When The Songs We Know Best—Karin Roffman’ s careful, caring account of John Ashbery’ s first twenty-eight years—found its first readers, its subject was not only alive but immortal, fresh off his twenty-seventh collection, a monument in American poetry who outlasted all the moments and movements he supposedly defined. A month and change after its publication, Ashbery turned ninety; another month and change later, he passed away.† Roffman did not set out to write an obituary, nor to condense an entire life or career, but her book may be the most instructive guide yet on reading Ashbery autobiographically, a rarely-chosen approach to this poet who invites and deflects all approaches. It’ s no secret that Ashbery had a life—it’ s there in “The Skaters ” (1966), with spots of time bubbling up to its surface; Flow Chart (1991), the hundred-page poem written into the vacancy left by his mother’ s death; “The History of My Life ” (1999), an elegy for his younger brother and a fairytale-neat childhood: “Once upon a time there were two brothers. / Then there was only one: myself. ” But for every dispatch from his life, Ashbery’ s poetry provides hundreds of red herrings, set changes, inattentive wanderings away from self-absorption. “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name, ” from Houseboat Days (1977), flings confessionalism down with a splat—self-indulging for a few whiny lines, Ashbery moves on:
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
One Ashberian virtue of Roffman’ s biography is its doting preservation of those boys’ names, sleds, skyrockets, of apparently everything minor, dated, otherwise discarded. That virtue enriches the first chapters of The Songs We Know Best, on Ashbery’ s roots and childhood in upstate New York, divided between the family farm in Sodus and his grandparents’ house in Pultneyville. For all the golden-hour nostalgia and endearing antiques within Ashbery’ s poetry, his childhood played out over a room tone of sadness:a father’ s disregard, a younger brother’ s unmentionable death, a small town and small minds inhospitable to this gay, ambitious, spacey, irrepressibly odd boy. As self-defense and self-distraction, the young Ashbery turned to playwriting, art history, technicolor spectacle, and overblown crushes; he fostered a competitive sense of bookishness that just about made him a quizbowl child star. (His record was imperfect, tragicomically: at the New York state spelling bee, the thirteen-year-old Ashbery spelled as far as D-E-S-P-A, realized his error, and was knocked out on “desperately. ”)
As Ashbery enters adolescence, Roffman’ s other virtues emerge. Compassionately, dependably, Roffman reconstructs the withheld interiority of the young Ashbery, whom she treats not as an Old-Master-in-the-making but as who he was: a young gay man, sad, solitary, distraught with his circumstances, itching for some transcendent escape. Collaborating with both Ashbery the septa-then-octogenarian and Ashbery the teenager, Roffman stitches together interviews with the former and the latter’ s diaries, totaling over a thousand pages, offering a meticulous (though often enciphered) accounting of ages thirteen through sixteen. (These, presumably, are the very diaries Ashbery remembered in a 2009 interview as “so boring!… I obviously wasn’ t doing anything of much interest. You know, I’ d say ‘had a tuna sandwich for lunch.’ ” So much for self-analysis.)
“The diaries were a revelation, ” Roffman writes, “because the voice of the poet was so present already, ” years before his mature (or immature) poetry took shape: there, unmistakably, were “his wry sense of humor, patience, impatience, and attention to the experience of his experience. ” A precocious teenager, no doubt, though it’ s just as fair to say that Ashbery the twenty-something (even the eighty-something) was constitutionally adolescent: Ashbery grows into a voice that can turn gushily romantic or moodily evasive, self-amusing or parodic of any adult pretensions within earshot. (“None of us ever graduates from college, ” Ashbery would write in “Soonest Mended, ” which he deemed his “one-size-fits-all ” confessional poem. “For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. ”) Roffman’ s biography, for all its scrupulous research and strict chronology, is constantly made trippy by its subject, a young poet who never acts his age. As a senior at Deerfield, Ashbery was already placing poetry in Poetry (though not under his name, or any real name—the poems were plagiarized by a roommate and printed under a pseudonym). Later, as the most overambitious undergraduate among many at Harvard, he made plans to “rip modern poetry wide open! ”; ever the ambitious reader, he cruised through Proust in one summer, then read it all again that fall. Going by the juiciness of the gossip, the Harvard years might beat out post-college Manhattan, years weighed down by grating jobs and undiagnosable writer’ s block, despite the levity and solace offered by his new friends. Maybe you’ ve heard of them: the artists Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers, a trio of barely-known poets named James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’ Hara. (All of the above convened in East Hampton to gripe, collaborate on sestinas, and film a version of Schuyler’ s short play Presenting Jane (1953)—less New York School than New York Summer Camp.) The deus ex machina of Ashbery’ s early life, and Roffman’ s biography, is W. H. Auden, who intersected with Ashbery’ s twenties with a preposterous frequency. The titanic poet of the post-modernist (and pre-Ashbery) generation, Auden at first seems untouchably distant: a chapter later he’ s a near-miss hookup after a Harvard Advocate event, then the subject of Ashbery’ s scraped-together BA thesis; a few years later, he’ s the contest judge awarding the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize to Ashbery’ s debut Some Trees (1956), choosing its title and cutting poems with words deemed unpoetically obscene (“masturbation, ” “farting ”).
In large part, The Songs We Know Best narrates the development of John Ashbery the poet—as odd, as temporality-shuffling a story as any in this book. The someday author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) started writing poetry at age eight, inspired by a 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’ s Dream: part fan fiction, part slapstick showpiece, “The Battle ” pitted fairies against bushes, flaunting an ear already attuned to storytelling cliché and unpredictable comic timing:
The battle’ s beginning! It’ s a fight to the end.
The rabbits pitch in! Some help they must lend.
The bushes are conquered! Well that was short.
Ashbery’ s Citizen Kane–sized debut, “The Battle ” proved hard to follow, and set off a seven-year hiatus from writing poetry.
But even before the adolescent Ashbery styled himself a writer and read through the Rochester Public Library by the shelfful, his voice opened up into a different range in privacy—was, in a way, privacy itself. Following his first, seminal gay experience, Ashbery opened his diary and strewed unpunctuated, clipped-short phrases across a page: as Roffman realizes, they were encoded notations “in a form that would render its importance legible and memorable for him ” but closed off to others, as well as “John’ s first original modernist poem, ” years before modernism found its way to Sodus:
tulip garden
old dutch
home all our own until
recall once more
At Harvard, Ashbery trained himself to stage that privacy in the open, in poetry that (for now, at least) strung that diaristic shorthand into bewitching verse. The title poem of Some Trees (dashed off in an hour, in pencil, at his dorm-room desk) finds congenial figures for intimacy in trees’ silent, dignified proximity—“These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as if speech / Were a still performance ”—and ends in “defense ” of a love that evolves, never entirely articulated, less into PDA than affection’ s telling “accents ”: “Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, / Our days put on such reticence / These accents seem their own defense. ”
As The Songs We Know Best becomes a story about the haphazard cobbling-together of Ashbery’ s now-legendary debut Some Trees, Roffman appears at her most eloquent and effortless (and least tethered to references: with forty-three pages of endnotes for 244 pages of text, The Songs We Know Best sometimes seems too resourceful). Seemingly impregnable poems, in Roffman’ s hands, open up in every direction. With “Some Trees, ” for instance, Roffman triangulates contexts: a frustrated flirtation with a fellow Advocate staffer; a newfound fondness for Marianne Moore’ s poetry, which kept passions in syllabic check; and the many resonances trees held for Ashbery: for starters, “summers in Pultneyville, castles, climbing willow branches, Robin Hood, his boyish and fragile brother. ” Roffman’ s readings never mean to “solve ” Ashbery, to fill in art’ s variables with life’ s constants: they alert us, rather, to how much of life Ashbery cleared away, abstracted, or eluded. The dorm-room epiphany of “Some Trees, ” she explains, “finally expressed the combination of experience and transcendence he had been attempting to communicate for many years, ” managing the feat “without including any specific details about his life. ”
Born in 1927, Ashbery arrived amid an absurdly prodigious and prolific generation of American poets. Already lodged into literary history, they’ re recently getting the full canonical-poet parade of publications: the last few years have brought us the collected poems of Denise Levertov, A. R. Ammons, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, and Lucille Clifton; revised selections or last poems by Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine, and June Jordan; and authoritative biographies on two Jameses, Merrill and Wright. (Line them all up and you’ ll hear Ashbery’ s title anew: some trees went into printing these.) Among such phonebook-thick volumes, The Songs We Know Best is the odd one out—felicitously so. Roffman hops about Ashbery’ s nine decades (including in her title, lifted from a 1980 poem) but her brisk, selective, blithely inconclusive biography cherishes the trivial and provisional and can’ t be bothered with grand, full-career-sweep pronouncements. All of which is to say that Roffman stays true to her subject, who is photographed on her last page during the first days of his Fulbright in France—caught midstride, he looks directionless but hopeful, oblivious of the work of the next day, let alone the next uncharted decades. Preserving that young poet’ s hope in her time capsule of a biography, Roffman has written something invaluable for today’ s many mournful readers, for all of us struggling to imagine American poetry without Ashbery’ s meandering step leading the way.
July 2018
This review will appear in issue 61.3/4