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BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Copley Square

BY JAMES SCHUYLER
Poems
Salute

(1960)

(1966)
Freely Espousing (1969)
May 24th Or So

A Sun Cab (1972)
The Crystal Lithium
Hymn to Life

(1972)

(1974)

The FireproofFloors ofWitley Court (1976)
The Morning ofthe Poem

(1980)

(1985)
Selected Poems (1988)
Collected Poems (1993)

A Few Days

Novels
Alfred and Guinevere (1958)

(with John Ashbery, 1969)
What's for Dinner? (1978)

A Nest ofNinnies

Poems and Prose
The Home Book

(edited by Trevor Winkfield, 1977)

Diaries
(1982)
For Joe Brainard (1988)
Early in 71

The Diary ofJames Schuyler (edited

Nathan Keman, 1997)

by

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/diaryofjamesschuOOschu

THE

DIARY

OF

JAMES SCHUYLER
EDITED BY

SANTA ROSA

NATHAN KERNAN

BLACK SPARROW PRESS 1997

THE DIARY OF JAMES SCHUYLER. Copyright © 1997 by the Estate
of James Schuyler.
EDITING, INTRODUCTION & NOTES. Copyright © 1997 by Nathan
Keman.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of
this publication may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from
the publiser except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical arti¬
cles and reviews. For information address Black Sparrow Press, 24 Tenth
Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401.

Cover portrait of James Schuyler by Darragh Park.

Black Sparrow Press books are printed on acid-free paper.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Schuyler, James, 1923-1991
The Diary of James Schuyler / edited by Nathan Keman.
p,
cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-57423-025-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57423-026-3 (cloth trade :
alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57423-027-1 (deluxe cloth : alk. paper)
1. Schuyler, James—Diaries. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Diaries.
I. Keman, Nathan.
II. Title.
818’.5403—dc21
96-49338
CIP
[B]

For Joe Brainard

(1942-1994)

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction

9

Acknowledgements

21

The Diary of James Schuyler

27

James Schuyler: A Chronology

278

Appendix of Names

299

List of Illustrations

319

Two sections of photographs follow pages 100 and 196.

Introduction

“— to be purely a thought!”

For readers of his poetry, the idea of the Diary of James Schuyler
might almost seem like too much of a good thing. The diaristic
quality of his poetry has been noted by almost everyone who has
written about it, from Howard Moss to Wayne Koestenbaum,
Helen Vendler to Edmund White, and can already be inferred from
the titles listed in Schuyler’s Collected Poems, fifteen of which consist
of or include specific dates, such as “May 24th or So,” or “Today
July 26, 1965,” while a further 33 poems are titled with either a sea¬
son, a month, a day, or a time of day: “February,” “In Earliest
Morning,” “A Name Day,” “August Night.”
Many Schuyler poems record a sequence of days so that they
become, in effect, little diaries: “A few days,” “The Morning of the
Poem,” “Dining Out with Frank and Doug,” “A Vermont Diary”
and “The Cenotaph.” But most often, a Schuyler poem seems to
have been written at one sitting; the day itself is often the subject,
or as David Bergman has pointed out,1 the object of a poem (“I
think/ I will write you a letter,/ June day. Dear June Fifth,...”;
“Silver day/ how shall I polish you?”). Schuyler’s poems often
draw our attention to the idea of Day as the infinitely varied yet
unchanging, inexorable unit of passing time: “The day lives us and
in exchange/ We it” (“Hymn to Life”). The sense of passing time
pervades Schuyler’s work from the first words of his first published
poem, “Salute” (“Past is past,”) to the last poem in the last book of
new poems published in his lifetime: “A few days/ are all we have.

1 David Bergman, “Material Ecstasy: The Poetry of James Schuyler/' published in
Mouth of the Dragon, Vol. 2, No. 5, October, 1980.

9

So count them as they pass. They pass too quickly... ”
Schuyler’s love of historical diaries, particularly nineteenth
century English ones, is reflected in his poems and in his own
Diary. “My writing, my poetry, is enormously influenced by my
reading,” Schuyler said in an interview with Carl Little, adding,
I’m really much more of a reader than a writer. I particularly
like diaries, for instance, Francis Kilvert’s diary, in three vol¬
umes, I’ve read many, many times. It’s extremely visual. I’m
always reading in Thoreau’s diaries, and my favorite book is
the diaries of George Templeton Strong.

Some of Schuyler’s other favorite diarists were James Woodforde, Gilbert White, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Virginia Woolf.
What makes their diaries live, and what Schuyler valued in them,
in addition to beautiful language, has nothing to do with analytical
thinking or insight into topical issues of the past—though these
may be present—but are the mundane, chance details of daily life:
the same kinds of closely observed details that we find in
Schuyler’s own Diary and in his poetry.
Schuyler also loved memoirs. It was a memoir, Logan Pearsall
Smith’s Unforgotten Years, that first awakened him to the realization
that he too must become a writer: reading the book as a teenager,
Schuyler looked up from his backyard tent and saw the landscape
“shimmer.” Schuyler quotes at length in his Diary from Harry
Daley’s memoir, This Small Cloud, from Iris Origo’s War in Val
d’Orcia and from Boris Pasternak’s Safe Conduct; he extolls Charles
Darwin’s memoirs for their “simplicity” and “reticence of intima¬
cy.” Although Schuyler never wrote his own memoirs, one of the
characteristics of the Diary, as of Schuyler’s poetry, is the way
memories seem to rise abruptly out of the fabric of whatever else is
going on, like Proust’s “involuntary memories.”
Another rather nineteenth-century sort of book which Schuyler
enjoyed and which undoubtedly influenced his own writing was the
commonplace book. Perhaps the best-known modem example of
the genre is Auden’s A --">