The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, edited by Francis Darwin, New York: Dover Publications, 1958. (First published in 1892.)

Schuyler had a New Year’s Day tradition of going to the Hazan’s (Jane Freilicher)—in fact one of his last Diary entries talks about getting dressed to go over to their soiree. On January 1, 1968 he wrote about starting Darwin’s autobiography. This notation eventually turned into the poem, “Empathy and New Year”. Here is a snippet:

Got coffee and started

reading Darwin: so modest,

so innocent, so pleased at

the surprise that he

should grow up to be him. How

grand to begin a new

year with a new writer

you really love.

It is the intimate simplicity that I love about Schuyler’s poems. I am given a glimpse into the interior of someone living generations past and dwelling in a landscape foreign to me. It is the mundane details that give me a landing place, a space to inhabit. I feel solidly anchored in New York City late 50s, 1960s, before displacement and the authentic got co-opted. When the Village was the village and the Chelsea Hotel was the bastion of washed up rock stars and writers.  

Though a book of and by Darwin seems like an ancient text it was likely more contemporary to Schuyler. The Journal was first transcribed and published in Life and Letters in 1887 but highly interleaved with other material. It appeared more fully in More Letters (1903). It first appeared in its entirety in English in 1959, edited by Gavin de Beer from a copy by an unknown copyist. The original manuscript was not re-discovered until 1962 and is now in the Darwin Archive, Cambridge University Library.

Jimmy Schuyler, Jane Freilicher

1965

oil on canvas

Sitting, listening to the snowplow blade scrape the street, Schuyler begins the new year ruminating on an expansive topic: the evolution of man. Bringing the world a step closer.