Art Imitates Life

On August 22, 1969 James Schuyler was reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson, London: Oxford University Press, 1922.

1969 was a particularly stable and fruitful year for Schuyler. As a writer he was making inroads with two publications. Free Espousing Schuler’s first commercially published book of poems came out with Doubleday under the imprint Paris Review Editions.  A Nest of Ninnies the back-and-forth book co-produced by Jimmy and John Asbery. Each wrote alternating chapters, passing the manuscript back and forth over oceans, despite Fullbrights and hospital stays, the loss of friends and friendships for 17 years. I don’t think either thought it would see the light of day. The story if like a long evening of storytelling between friends, friends with wit and intelligence who both know dialogue. A tale derived from anecdotal observations of middle-class suburbia. Published by Dutton it was reviewed by W. H. Auden in the NY Times Book Review—destined to become a minor classic (was the satire intentional?).

Also at the time Schuyler was still living with the Porters and traveling back and forth from Amherst, MA where Fairfield Porter was a visiting professor at Amherst College to Southampton in Long Island to Calais, Vermont to visit Kenward Elmslie and Joe Brainard. Schuyler seemed at the top of his game. In a few year’s time he would be broke, suffering from mental breakdowns, and struggling with living independently.

Boswell’s Life of Johnson seems apropos for this time in Schuyler’s own life. It is a work between friends: Not exactly accurate, full of embellishments, conflated incidents, and condensed conversation.  From wiki:

On 6 August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, to begin "a journey to the western islands of Scotland", as Johnson's 1775 account of their travels would put it.[3] Boswell's account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), was a preliminary attempt at a biography before his Life of Johnson.[4] With the success of that work, Boswell started working on the "vast treasure of his conversations at different times" that he recorded in his journals.[5] His goal was to recreate Johnson's "life in scenes."

This sounds a lot like how A Nest of Ninnies came about—a result of a car ride in July 1952 where Ashbery and Schuyler whiled away the trip weaving a story. From an article written by Ashbery which appeared in Context, no. 22:

The Making of John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies

Context N°22

James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance. It was July 1952 and we were being given a lift back to New York from East Hampton, N.Y. where we had spent the weekend as guests of the musical comedy librettist John Latouche. Latouche planned to make a short movie starring us and our friend Jane Freilicher called “Presenting Jane,” from a scenario by Schuyler. A few scenes had just been shot, including a scene of Jane walking on water (actually a submerged dock on Georgica Pond); the film was never finished though Schuyler’s script recently surfaced and is going to be published soon. Now we were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat.

Since neither Jimmy nor I knew the Starrs very well, we at first contented ourselves with observing the exurban landscape along the old Sunrise Highway (this was before construction of the now infamous Long Island Expressway). Growing bored, Jimmy said, “Why don’t we write a novel?” And how do we do that, I asked. “It’s easy—you write the first line,” was his reply. This was rather typical of him—getting a brilliant idea and then conscripting someone else to realize it. Not to be outmaneuvered, I contributed a three-word sentence: “Alice was tired.”

So as art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art. Life lived. Boswell and Johnson, Ashbery and Schuyler literary friends who have contributed to the world of literature and memoir—an inspiration to all who endeavor to explore the intersection of fiction and non-fiction.

John Ashbery and James Schuyler, Great Spruce Head Island, photo: Kenneth Koch