheels are inside me thundering. They do not churn me, they are inside.

Now I am going to lie down like an expanse of marble floor covered with commuters and information: it is my vocation, you believe that, don’t you? I don’t have an American body, I have an anonymous body, though you can get to love it, if you love the corpses of the Renaissance; I am reconstructed from a model of poetry, you see, and this might be a horseless carriage, it might be but it is not, it is riddled with bullets, am I. And if they are not thundering into me they are thundering across me, on

562 Davidson 112.

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the way to some devastated island where they will eat waffles with the other Americans of American persuasion. On rainy days I ache as if a train were about to arrive, I switch my tracks.563

This is a proud, aggressive sexual poem that is absolutely unrepentant about homosexuality. The

poem opens with O’Hara anthropomorphizing Grand Central – he is Grand Central Station in the

first stanza - feeling a thundering train, speeding and driven, as it roars into (penetrates) the

station. His “vocation” is to lie down – something that a sex worker might say – and he lays on a

floor of “commuters and information.” What’s burning inside him is sexual desire, but at the

same time he is writing about this desire, he knows that to be a homosexual is considered “not

American.” Therefore, he says he has “an anonymous body,” one that is unrecognized by

America, although he thinks it could be loveable in America someday, in the same way that

America has come to love the “corpses of the Renaissance,” perhaps referring to a reverence and

lack of knowledge about the masters of the Renaissance Leonardo and Michelangelo and their

sexual orientations. If you can find a way to love them, you can also love me, he seems to write.

“I am reconstructed from a model of poetry,” he continues, referring possibly to the long line of

gay male poets, from Whitman, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lorca, Auden, Lawrence, Eliot, Crane to so

many poets among his friends and contemporaries.564 O’Hara frequently mentions these ancestral homosexual poets in his work, and is aware that, despite their having to hide, his lineage will always be as a homosexual poet.

563 Collected Poems 168. 564 These poets include Ashbery, Schuyler, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Denby, and others.

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O’Hara continues by writing about “a friend” of his who engaged in oral sex with a letter

carrier “during the noon-hour rush:”

During the noon-hour rush a friend of mine took a letter carrier across the catwalk underneath the dome behind the enormous (wheels! wheels!) windows which are the roof of the sun and knelt inside my cathedral, mine through pain! and the thundering went on. He unzipped the messenger’s trousers and relieved him of his missile, hands on the messenger’s dirty buttocks, the smoking muzzle in his soft blue mouth. That is one way of dominating the terminal, but I have not done that. It will be my blood, I think, that dominates the trains.565

Here he expands on the anthropomorphic comparison he had started with, that he was Grand

Central and was serially penetrated by trains – some across him, some inside him; and his musings about having an anonymous body in such a busy place. In this last stanza, he again uses war equipment references for the male sex organ, in this case “missile” and “muzzle.” He claims in this stanza that he’s writing about an experience “a friend” had, and reiterates in the penultimate line that he’s not writing about his own experience: “I have not done that.” Clearly, he means specifically in Grand Central Station – for he often cruised for anonymous sex, especially in his early New York years.566 Nevertheless, he spells out in great detail what these random sexual encounters consisted of by telling this story about his friend. Having found

565 Collected Poems 168. 566 Gooch writes about a specific a social night at the San Remo between O’Hara, LeSueur, and W.H. Auden’s lover, Chester Kallman. LeSueur was offended by Kallman’s repeated vulgar stories about a hustler he and Auden had previously picked up. LeSueur found Kallman overly crude and, on the cab ride home, made O’Hara promise he wouldn’t let LeSueur turn into one of those old homosexual men. After that conversation, O’Hara completely stopped cruising and only had sex with friends. LeSueur says O’Hara later told him, “I decided I didn’t want to be like that [Kallman].” Gooch 292.

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someone in the crowd who was also cruising for sex – a letter carrier, his friend led the letter

carrier to a specific private spot underneath the great dome and across a catwalk. The spot was

remote enough that O’Hara called it “his cathedral” – one that was his “through pain.” While it’s

not clear to what he is referring here, this location – a sacred one - apparently also known to his

friend, is where the oral sex occurs. His friend unzips the letter carrier’s pants, placing his hands

on his “dirty buttocks.” O’Hara reads this as “dominating” the terminal – perhaps some sort of a

public-places-to-have-sex scorecard of which he mentally kept track.

O’Hara and many of his friends – homosexual or not - considered themselves examples of

cosmopolitan hipsters. He wrote about his identification outside the expectations of most

Americans in the previously mentioned poem, “Grand Central.” “I don’t have an American /

body, I have an anonymous body, he writes.” 567

O’Hara seems to say he doesn’t care if he has “an American body” – he’s got “an anonymous” one, and further, his people are the hipsters who don’t belong here, clearly a more prestigious genealogy in his mind.

5.10 The Romanticization of Dying Young

One of the curiosities of the era in which O’Hara lived is a sort of romanticization of early death, and the perspective that one would live on “forever young.” This perhaps comes from living through the War, romanticizing young soldiers’ deaths this way as a way to assuage grief.

Describing the New York City artist milieu, O’Hara’s friends and those for whom he wrote, biographer Cathy Curtis writes:

567 Collected Poems 168.

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In the fifties, many of the downtown artists self-consciously adopted a “live fast,

die young” credo compounded of equal parts of existentialism, postwar

disillusionment, and youthful romanticism. Alcohol was central to this outlook. . .

. the heavy drinking began when artists availed themselves of the seemingly

endless supply of free liquor at art gallery openings, which clustered on the same

nights of the week.568

In addition to the alcohol problems O’Hara clearly showed, an early death seemed somehow romantic to him - many of his poems are about his pop culture heroes, and several of these heroes died young, some helped along by their addictions or depression. Russian poet

Mayakovsky, who was very close to O’Hara’s heart, committed suicide at age 36. Pollock’s drinking and depression contributed to his fatal car crash at 46. Billie Holiday, the subject of one of O’Hara’s most beautifully haunting poems, died at 44 after years of drug and alcohol addiction. James Dean died at 24, O’Hara’s college friend Bunny Lang at 32, Broadway lyricist

John Latouche at 42. In addition, Baudelaire and Apollinaire, who O’Hara’s coterie of friends believed were his predecessors, ghost-like poets among painters, also died young at 36 years and

38 years respectively. Death, particularly youthful death, seemed always close to O’Hara. Gooch recounts a game of Twenty Questions among dinner guests, Berkson and O’Hara included. “The question was, ‘What are you most afraid of?’ O’Hara’s answer: ‘Living beyond forty. I don’t ever want to grow old. I want to be like Shelley and Keats and die while I’m still young and beautiful.’” 569

568 Curtis 68. 569 Gooch 451.

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Some 20 years after O’Hara’s death, Berkson and LeSueur solicited poems and essays about

O’Hara from his friends for the purpose of publishing a book about him. The resulting book,

Homage to Frank O’Hara, was published in 1988. One essay, written by O’Hara friend and

avant-garde composer, Morton Feldman, writes in detail about the “live fast, die young” credo

that pervaded the arts during the time. It’s worth quoting the two paragraphs here for the insight

they provide:

The day Jackson Pollock died I called a certain man I knew – a very great painter

– and told him the news. After a long pause he said, in a voice so low it was

barely a whisper, “That son of a bitch – he did it.” I understood. With this

supreme gesture Pollock had wrapped up an era and walked away with it.

It was big stakes we were after in those times. Through the years we have

watched each others’ deaths like the final stock quotations of the day. To die early

– before one’s time – was to make the biggest coup of all, for in such a case the

work perpetuated not only itself, but also the pain of everyone’s loss. In a certain

sense the artist makes that pain immortal when he dies young.

That’s a little the way I think of Frank O’Hara. Not in terms of artistic

insight or of personal reminiscence, but just in terms of that all-pervasive

presence that seems to grow larger and larger as he moves away in time.570

O’Hara wrote what his poetry meant to him, and what he was trying to accomplish, in a few essays over the course of his life. In this paragraph, he talks about suicide – something he

570 Homage 12.

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mentions more than once in his poetry. Begrudgingly writing a statement about his poetry for

editor Donald Allen, who was to give him over 30 pages in his ground-breaking The New

American Poetry in 1960, easily O’Hara’s biggest publishing break during his lifetime, O’Hara

wrote this:

I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I

would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far

stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I

haven’t.571

In “A Slow Poem,” he thinks about death another time: “I wonder if you can die of / sadness What a way to go.”572 He also wrote about his cultural icon’s deaths, another form of

occasional poem. For example, he wrote more than one for James Dean after his shocking death

at the age of 24. In another, during a bustling shopping trip buying host guests for his upcoming

weekend, he sees the newspaper headline that she’s died, and recalls recently witnessing a failing

Billie Holiday whisper a song:

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

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 keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing573

571 Collected Poems 500. Allen gave O’Hara 31 pages in his book, second only to Charles Olson in number of pages. 572 Poems Retrieved 7. 573 Collected Poems 325.

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O’Hara’s friend Joe LeSueur recalled that song in his memoir about his friendship with O’Hara,

Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara. A judge had forbidden Holiday to perform in any establishment where alcohol was served, but one night at the 5 Spot jazz club in The Bowery,

O’Hara and a group of friends happened to be there when Holiday went up on stage and

“whispered a song” with Mal Waldron at the piano. O’Hara had just gotten up from the table to visit the restroom before she appeared, and LeSueur was afraid he’d miss her.574 But O’Hara was

“leaning on the john door,” and didn’t miss the performance after all. In fact, recalling it the minute he saw she had died; he recalls the mesmerizing effect she could have on audiences even at the end of her life: “and everyone and I stopped breathing,” he writes to close the poem.

5.11 O’Hara’s Love of New York

For O’Hara, moments like that became commonplace because he lived in New York – the international center of the art world in the postwar period. While the organization man moved to the suburbs, O’Hara cherished living in New York at the mid-century, and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Like for many homosexual men, New York had everything: the privacy found in anonymity, culture, jobs, cosmopolitanism; O’Hara loved living in New York. Vider wrote about the predilection shared by young homosexual men for large cities like New York:

Middle-class white men, at the same time, increasingly set up homes in the cities

expanding number of apartment houses, where they could pursue same-sex

relationships, and host friends, with even greater privacy.575

574 LeSueur 191-196. 575 Oh Hell, May 880.

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While some large cities like Washington, D.C. during the lavender scare of the 1950s lost the

ability to protect its gay citizens - even in the privacy of their own homes - nevertheless, the

mid-century city was a far better place to live as a homosexual than in the closet of the small

town. For O’Hara, there was only one place for him to live - he was resolute in his love for New

York City. The pattern his older friends like Jackson Pollock, Fairfield Porter, and Willem de

Kooning had followed as they found some financial success was that they moved out of the city

to Long Island. O’Hara also watched his generation of artists follow suit – Larry Rivers and

Mike Goldberg among them. These East Hampton, Southampton, and Springs homes of friends

became frequent weekend and summer destinations for O’Hara and the other poets, sites for

innumerous boozy beach parties throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.576 Nevertheless, throughout his poetic career, he often states his preference for New York City: “Last night I saw

Garfinkel’s Surgical Supply truck / and knew I was near “home” though dazed and thoughtful,” he wrote. 577

A large part of the appeal of New York, in addition to his friends who had already moved there, was the vast artistic opportunities that mid-century New York offered. Author Jed Perl waxes romantic about the setting:

These writers and artists were mostly in their early twenties, and the city seemed

wide open to them, a world away from the small towns that they had grown up in.

At the time, the United States, deep in the Korean War and in the grip of

McCarthyism, was a socially oppressive place, and New York City was an

576 In fact, O’Hara’s death in the early morning hours on the beach of Fire Island occurred during a house party weekend. 577 Collected Poems 448.

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enclave for an artist inclined toward recklessness.578

Perl doesn’t add that post-war cities like New York also served as gathering places for young homosexuals who congregated there so they could live without the burden of the closet and secret lives. The anonymity of a large city was an important factor in the post-war decision where to locate. In addition, New York found itself suddenly the art capital of the world as

European art cities like Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin undertook the long rebuilding process after the war. New York was the place to be if you were a young artist, as Perl describes here:

What was clear to just about all the artists was that the ball was in New York’s

court. The grand old themes now belonged to Manhattan. These themes included

the artist’s relationship with society; the struggle to define and redefine quality;

and the place of meaning in art, and especially, now, in abstract art.579

While O’Hara’s role became that of the ringleader (the role Gorey had previously played), these supportive friendships of fellow poets and emerging painters and the warm acquaintances of all the great mid-century painters and sculptors eventually were more than support, they became subjects for his work itself.580

In this poem, O’Hara makes fun of New York - the elitism, capitalism, the snobbery of

Manhattan, and sweaty sex in the park – and the only place he wanted to live. As proof that he

578 Perl 55. 579 New Art City 11. 580 O’Hara cherished the friendship, gained primarily at The Club and the Cedar Tavern, of Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, David Smith, and Robert Motherwell in addition to his poet friends and all the so-called “second generation” Abstract Expressionist painters.

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could turn any poetic subject into a discussion of sex, “The Lay of the Romance of the

Associations” cleverly does just that.581

High above Manhattan’s towers gilded like Camelot in every weather I heard the cries of the Park Avenue and the Fifth Avenue Associations trying to get together.

If only, if only, cried the Fifth Avenue Association being the less elite of the two, and therefore the first to come on, I weren’t so rushed all the time! I have so much to say to you but we are far apart.

I hear you, yodeled the Park Avenue Association in Westchester accents cracked with emotion, and I too am harried even in my very center and a strange throb of emotion fills the towering Seagram Building with a painful foretaste of love for you. But alas, that bourgeois Madison Avenue continues to obstruct our free intercourse with each other.

Intercourse! cried Fifth Avenue, all I want to do is kiss you, kiss your silver grey temples and your charming St. Bartholomew’s ears. What would Saks think, and De Pinna, much less Tishman if such things were to go on in the middle of Manhattan? You must not be untrue to your upbringing, even if your suit is torn and your tailor hasn’t delivered the new one.

Suit-schmut, said Park Avenue, our joining will fecundate this otherwise arid and sterile-towered metropolis! the alliance of aristocrat with parvenue has always been the hope of democracy, not to mention bureaucracy. You don’t think I need you, my plants are green. But look! I don’t have many plants. And you, even in the depths of winter are covered with lights under which like basking collies grow your tender evergreens of love and commerce. Come!

581 I’ve presented this poem in its entirety to illustrate the complex machinations O’Hara uses to turn a poem about two commercial associations into sex in the park.

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I can’t, for stern Madison Avenue has me in thrall and won’t divorce me even though I’ve offered “no settlement.” Why don’t we rendezvous in Central Park behind a clump of cutthroats near the reservoir and there we’ll kiss and hold each other sweatily as in a five o’clock on a mid-August Friday in the dusk and after, languorously bathe to sweeten city water for all time.582

This poem, in just 36 lines, illustrates O’Hara’s droll sense of humor, his eye-rolling disdain for elitism, his love of the architecture of New York (he wrote about Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram

Building more than once), and secret public sex. There is such a personal element in this poem – a poem that appears at first glance to be impersonal. O’Hara is surrounded by a world potentially or actually elitist – his artist friends are mostly too unknown to be elitist, but certainly the

MoMA crowd – the rich donors, the Rockefellers, and the administration considered themselves the absolute vanguard of style. O’Hara makes fun of this desire of the elites to have sex with the less elites and the married partners who can’t get divorces. Surrounded by open marriages, singles, homosexuals, heterosexuals, men, and women, O’Hara had a much more liberal view of sex than the 1950s American public.583 What comes through most in this poem, however, is his love of living in New York and being a part of the excitement of being in the center of the art capital of the world. “I can’t even enjoy a blade of Grass (sic) unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life,” O’Hara wrote in his prose poem “Meditations in an Emergency,” after living in New York for three years. 584

582 Collected Poems 320. 583 See Curtis for a lengthy explanation of the sexual exploits – hetero- and homo-sexual – among these friends. 584 Collected Poems 197.

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In the early years of his life in New York, before he began travelling internationally to install

exhibitions for MoMA, the only time O’Hara left the city was to weekend or vacation at friends’

homes on Long Island. Even those trips took a toll on him, it seems:

I was back in town! what a relief! I popped into the nearest movie-house and saw two marvelous Westerns but, alas! this is all I remember of the magnificent poem I made on my walk why are you reading this poem anyway? 585

“Back in town” – home – meant a great deal to O’Hara. The “home” O’Hara refers to is his adopted, adult home – New York City. Gooch documents that the last visit O’Hara paid to his childhood home was in 1952, when he went home to the funeral of an aunt.586 He was 26 years

old. He lived for fourteen more years without ever visiting his mother or siblings at their home in

Grafton, Massachusetts. Why this was his last visit is not entirely clear. O’Hara had a

complicated and challenging relationship with his mother as an adult – one that couldn’t be

considered warm or loving.587 Apparently, not even O’Hara’s close friends understood the

estrangement. Berkson, writing decades later, wondered what had happened to the O’Hara

family:

What was the O’Hara family tragedy? J. Russell O’Hara, the failure? grower of

roses?? From the handsome guy on horseback to the weary, bloated man in

Sunday morning bathrobe. Were both he and Catherine alcoholics? The father

585 Collected Poems 427. 586 Gooch 210. 587 See LeSueur and Gooch for more on his relationship with his mother, who apparently had developed a drinking problem after the death of his father while O’Hara was an undergraduate.

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died when, how? The mother somehow went off the rails so that Frank became

surrogate parent to Maureen.588

The estrangement with his blood family couldn’t help but contribute to the intimacy he fashioned with his family of choice. Regardless, it is clear that O’Hara found New York City his home now and the poets and artists he communed with were his new family. Even his graduate experience in Ann Arbor didn’t satisfy his image of what a home should be; while working on his M.A., he wrote, perhaps about a neighbor: “. . . say hello across the lawn and linen, wondering if I’m too gay.”589 Ann Arbor represented a time of missing the companionship of his friends, and the people were probably not as cosmopolitan as O’Hara liked or needed. Once he moved to New

York, however, he thrived in the community he built for himself, often treating New York as though it was a small town. Far from acknowledging the anonymity of the city, O’Hara’s poetry often wants readers to believe he often runs into friends while traversing the city streets. Seeing and being seen, hiding and being visible are the subjects of this poem in which O’Hara tangentially informs the reader that he is a master of hiding.

The subject of “passing,” or hiding an alternative sexuality, is, of course, one of the burdens of being a homosexual in the 1950s. Making a game of it was O’Hara’s method of pretending he was the initiator of the game, rather than his caustic society.

588 Notebook 251. 589 Collected Poems 30.

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the Russian Tea Room fooled you didn’t I well it is nicer in the Park with the pond and all that okay590

In another poem about visibility and internal thoughts, O’Hara walks and expects to be seen simply because he was thinking about someone: “Did you see me walking by the Buick

Repairs?” he asks. “I was thinking of you.”591 The next poem must have followed a visit to the

Guggenheim Museum in the summer of 1961:

I want you to be very very happy like Central Park what a wonderful city you have here I never dreamt until we’d been together two weeks straight

this train is going away from the Guggenheim a hot “dog” worrying rent already paid Joe? he’s in the sack you know, your eyes are the color of that Miro’s back it’s a marvelous happing of Frank L. Wright the great accidental architect. 592

This poem is one of a series of poems between he and Bill Berkson, a young heterosexual poet who took the emotional place of O’Hara’s two-year lover, Vincent Warren, when it was clear that their love affair had run its course. Vincent, a ballet dancer, simply was not living in New

York anymore – a Canadian, he lived and danced in Montreal. In June of 1961, Bill and Frank began a series of poems with cryptic titles: F.M.I, F.Y.I., F.O.I., F.Y.(M.)B.I., F.Y.S.C., and

F.I.R. The Guggenheim, less than two years old at the time, had an exhibition entitled, One

590 Collected Poems 420. 591 Collected Poems 367. 592 Collected Poems 411.

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Hundred Paintings from the G. David Thompson Collection, held at the museum from May 26 through August 27, 1961.593 O’Hara would have had four opportunities to see a Miro there that

June; three in the painting exhibit: paintings entitled Constellation, Poetic Landscape, and

Halloween.594 By referring to the “Miro’s back,” however, rather than background, it’s possible he was referring to the Miro-Artegas collaboration also on view at the Guggenheim that summer, an eight-foot high ceramic Roman arch decorated with Miro-esque figuration. Made to be walked under, it would have had a back, but no record exists about its color.595 Regardless, what is striking about this poem was the easy relationship O’Hara has about New York, as if Central

Park and the Guggenheim are in his back yard, just there for he and his friends to visit at their leisure, perhaps to have a hot dog and then ride the train south. “What a wonderful city you have here” makes reference to the fact that Berkson was a native New Yorker and O’Hara wasn’t – always a marker among natives when living in a city. O’Hara’s tone is a bit over-the-top romantic here, likely in the hopes that heterosexual Berkson would replace Vincent as his lover, but that didn’t ever happen. Nevertheless, they remained good friends for the five more years

O’Hara lived.

In a later poem, “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson),” O’Hara creates a long list of all the things about New York and Bill that are his “favorites:”

going to parties with you, being in corners at parties with you, being in gloomy pubs with you smiling, poking you at parties when you’re “down,” coming on like South Pacific with you at them, shrimping with you into the Russian dressing, leaving parties with you alone to go and eat a piece of cloud

593 Hermo, n.p. 594 Internet Archive 49. 595 Guggenheim Museum website. All the existing photographs are in black and white.

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vichyssoise, capers, bandannas, fudge-nut-ice, collapsibility, the bar of the Winslow, 5:30 and 12:30, leather sweaters, tunafish, cinzano and soda, Marjorie Rambeau in Inspiration whatdoyoumeanandhowdoyoumeanit596

In addition to the obvious flirting O’Hara is doing here, he also creates a list of the dizzying social and shopping calendar he and Bill have been keeping during the summer of 1961. The final line of the stanza contains an oddity, however, that is unusual for its form rather than for its content, and not standard O’Hara fare. The questions contained in the final line don’t seem unusual for two poets at the beginning of a friendship, one of whom who has a huge crush on the other, younger one: What do you mean? How do you mean it? seem to be fairly common questions between friends, particularly literary ones.

However, removing the spaces from the two questions is very unusual, even for O’Hara, who nevertheless believed there were no such things as rules regarding poetry. What strikes me is that this form is exactly what has become known in the social media age as the “hashtag” message. If one put the pound sign (#) at the beginning of it, O’Hara would have foretold the social media craze of the next century in this line. This poem is a personal one – not all of them O’Hara writes in first person are; here he is wooing Berkson with a long, swaggery, literary, modern poem – showing the younger poet what the master can do. And at the end of one of the stanzas, there is the hashtag look-alike. While much of O’Hara’s poetry reads like social media posts – what he had for lunch, all the parties and places he goes, philosophizing about one thing or another, internal dialogue, social media on the Internet wasn’t on anyone’s radar when he wrote this –

596 Collected Poems 445, 447. These are merely two stanzas of a very long poem of almost 500 lines that O’Hara wrote over six months at least partly to impress Berkson.

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O’Hara is firmly a part of the letter-writing and postcard era. Given O’Hara’s development of a new poetic form, however, it’s not surprising that he foretold a modern method of organizing words succinctly as a phrase, despite the fact he was wrote this five decades before social media was invented. Despite the fact that some of his poems are autobiographical, perhaps like this one, it is also clear that not all his poems are factually autobiographical. Sometimes, they are intended to look like a record of his life, but in fact, some are fictional, artificial, and about a character he invented called Frank O’Hara.

5.12 Creating a Character: “Frank O’Hara” and His Friends

The happiness O’Hara felt about his life in New York was due, in great part, because of his friends and his busy social life, full of small prosaic choices. Everyday choices are the subject of this poem about two friends on the phone making a date for a social event, entitled

“Metaphysical Poem:”

When do you want to go I’m not sure I want to go there where do you want to go any place I think I’d fall apart any place else well I’ll go if you really want to I don’t particularly care but you’ll fall apart any place else I can just go home I don’t really mind going there but I don’t want to force you to go there you won’t be forcing me I’d just as soon I wouldn’t be able to stay long anyway maybe we could go somewhere nearer I’m not wearing a jacket just like you weren’t wearing a tie well I didn’t say we had to go I don’t care whether you’re wearing one we don’t really have to do anything

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well all right let’s not okay I’ll call you yes call me597 The 22 lines comprising this poem read like a conversation between O’Hara and a friend about

an ultimately unsuccessful arrangement to meet somewhere. This poem, in particular, recalls

what O’Hara once wrote, partially as an affectation, about his new (fictional) literary movement,

Personism:

I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I

was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the

poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will

undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet

and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The

poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I

confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. 598

Writing about his own work was something O’Hara did not like to do – and, in fact, he thought it was unnecessary and gauche. He believed everything he needed to say about the poem was there, on the page – in the poem. So, when he quickly typed up a literary manifesto – at least partially as a ruse – he couldn’t help but compare his poetry to a sexual act that “gratified” the poem.

“Lucky Pierre” refers to a threesome, where the person in the middle both gives and receives sexual acts. What’s he’s said here is that reading one of his poems is like having sex with him – it’s an intimacy between two people. Further, writing a poem “for this person” is the very

597 Collected Poems 434, 435. 598 Collected Poems 498.

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definition of Goethe’s occasional poetry, so well demonstrated by O’Hara’s oeuvre, and recommended by Goodman in the Kenyon Review article. Indeed, this poem feels like a telephone conversation where two friends, both sounding somewhat listless, try to figure out a meeting place for the evening. It reads almost like a vaudeville comedy routine; by the end of the work, the friends have decided not to do anything after all. The poem concludes with mutual promises to call one another. The society O’Hara kept was dependent on the activities and possibilities of the streets of New York: movies, theater, ballet, art galleries, bars, friends’ apartments, the train and Long Island were the places he spent time. No other city in the country had so much to do in such a compact space, but in this poem, he and his unnamed friend couldn’t decide what to do, so they eventually hang up. The theme of choices and freedom of choice is a very common American mid-century literary theme. The friends in the poem had so many possibilities to choose from that, ultimately, they were overwhelmed and stopped trying. This theme is, in its own way, a comment on the era, whether O’Hara meant it that way or not - ennui was a symptom of his times.

In another poem in the Personism vein, O’Hara does accept an invitation to a party, and takes his readers along:

Yesterday I accepted an invitation to a party. But I had no sooner arrived and let my coat tumble, exhausted, onto a bed, when a perfect stranger whom I immediately and unwittingly admired asked me if I were a poet. Many guests crowded around the two of us, as at a wedding. “I suppose I am,” I said, “for I do write poems.”

Beginning the poem with “I” misleads his readers into thinking that he is writing about an event that actually happened – that we are hearing about an authentic Frank O’Hara’s experience. To the contrary, however, the poem reads as though it’s fictional, happening to character O’Hara

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rather than person O’Hara. His coat tumbles, “exhausted,” onto bed as he arrives. Then a

“perfect stranger” asks him if he’s a poet, one who he “unwittingly” admires. In O’Hara’s actual life, his work was as a museum curator, so the question, coming from a stranger, may have been difficult to answer – especially to a stranger who our narrator “immediately and unwittingly admired.” The artifice of the party begins to show already. Guests began to crowd around the narrator and his interrogator, waiting for an answer. Our narrator admits that he supposes he is a poet, because he writes poems. The interaction continues:

“Well write one now, will you?” he said, smiling fiercely, faces aureoled at his shoulders and elbows. A few tendrils of hair escaped the opening of his shirt, fled upward to his neck, and they were not the color of his eyebrows! “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like one just now, if you don’t mind,” I said, thinking of many things, chiefly, perhaps of childhood, when I would make myself vomit so I wouldn’t have to go to parties.

Our narrator, faced with the demand for a parlor-trick, notices more about his provocateur: first, onlookers are quite taken with the person – their faces positively glow looking at him, and second, the man has chest hair showing that doesn’t match his eyebrows – a reference to more artifice, dying one’s facial hair to appear younger. O’Hara’s readers start to feel this man is a boor, as our narrator tries to end the conversation. Rather than feel smugly superior to his questioner, though, the experience reminds our narrator of his childhood abhorrence of parties – a discomfort so great, he’d make himself vomit to avoid them.

“Well, what makes you feel like writing one?” he said, and kicked me in the balls. Ugh! As I hobbled to a chair, however, I managed to somewhat regain my composure. “You needn’t be afraid of me,” I said,

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turning. “I don’t love you.”599

The poem concludes with the narrator injured in a particularly masculine way, ending the conversation with the boorish inquisitor by trying to return the pain he’s caused the narrator by turning the tables on him, telling him not to be afraid, but he isn’t loved. “I don’t love you” indicates that perhaps his fellow party-goer was an older homosexual man – older due to the mis- matched body hair and homosexual because he attempts to retaliate by rejecting his unwanted advance. In this poem, the narrator is the more masculine of the two in the end – he has refused to write a poem on the spot, and he is physically wounded in with a kick to the groin, proving he’s a man.

This poem is one of several in which the narrator character seems artificial and non- autobiographic. Frank O’Hara, the poet, would thrive at a party, where he would make sure he was the center of attention. He wrote and read many poems at parties, and it’s unlikely he spent much time at a party cowering on a chair in the corner. In these poems in which he writes about the character Frank O’Hara, as in this poem, O’Hara separates life and art, imagining a caricature of himself in a social situation.

In an example of his method of converging art and life, however, O’Hara actually wrote the following poem for a dual social function – a farewell lunch with painter Norman Bluhm, who was travelling to Paris, and a welcome back party at Kenneth Koch’s house for painters Joan

Mitchell and her lover Jean-Paul Riopelle, who had also been in France. LeSueur claims that

O’Hara did, indeed, write this poem between 12:10 p.m. and 1:00, when LeSueur called O’Hara

599 Poems Retrieved 70.

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to encourage him to write something as a going away present for Bluhm, who they were meeting for lunch at one o’clock. In this poem, the “I” is definitely autobiographical, not a caricature as in the previous poem.

ADIEU TO NORMAN, BON JOUR TO JOAN AND JEAN-PAUL It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch ah lunch! I think I am going crazy what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch's 600

Harried at work, hungover, with a lunch date with Norman Bluhm to bid him adieu for a trip to

Paris, O’Hara writes this poem at LeSueur’s insistence. Always seemingly ready for a weekend party on Long Island at one of his friend’s houses, in this poem, however, he seems to feel too busy to go.

I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems at Joan's studio for a new book by Grove Press which they will probably not print but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it 601

O’Hara is under contract with Grove Press for Meditations in an Emergency, and he writes here that, this weekend, he’d rather stay in town and work on the poems for it. “Joan’s” refers to Joan

Mitchell’s apartment, which he writes about in several poems. It was near he and LeSueur’s apartment and he must have been using it for a quiet place to finalize his poems while Mitchell was in Europe. This was his first book of poems – thirty of them in total – and while he generally didn’t lack for confidence in his work, and had been published a few times in magazines, he may

600 Collected Poems 328. LeSueur 213-218. 601 Collected Poems 328.

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actually have felt some anxiety about a full book of his work coming out. This is a rare moment

of either humility or raw truthfulness about his poetry, although as I’ve written previously,

publishing was not something he particularly sought after. He continues with gossip:

and Allen is back talking about god a lot and Peter is back not talking very much and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth's although he is coming to lunch with Norman I suspect he is making a distinction well, who isn't 602

“Allen” is Allen Ginsberg and “Peter” refers to Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s long-time lover.

“Joe” refers to LeSueur, O’Hara’s longtime roommate and friend, who was joining them at lunch, so O’Hara must have included him just to memorialize the occasion accurately. The last two lines, as with much of O’Hara’s poetry, look like throw-away conclusion lines at first glance, but actually impart more than he perhaps thought. “Making a distinction” in this context implies both choice – a common O’Hara theme – and a social hierarchy, a classism that O’Hara would have detested when applied to society in general. Here, however, he seems to imply that

LeSueur weighed Bluhm’s lunch with Koch’s house party and Bluhm was deemed more important. The lines could read as a put-down of LeSueur, except that he was going to be present at the lunch where the poem was given to Bluhm, so they must just be a thought – an internal observation. 603 Smith reads these as hostility, O’Hara for LeSueur: “The city-as-community, then, is multi-layered, fragile, and open to change: strangers in the street pass by, friendships split up, artists come and go. The community has its excesses, . . . as a form of hospitality. It also

602 Collected Poems 328. 603 LeSueur was O’Hara’s friend and roommate in several apartments over eleven years before he finally rented an apartment of his own, just a few years before he died.

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has its hostilities and hierarchies . . .” 604 My read on these lines differs from Smith. I believe that

O’Hara was simply nodding to personal choices with his remark – a complicated subject in post- war America for this reason: in the age and political system America was selling globally, a myriad of personal choices equaled freedom. And yet, at the same time, Americans were more paranoid and conformist and afraid of individuality than at any time in history. I think O’Hara made this as an off-hand remark rather than a snarky statement – as an almost unconscious awareness that a hierarchical structure exists, and, whether one pays much attention to it or not, everyone is living within it. At any rate, the poem says something interesting about the complicated webbing of the network of friends that kept growing larger the longer O’Hara lived in New York.

Frank O’Hara’s poetic resistance to the plethora of social pressures he ignored was liberating for a young, effeminate, homosexual poet working in the American Cold War. His poetry, while it sometimes doubles as his life, also created for him and artificial version of the life of a character called Frank O’Hara – a life that was fabulous, campy, and, generally happy. The aspects of O’Hara’s life exposed his poetry are his friends, his daily routine, and, from time to time, candid internal thoughts. Other poems reveal a constructed life – set in New York City, awash with parties, shopping, lunches, and humorous observations. Separating reality from artifice is difficult – just as it is in contemporary social media, as humans tend to display for consumption only the brighter moments in their life. O’Hara did this with such a mastery that it’s difficult not be jealous when reading about the sunny, fun-packed, mega-social life that he writes

604 Smith 78.

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about. In the written, perhaps artificial life, O’Hara is fulfilled, happy, never has money problems, and only very rarely feels lonely. In this life, he is flagrantly homosexual without any regard for or thought about what his culture thinks about homosexuals. He is a pacifist and despises war, and regularly makes fun of American foreign policy, particularly with regard to

Russia and Communism. His friends and casual sex are enough to fill his life, and he only rarely admits to desiring love and romance. In this world, he is a poet, not a MoMA employee; he is carefree and comes and goes as he pleases rather than having a 9 to 5 job; he is sexually active and fulfilled. Despite writing often about sex, O’Hara had only one romance in his life – it lasted about 2 years. The character O’Hara doesn’t need church or family to be content with his life – he has friends who fill those roles. He doesn’t feel a need to move out of the city, own property, or have an automobile. He is not interested in what critics think about his work, nor is he particularly interested in the established capitalist publishing distribution channel. He has little interest in academic poetry or those poets at the top of successful careers during his lifetime. He shows little interest, either, in writing anarchy like the Beats, or participating in the civil rights movement, although his poetry confesses equality in many instances.

O’Hara seems to have been personally nourished by writing poetry, receiving from his writing a great sense of accomplishment and personal identity. Moreover, his poetry also gave sustenance to his friends. The life he made up in his poems – some of it simply reporting events or thoughts – was no doubt a much better life than his actual life. While he occasionally writes candidly, he usually avoids topics that don’t reinforce what a fabulous life he has. In fact, it is easier to see how his poetry subverts the anxieties and paranoias of the era than it is to see how his life actually did that. Nevertheless, there was likely no man alive during the early Cold War

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period who didn’t feel some of the negative effects of the anxiety, fear, paranoia, and societal judgement the era brought. Frank O’Hara lived much more gracefully and authentically than many.

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CHAPTER 6

EPILOGUE: THE SOCIAL MEDIA POETRY OF TOMMY PICO

With this epilogue, I’d like to advance a line of new research on the relationship between

Frank O’Hara and 21st century poet Tommy Pico. It almost goes without saying that Frank

O’Hara’s avant-garde mid-century poetry has been read and taught for over fifty years to successive generations of readers and poets. The collections of his poetry have not been out of print since the 1970s when they burst forth on the poetry landscape. O’Hara’s poems have inspired numerous dissertations, books, scholarly articles, readings, conferences, and even a recent appearance of O’Hara’s collection, Lunch Poems, on a television show, Matthew Weiner and AMC’s Mad Men.

The original group of poets called the New York School: O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James

Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery have now all passed, but their poetry hasn’t died – it is still being taught in colleges, and is used, particularly by urban gay writers, as a source of inspiration and influence. Even before O’Hara died, young poets pursued him; he personally mentored a second generation of New York School poets that idolized him, among them Bill

Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Joe Brainard. Berrigan, Padgett, and Brainard found

O’Hara’s poetry as teens in their hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York as soon as they could to meet and become friends with their poet-idol. Had O’Hara not died so young, his personal mentorship would no doubt have multiplied to include many more names.

Tommy Pico is a contemporary queer New York poet who I would like to establish in this

Epilogue as a 21st century poetic ancestor of O’Hara. Pico is a 35-year-old member of the

Kumeyaay Indian Nation who grew up on the Viejas Reservation near San Diego, California in

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the 1980s and 1990s. He excelled in academics, and attended Sarah Lawrence College on an academic scholarship, majoring in pre-medicine studies. After graduation, he moved to New

York City and began to write poetry.

In a recent interview, Michael Foulk asked Pico why he didn’t study poetry in college. Pico replied, “I was too intimidated by the poetry program at Sarah Lawrence. I was very young. I was very smart, but I wasn’t educated. I went to college with people who had a lot of money and huge vocabularies, and I was too intimidated.” 605 Nonetheless, Pico has been producing culture since he was a little boy who drew comic books. From them, he began producing zines, and now writes poetry (usually still first distributed as zines) and produces a podcast, Food 4 Thot, with three other multiracial queer men.

Pico’s impressive biography includes four books of poetry: IRL (2016), which won the

Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery

Award; Nature Poem (2017), winner of a 2018 American Book Award; Junk (2018), a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry; and Food (2019). He was also the founder and editor-in-chief of birdsong, an “anti-racist / queer-positive collective, small press, and zine” that published art and writing from 2008 to 2013. He was also a Queer/Art/Mentors Inaugural

Fellow, a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, was awarded the 2017 Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and won a 2018 Whiting Award. 606

605 Foulk n.p. 606 tommy-pico.com.

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Pico’s poetry builds on the solid ancestral base of previous gay poets, and his work is

evocative of the urban homosexual poetry of Frank O’Hara. The Pico poem selection I’ve chosen

for the Epilogue to this dissertation is from his book entitled IRL, a 98-page epic poem. IRL is a

digital vernacular abbreviation for “in real life,” used on social media posts to distinguish reality

from something that happens in games, just on social media, on television, or other fictional

media. Pico said his inspiration for the poem was that, “I wanted to write the longest Tumblr post

ever.”607 The poem is about Pico’s loosely-based autobiographical character, Teebs, who he

describes as “a queer indigenous protagonist.” Teebs is constantly on a search for Muse, which

Pico personifies as a character in the poem, describing Muse as the “embodiment of abstract /

concept: Art, dance, / astronomy, drama, heroic / poetry, security, good/god, edible / underwear,

pepperoni pizza, Jim / Beam.” 608 Pico says Teebs’ poetic energy is such that, “he’s unloading and he’s going to keep unloading until he’s done.” 609 He bases the character Teebs on himself, but, like in O’Hara’s work, the resulting poetry is not necessarily meant to be autobiography.

When pressed for an explanation for his drive to write this type of poetry, what Pico calls,

“contemporary, self-directed, Indigenous documentation,” he says this: "It's important to fucking prove that we're out here, 'cause nobody's looking for us."610

My claim with regard to Pico’s poetry in this Epilogue is that it functions, as did O’Hara’s, to

create a reparative practice as described by Sedgwick. Pico’s personal identity is undoubtedly

non-hegemonic as a gay Indigenous American poet who was raised in poverty on a reservation.

607 Foulk n.p. Tumblr is a popular social media and blogging platform. 608 Walker n.p. IRL 29. 609 Walker n.p. 610 Walker n.p.

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With this identity, Pico understands in an elemental way what film scholars Dhaenens,

Biltereyst, and Van Bauwel wrote about why coming to literature in a reparative way is so

essential for gay identity formation. They described a viewpoint that sees American cultural

hegemony – the dominant worldview, the cultural norm – by its very nature, as a force stripping

homosexuals of personal power. Pico, marginalized both as a Kumeyaay and a gay man works to

repair that power differential with his poetry. Peter Moscovitz writes:

He [Pico] told me that he uses poetry to square two identities that don’t fit

together well: being a poor, queer kid from the rez, and being a pleasure-seeking,

technology-addicted New Yorker who would rather chase the boys he meets on

apps than think about centuries of pain passed from one generation to another.611

Pico’s instinct for writing his poetry is the very definition of Sedgwick’s reparative impulse:

The desire of a reparative impulse . . . is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic

one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it

wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object [in Pico’s case, literature

celebrating his ‘contemporary, self-directed, Indigenous documentation’] that will

then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. 612

Despite living in an era when homosexuality is no longer illegal or considered mental illness, as it was for O’Hara, Pico nevertheless inhabits a reality in which homosexuality is still considered non-normative and non-hegemonic. His additional marginalization as an Indigenous American,

611 Moscovitz n.p. 612 Novel Gazing 27, 28 emphasis mine.

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particularly one raised immersed in his peoples’ culture on a reservation, considerably adds to

his paranoia about the culture surrounding him, to mimic Sedgwick’s explanation.

Charles Theonia wrote about Pico’s poetry: “Condensed into an instant of looking, failure to

connect in the historicized present reverberates out, estranging us from each other far beyond the

time it takes to have the interaction itself. The pain of distance is aloneness in experience—in

moments like this, Pico is asking us to inhabit it with him.”613 Pico’s poetic habit, similar to

O’Hara’s sixty years ago, is to invite readers to experience and occupy his urban world with him.

The result, the poetry he writes, is then both reparative to read and, for him, also reparative to write. It turns a perfectly legitimate and reasonable paranoia about the world he inhabits into a moment of hopeful reparation. Theonia goes on to describe this necessitated dialectic between paranoia and repair in Pico’s work, interestingly describing the poem as a place, in a way similar to de Certeau:

IRL maps Brooklyn and its familiar hazards in a cross between self-soothing

repetition and hyper-vigilant caution. . . [Pico’s poetics] are finely attuned to the

emotional workings of urban presence—a sensitivity I’d think is, at least in part,

born of the need to be ready to react at any moment—and to the impact of our

often-failing attempts to connect.614

These “tactics of the everyday,” as de Certeau called them, are the tactics non-hegemonic people

must use to keep or reclaim their autonomy from pervasive societal forces of institutions,

governments, and even culture. Recall that de Certeau describes his interest in these behaviors as

613 Theonia n.p. 614 Theonia n.p.

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an operational logic, “whose models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects

that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive.” 615 It is this way of being that Pico writes about in his poetry – a way of being that, due to his living an authentic identity, is required to survive – and to be seen - in the society in which he lives.

However, like O’Hara, Pico’s poetry shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as autobiographical.

Pico even removes himself one step further in his poetry than did O’Hara, so that his readers aren’t confused, he has created a character, Teebs, about whom he writes.616 Pico himself made

this distinction in an interview:

Another thing that helps me write all the time is that I’m not writing about myself;

I’ve always been writing about the world. I may be a character in the world, but as

long as the world keeps shifting, there’ll be stuff to write about. Governments

change, wars are waged, people die, the day gets long, the day gets short, the

seasons change, you meet new people, you learn new things, and I can just keep

committing that to the page. It’s all very routed in the vibe of punk scenes.617

This is in contrast to O’Hara’s poetry, which, by his careful purposefulness, did appear to be about his life. Notice, however, that, in the quote above, Pico seems to be saying that Teebs is him: “I’m not writing about myself,” but immediately following, “I may be a character in the world.” Clearly, he is Teebs, thinks of himself as Teebs, and knows readers believe he and Teebs are the same person. The reasons for this difference in his approach would make for interesting

615 Everyday Life xi. 616 In another poem, Junk, Pico creates a character named Junk, a slang term for male genitalia, as a stand-in for himself, however, he doesn’t ever write about a character named Tommy Pico as O’Hara did about a character named Frank O’Hara. For Pico, a step removed from self is the rule. 617 Foulk n.p.

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further scholarship, however, the stated goals of both poets was to use their poetry in a way that

made sense of the world they inhabited.

Recalling de Certeau’s writing about “habitable spaces,” particularly his advancement of

streets as habitable places pedestrians “fill with the forests of their desires and goals,” I’d like to

examine similarities between O’Hara and Pico with regard to their poetic of walking the streets

of their neighborhoods: the creation of the “urban text.” 618 Both O’Hara and Pico write almost exclusively about New York – the city that for both authors provides both anonymity and community. Theonia writes that Pico, “explores relationalities of crushes, hookups, partnership, and friendship while offering a queer, anti-colonial, New York look at the structures of violence underlying our lives.”619 Like O’Hara, Pico often writes with candid vulgarity about sex. He

writes with surprising similarity to O’Hara about the locations and circumstances surrounding

urban gay sex, so similar to O’Hara, in fact, it’s difficult to remember that sixty years have

passed and gay marriage is the law of the land. Theonia writes: “Uncertain whether it’s dark or

secluded enough to be intimate outside our apartments, Junk’s sexuality spreads out into dimmed

movie theaters, karaoke booths, and bathrooms.”

IRL is written as if it is an almost 100-page social media post, consisting of habitable spaces

and events in the first-person gay urban life of Teebs, an indigenous queer protagonist. Recalling

that de Certeau found that city dwellers used patterns of walking the city as a tactic of operation,

in this selection, Teebs invites readers along as he maps out his route “walking to the JMZ,”

carefully choosing his route while attempting to avoid insults and epithets directed at him

618 Everyday Life xxi. 619 Theonia n.p.

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because he’s queer. Something important happens, however, in this section of the poem as Teebs

realizes that he holds a kind of power against the anti-gay hostility that he hadn’t before realized:

“Wipe your face off, bitch. There is a kind of power in being reviled just for being…. hate so

swoll it destabilizes something about their everyday.”620 This is exactly the result of what de

Certeau called the “tactics of the everyday,” where a kind of power over institutional or societal domination has been negotiated in the places of free play and creativity – in this case on the streets of New York. Teebs also recognizes another important aspect of urban life in this selection; and that is that walking “w/ / a friend, you will forget / to pay attention.”621 The theme of an artistic community with which one shares life, advanced by Goodman and embraced by

O’Hara, also has significant ramifications for Pico.

Here is the selection from IRL:

I’m in the city. Am the city. The rush is what I covet - the noise of constant motion, curled in bed on the rez a sense of options. I’m starting to (s)well up, feasting on boys ideas and language and chips of technology. Sometimes real food. So much is left to interpretation – the jag you think is a dagger as Man says faggot but really says father to someone out of the range of your thot process. This is how shoulders scoop n stay scooped:

620 IRL 63. 621 IRL 61, 62.

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Feeling eyes upon you, walk to the door. If walking to the JMZ summertime and you want to show your legs— take Scholes to Lorimer, cross to the other side of the park. If you walk parkside, men on the benches will call you faggot, spit toward you and sometimes even follow close behind. If you take Montrose to Lorimer, it’s almost good but nearing the turn is the stretch where men sit on lawn chairs to watch the baseball games in the park and they will throw bottlecaps, call u fag, if you walk alone. W/ a friend, you will forget to pay attention. The walk to Greenpoint is fine until about Norman. Stay on the even side, otherwise you pass the red- faced Polish men who will bark at you, sometimes jut their chins, make kissy faces and spit. Cross to Metro- politan at Lorimer, or to the side of Graham to the right of Scholes and never between 3pm and 4 bc you know – teens. When walking with Jess or Chantal or Wilkes or Lauren or Maud or Cat or Tyler or Theresa or Ruby or Alyson, they

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intone walking with you six foot two feels safer They get less shit and spit and suck from men, and while you think godamn, my faggot ass makes men hesitant? While u of course oblige While u realize this makes you more that hated man- thing – this is a safety exchange. With friends, u think less about a jeer and more, then what’d he say? ... There is a kind of power in being reviled for just being in the sense that my scooped shoulders the snake of my neck my bare legs strike frenzy I scare them something in the lumen jolts, terror or desire, hate so swoll it destabilizes something about their everyday something bubbling shuddering under the brushstroke of stars.622

While Pico’s poetic style differs from O’Hara’s in some significant ways: Pico is more tied to the standard rules of capitalization and punctuation than O’Hara, and Pico’s line length is much shorter and much more regular; the similarities, particularly in his walking on the streets poems, however, are striking. This section of IRL reads as though it is a dialogue with himself, like many

O’Hara poems: an internal conversation. Like O’Hara, Pico doesn’t edit vulgarities from his

622 IRL 60 - 63.

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texts; they read as if they are conversation with a close trusted companion. Pico’s comical gay

impulse to want to show his legs (it’s summertime!) is reminiscent of O’Hara’s “Personism”

manifesto line, “As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if

you’re going to buy a of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to

bed with you.” 623 The impulse for both poets is a desire to be seen, not invisible – even though they both also know that being seen also means the potential for hostility and unwanted aggression.

In this selection, Pico illustrates perfectly one of de Certeau’s observations about the consumption of urban space for personal power. de Certeau wrote, “The city, in the strongest sense, is ‘poeticized’ by the subject: the subject has refabricated it for his or her own use by undoing the constraints of the urban apparatus and, as a consumer of space, imposes his or her own law on the external order of the city.” Here, Pico does just that: by describing a street map that maximizes his chances of getting from home to “JMZ” with a minimum of danger or hostility, he unexpectedly discovers that his queerness destabilizes the neighborhood men in a way that ultimately grants him hegemony.624 Moreover, it is in walking with friends that he

makes his discovery, as they relay to him that his physical height [Pico himself is 6’2”], his

stature, makes them feel safe. “godamn, my faggot ass / makes men hesitant?” he thinks,

surprised. Then: “There is a kind of power / in being reviled / for just being,” he writes,

astonished at his own realization. “[S]omething . . . / so swoll it / destabilizes something / about

623 Collected Poems 498. 624 The JMZ is a train connection in the Brooklyn neighborhood of South Williamsburg in New York.

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their everyday something,” follows as if Pico is suddenly aware, perhaps for the first time, how powerful his presence can be.

Nevertheless, this realization that his friends find Teebs company, fearlessness, and height to carry power against aggression causes Teebs to immediately wonder if this makes him as bad as his attackers:

While u realize this makes you more that hated man- thing – this is a safety exchange.

This insistent gender role awareness, expressed both an awareness of his queerness and of toxic masculinity, is a common internal dialogue for homosexual men, and Pico knows his queer readers will follow him here. With every small personal gain in the power differential of marginalized people, also comes an immediate slap-down. If his presence has power, is that the same as the patriarchal, white, male hegemony he’s constantly fighting against, he wonders? And would that make him as guilty of a pernicious historical masculinity as those who make fun of him?

The ever-lengthening list of streets and turns and the long list of the first names of Pico’s friends all provide a confusing lack of context for readers – the same complaint early critics applied to O’Hara’s poetry. The experience of poetically tracing a map of the neighborhood to make it your own is an exercise in which O’Hara also participated. In this poem, O’Hara asks a friend how she walked from one place to another using their familiar landmarks:

361

illuminating lampshades, past Cooper Union where we heard the piece by Mortie Feldman with “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in it and the Sagamore’s terrific “coffee and, Andy,” meaning “with a cheese Danish”— did you spit on your index fingers and rub the CEDAR’S neon circle for luck? did you give a kind thought, hurrying, to Alger Hiss?625

There is an insider connection to knowing the route a friend will walk to get from one place to another; Pico is describing that same connection of shared experience in the IRL excerpt.

In another poem, O’Hara opines about the visibility of walking compared to, for example, riding the bus:

when you ride on a 5th Avenue bus you hide on a 5th Avenue bus I mean compared to you walking don’t hide there you are trying to hide behind a fire hydrant I’m not going to the Coliseum I’m going to the Russian Tea Room fooled you didn’t I well it is nicer in the Park with the pond and all that okay lake and bicyclists give you a feeling of being at leisure in the open air lazy and good-tempered which is fairly unusual these days I liked for instance carrying my old Gautier book and L’Ombra over to LeRoi’s the other pale afternoon through the crowds of 3rd Avenue and the ambulance and the drunk626

Still, not all O’Hara’s interaction with fellow New Yorkers was as pleasant as he has recorded in that poem. He, too, shares with Pico the experience of being aggressively maligned because he is

625 Collected Poems 265. 626 Collected Poems 420.

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visually read as gay. Consider this excerpt from O’Hara’s long-form poem, “Biotherm,” on a

similar interaction with a stranger:

Despite both O’Hara’s and Pico’s intense claims on New York as their city, there are these random moments of estrangement which make them both realize that they live among those who strongly disapprove of them, believe that they don’t belong, that they are despised as the Other.

Reading O’Hara and Pico as political poets helps unlock the key to their poetic power: that how we each perform our identities in an effort to be “seen,” through our clothing, accessories, speech, body expressions, and where and how we “walk” through our daily lives; this everyday essence is something worth writing about. O’Hara and Pico’s conscious choices to elevate their everyday activities by recording them in poetry are important records of resistance to the social pressures marginalized communities face.

In addition, the practice stands as a confirmation of Sedgwick’s work that queer people can develop methods in which they find reparative practices, particularly in literature, which bolster their hope for a better future. Their poetry also provides evidence of de Certeau’s theoretical work that, in his belief, the most significant form of resistance to dominance - governmental,

627 Collected Poems 441.

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religious, cultural - is found in the tactics of the everyday. Referring specifically to non-dominant groups of people, he wrote that, “they escaped it [the dominant social order power] without leaving it.

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395 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kent L. Boyer grew up in a blue-collar home in a small town in Iowa, and has lived as an adult in Dallas, TX, Rochester, NY, Sioux City, IA, and Washington DC. He has worked as an

Associate Professor at two colleges and an academic administrator at one, as Vice President of

Online Learning a for a financial corporation, as a Senior Change Management Consultant for an international IT company, and as a Photoshop seminar lecturer for North America. During other periods, he has been an online media producer, chiropractic educator and textbook author, arts writer, curriculum writer, bank teller, retail jewelry manager, hospice liaison, house painter, academic technology consultant, web developer, and a hospital orderly. He has worked in higher education, for Fortune 100 corporations, and for a K-12 educational non-profit. He holds previous degrees in computer animation, general science, art and cultural traditions, and chiropractic medicine. Boyer currently teaches art appreciation, composition, and world literature at area colleges. He is passionate about life-long learning, teaching first-generation college students, and expanding public access to the magical worlds of arts and letters.

396 CURRICULUM VITAE

Kent L. Boyer School of Arts and Humanities University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX 75080

[email protected] https://independent.academia.edu/KentBoyer

Research Interests Identity Politics, Masculinity Studies, Critical Theory, Modernism, Twentieth Century Germany, Abstract Expressionism, Twentieth Century Art and Literature, Digital Humanities and Media.

Education University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX Ph.D. Candidate in Humanities (2020) Dissertation: “Subverting Propriety: The Intimate, Habitable Poetics of Frank O’Hara” Dissertation Chair: Charles Hatfield Qualifying Fields: • Mid-Century American Cultural and Intellectual History • Critical Theory and Politics in American Art and Literature • Modernity, Culture, and the Jews

Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX Master of Liberal Studies (M.L.S.) in The Arts and Cultural Traditions (2014) Thesis: “X-Men Films as Allegorical Camp and Reparative Reading”

Palmer College of Chiropractic, Davenport, IA Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) (1987)

Palmer College of Chiropractic, Davenport, IA B.S. in General Science, Minor in Studio Art (1987)

The Art Institute of Dallas, Dallas, TX A.A.A. in Computer Animation (1997)

Publications 2012 - 2013: DFW Arts & Culture Magazine, Dallas, TX: Artist interviews, exhibition reviews, feature articles on arts and culture 2012: “Michael O’Keefe,” Biographical Essay, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, Vol. 9, Aug. 2012 2011 – 2012: Dallas Art News, Dallas, TX: Exhibition reviews

397 1994: Topographical and Motion Palpation of the Appendicular Skeleton, The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York 1993: Chiropractor: The Quest for Professional Respect, Halo Books, San Francisco, California 1992: How to Succeed in Chiropractic College, Halo Books, San Francisco, California 1991: Topographical and Motion Palpation of the Axial Skeleton, The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York

Papers Presented “Exchanging Themselves: Frank O’Hara and the Mid-Century New York Painters,” 2020 Seminar lecture for Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, Richardson, TX

“Ekphrastic Poetry: ‘Why I Am Not A Painter,’ by Frank O’Hara,” 2019 Seminar lecture for Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, Richardson, TX

“Living Inauthentically: The Wartime Activation of a Gay Poet,” 2019 Paper presented at the Research, Art, and Writing (RAW) Graduate Symposium Presentation, University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, Richardson, TX

“The World War II Activation of a Gay Poet: Frank O’Hara’s Navy Service,” 2019 Paper presented at the World History Conference of Texas, Texas A&M University – Commerce, Commerce, TX

“Gerald Murphy: Seven Years as a Painter,” 2016 Paper presented at the University of North Texas Art History Society Writing Competition, Denton, TX

“Cultural Resistance in Occupied Holland: H. N. Werkman's Hasidic Legends Portfolios,” 2016 Paper presented at the Research, Art, and Writing (RAW) Graduate Symposium Presentation, University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, Richardson, TX

Awards and Academic Honors 2019-2020: Fellow, Edith O’Donnell Institute for Art History, University of Texas at Dallas 2016: Art History Society Writing Competition Winner, Third Prize, for “Gerald Murphy: Seven Years as a Painter,” University of North Texas 2016: Travel Grant Recipient to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas 2014-2019: Scholarship Recipient, School of Arts and Humanities Graduate Teaching Scholarship, University of Texas at Dallas 1997: President’s List Award Recipient, The Art Institute of Dallas 1997: Dean’s Award for Overall Excellence Recipient, The Art Institute of Dallas 1991: Outstanding Educator Award Recipient, Parker University College of Chiropractic Student Body Association

398 1990: Outstanding Educator Award Recipient, Parker University College of Chiropractic Student Body Association

Teaching and Administrative Experience 2016 – present El Centro College (an Hispanic-Serving Institution) Dallas County Community College District, Dallas, TX Adjunct Instructor

2017 - 2019 University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX Instructor of Record

2014-2017 University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX Graduate Teaching Assistant

Fall 2002 Morningside College, Sioux City, IA Adjunct Instructor

Spring 1999 The Art Institute of Dallas, Dallas, TX Adjunct Instructor

Fall 1996 Court Reporting Institute of Dallas, Dallas, TX Adjunct Instructor

Summer 1995 Collin County College, McKinney, TX Adjunct Instructor

1994 - 1996 Parker College of Chiropractic, Dallas, TX Associate Professor and Academic Center Director (four departments, forty-five faculty)

1992 - 1994 New York Chiropractic College, Seneca Falls NY Associate Professor, Chiropractic Sciences

1989 - 1992 Parker College of Chiropractic, Dallas, TX Assistant Professor, Chiropractic Sciences

399 Courses Taught Masterpieces of World Literature College Writing - Rhetoric Humanities – Fine Arts Appreciation Humanities – Fine Arts Appreciation Dual Credit Art Appreciation Art Appreciation for Culinary Students Art Appreciation – Hybrid Format Technology for Education Majors Image Manipulation 2D Animation Anatomy and Physiology for Court Reporters Medical Terminology for Court Reporters Anatomy and Physiology for Nursing Students Professional Ethics for Healthcare Providers History of Alternative Health Care in America Introduction to Health Care Motion Palpation Diagnosis of the Axial Skeleton Motion Palpation Diagnosis of the Appendicular Skeleton Neuropathophysiology Nutrition for Healthcare Providers Physiotherapy Procedures Therapeutic Manipulation of the Spine

Certifications Online Instructor Certification, Tarrant County Community College, Introduction to Humanities Online Instructor Certification, Dallas County Community College, Art Appreciation

Other Professional Employment 2012 – 2016 Simmons School of Education, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX Online and Hybrid Course Instructional Designer/Developer: Blackboard and Canvas

2010-2012 Girls Incorporated of Metro Dallas, Dallas, Texas Senior Program and Professional Development Director

2007-2008 Electronic Data Systems (EDS), now Hewlett Packard, Plano, TX Knowledge Management and Curriculum Development Manager

2004 – 2006 Countrywide Financial Systems, Plano, TX Vice President of eLearning

400 2003 - 2004 Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Minneapolis, MN Virtual Team Academy Manager

2002 – 2003 Wells’ Dairy, LeMars, IA Leadership Development Manager

2000 – 2002 Electronic Data Systems (EDS), now Hewlett Packard, Plano, TX Senior Change Management Consultant

1999 – 2000 Millbrook Software, Carrollton, TX Senior Developer, Computer Based Learning

1998 – 1999 SSDC, Carrollton, TX Creative Director

1994 – 1996 Parker College of Chiropractic, Dallas, TX Associate Professor and Center Director, Chiropractic Sciences

1991 – 1994 New York Chiropractic College, Seneca Falls, NY Associate Professor, Chiropractic Sciences

1989 - 1991 Parker College of Chiropractic, Dallas, TX Assistant Professor, Chiropractic Sciences

Academic Service University of Texas at Dallas: Member, Graduate Student Association (School of Arts and Humanities) SAFE ZONE LGBTQ+ Ally Training, Galerstein Gender Center Parker University: Member, Disciplinary Committee Member, Re-Admissions Committee Member, Research Committee Transcript Evaluator / Academic Advisor to Transfer Students Member, Center Directors Committee Member, SACS Accreditation Self-Study Committee Member, Faculty Senate

401 New York Chiropractic College: Member, Faculty Senate Member, Faculty Handbook Revision Committee Member, Middle States Accreditation Self-Study Committee Member, Admissions Committee

Professional Memberships Member, The College Art Association Member, Modern Language Association Member, Modernist Studies Association Member, Phi Alpha Theta (National History Honor Society) Member, Association for Jewish Studies Member, College Book Art Association Board of Advisors, Oxford University Press, Higher Education Inaugural Member, Leadership Dallas Independent School District Class of 2012

Professional References

Dr. Charles Hatfield, Associate Professor, Literature University of Texas at Dallas (972) 883-2780 [email protected]

Dr. Dianne Goode, Senior Lecturer II, Art History University of Texas at Dallas (214) 850-4624 [email protected]

Dr. Nils Roemer, Interim Dean, School of Arts and Humanities Professor, History of Ideas and Director of the Ackerman Holocaust Center University of Texas at Dallas (972) 883-2769 [email protected]

Dr. Christopher Ryan, Director of Rhetoric, Professional, and Technical Communication University of Texas at Dallas 972-883-2188 [email protected]

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