A Random Footnote

I’m still working on a hybrid manuscript I started this summer on Great Spruce Head Island on James Schuyler and his connection to the island and the Porter family. In re-reading Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991, I came upon a random footnote.

First some context. James Schuyler was crazy.

He didn’t start out that way. He was a curious, witty, conversational gay young man. He was a self-taught poet, once serving as a secretary to W. H. Auden at his vacation home on Ischia in Italy. Moving amongst heady circles he associated with renowned poets and artists. Until his breakdown, or series of breakdowns. This was in the days when psychological drugs were still in their infancy. If you were diagnosed as schizophrenic you were sentenced to a life of lithium and being zoned out. No wonder most creatives risked psychosis rather than being medicated.

Mostly Schuyler kept his episodes in check. The stability of living with the Porters helped as well as the support of a network of friends ie The New York School.

Footnote from Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991

Schuyler in Vermont General Hospital in Woodbury, VT following a breakdown while visiting Joe Brainard and Kenward Elmslie at their vacation home

…This episode began on a night that Schuyler locked himself in a v=bathroom and proceeded to wash his money. In the morning Elmslie and Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, who were also staying in the house, realized that Schuyler was not going to snap out of it. Elmslie called the state police, who came with a doctor. Not wanting to be institutionalized again, Schuyler refused to go until Ashbery agreed to accompany him in the police car.

A footnote, in time, giving me pause. I could just imagine the scene.

Some context. I’ve been crazy.

I remember times during college when I went on crying jags, lost my mind over the stress of academic workload, money worries, anxiety about friendships, the future. Who wouldn’t feel on edge? I wrecked a friend’s car (because mine was in the shop getting fixed)—I was all right—but had to figure out how to get it back from the shop out of town and pay for repairs. And I was graduating in a month about to embark on—

I had no idea.

Friends walked me back from the ledge. Got me sorted and launched in Chicago. Whew!

I imagined Kenward and Joe knocking on the bathroom door, shouting Are you okay? Then John stepping up, Hey buddy. Promising he won’t leave him. I’ll go with you. Whatever it takes to get you better.

I can bet this wasn’t what Ashbery went to Vermont for. He was probably looking forward to a vacation, relaxing in the Vermont woods with the fall colors. Maybe getting some writing done. This must have been perceived as a huge disruption.

He rode along in the police car with James to the hospital. I’m sure he didn’t want to see his friend committed, navigating the sticky landscape of seeing a friend go off his rocker and convincing him—this is for your own good. I’m sure he had to do a lot of verbal dancing ie lying. An act of betrayal. The whole time hating himself.

It was a short, random footnote that spoke volumes.

This past September we lost John Ashbery. A true friend.

Schuyler and Ashbery