Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, #1952Club, and New World Writing

One evening in December 1951, a crowd gathered in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The host was Victor Weybright of the New American Library, and the occasion was to celebrate the upcoming launch of New World Writing.

The guest list glittered with the big names of the literary world: Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams – along with power brokers from agencies, publishing houses, and newspapers.

The first issue appeared in April 1952, priced at fifty cents. New World Writing was a bold experiment: a twice-yearly paperback designed to bridge the divide between high art and popular access – a literary magazine aimed at a mass-market readership. 

The title owes more to Dvořák’s idea of a “new world” than to anything truly global. Nearly all the contributors were American. It was also a strikingly male world, though with some important exceptions: the editor, Arabel Porter, and Flannery O’Connor, represented by an excerpt from her novel Wise Blood, published that same year.

Later issues broadened its reach, showcasing transatlantic writers and avant-gardists like Boris Pasternak, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet. The magazine also helped launch writers such as Joseph Heller and Jack Kerouac.

New World Writing ran for fifteen issues. The final edition in 1959 featured Contemporary Icelandic Writers, John Ciardi’s translation of Dante, and Voices of Ghana – referenced rather dismissively by Frank O’Hara in his poem The Day Lady Died: 1964.

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days…

After his hamburger, malted, and New World Writing, O’Hara buys gifts for his friends: a Verlaine with drawings by Bonnard, a bottle of Strega, a carton of Gauloises, a carton of Picayunes, and a New York Post.

He remembers when he heard Billie Holiday sing and “stopped breathing.”

Two years later, in July 1966, O’Hara himself was dead, killed in a beach buggy accident on Fire Island.

At his funeral, the artist Larry Rivers told the congregation, “Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.” For fifteen hectic years, O’Hara had been a galvanizing force in New York’s literary and artistic world. 

Breakdown and Breakthrough: James Schuyler and “Salute”

I haven’t read much of the prose from that first issue yet, but I have read the poems. There’s one by New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss, and another by the Cistercian monk and ordained priest Thomas Merton, intriguingly titled Blood Sports — a letter to Dylan Thomas, which seems to hark back to Merton’s wilder days at Cambridge.

One of the standouts for me is Salute — James Schuyler’s first published poem.

Schuyler wrote Salute in late 1951 while recovering from a manic breakdown. Committed to Payne Whitney in New York after believing the radio was speaking directly to him and that he was the infant Jesus of Prague, he was later transferred to the Bloomingdale Psychiatric Hospital in Westchester County, where his friend W.H. Auden paid the hospital bills. From this crisis came recovery – and a creative breakthrough.

Schuyler described his discovery of Frank O’Hara’s work:

My first encounter with Frank O’Hara was not really an encounter – it was more of a rencontre. In the summer of 1951, I had that exciting experience of having something I had written appear in print for the first time, in Accent. After tiring myself reading my own three stories over and over, I looked at the rest of the issue. Frankly, none of it seemed quite up to my level – except for a poem called “The Three-Penny Opera” by Frank O’Hara…

During a phone call with gallery director John Bernard Myers, Schuyler mentioned liking O’Hara’s poem – only to find that O’Hara was sitting right there in the room.

O’Hara’s The Three-Penny Opera is breezy and conversational, full of unexpected line breaks that feel improvisational, like jazz. Schuyler later said:

The first poem I ever had printed was Salute, which I wrote when I was in a hospital. That was terrifically influenced by Frank, not in the poem but in the way it’s written –  the line turns, the enjambment –  which I picked up completely from that one poem of his.

Here is Salute:

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

It feels as if we are dropped into the poet’s thought process midstream –  less a formal poem than a flicker of memory, a self-forgiving gesture.

Schuyler mailed Salute to New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss, who passed it along to Arabel Porter for New World Writing.

Later, Schuyler recalled their first proper meeting:

I first met Frank O’Hara at a party after a Larry Rivers opening. De Kooning and Nell Blaine were there, arguing about whether it was bad for an artist to do commercial work. I was dazzled by the company.
A very young-looking man introduced himself — Frank O’Hara. He asked if I had read Janet Flanner’s column that week, about Gide’s wife burning all his letters. “I never liked Gide,” Frank said, “but I didn’t realize he was a complete shit…”

Call me when you get in

O’Hara also had a poem in that first issue of New World Writing, placed next to a grim offering – The Goose Fish – by Howard Nemerov. O’Hara’s Poem  has a conversational setup – a simple, everyday situation – before suddenly swerving toward shock and loss, then closing with a wry deflection.

Friendships and a Film