SOME TREES, 1947 – 1949: JOHN ASHBERY AT HARVARD

Abstract

3 4 Y S O M E T R E E S , 1 9 4 7 — 1 9 4 9 J O H N A S H B E R Y A T H A R V A R D K A R I N R O F F M A N Arriving for his junior year at Harvard, John Ashbery and his closest friend, Bob Hunter, moved into what were reputed to be Norman Mailer’s old rooms (Dunster House B-43). They placed their desks back to back in the spacious, top-floor suite with a Victrola and a large stack of classical music records between them. Ashbery began writing ‘‘Fête Galante,’’ a short story inspired by Watteau’s painting (and style) of the same name. Ashbery’s bubbly , mischievous piece, which he published in the Harvard Advocate , describes a party: There is so much noise! Two sylph-like young men, one with an accordion, the other with a guitar, hurl themselves at the groups of guests, breaking up conversation, making bad music . . . . Then all the lights go out, all the noise and the music stops. . . . Something makes Lucy’s fingers explore, explore, along the balcony rail to where Frank’s hand last lay. Very plump and appealing in the moonlight, it seemed. Now she has found it, now they are holding hands. What a lovely sensation. The Harvard Crimson raved that ‘‘John Ashbery . . . has turned his ever-competent hand to prose. . . . The result is a dream-like story 3 5 R of innuendo. . . . None of the machinery shows through the delicate and expertly woven surface.’’ Soon after, Ashbery earned a ‘‘literary associate’’ position, finally appearing on the Advocate masthead for the first time in the Christmas issue. The Signet Society, an exclusive undergraduate art and literary society with its own, yellow building at 46 Dunster Street, also invited him to join. He and another undergraduate friend, the poet Kenneth Koch, who was already a member, ‘‘played’’ and ‘‘invented’’ games over their lunches, finding anagrams, assigning feelings to objects, or debating ‘‘Auden’s sexuality and his religious professions.’’ At the end of December, Ashbery wrote and performed a Henry James parody, ‘‘Return of the Screw,’’ the story of ‘‘a Harvard student’s nearly erotic encounter with a Dean Flotcher,’’ as his Signet Society initiation ritual. He was also invited to read at the Widener Library Poetry Room by its director, John Sweeney. Since 1945, Ashbery had been a constant presence in the poetry room, listening to its vast collection of poets reading their own work. Sweeney convinced both Harvard poetry professor John Ciardi and local established poet Richard Eberhart to attend. Ashbery’s friends Sandy Gregg, Bob Hunter, and Bubsy Zimmerman (who would later be known as Barbara Epstein, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books), and Antonio Giarraputo, a Harvard undergraduate poet whom Ashbery had never seen before and never met again, completed the small audience. After reading for thirty minutes, Ashbery ended with ‘‘For a European Child,’’ a dark poem of four stark quatrains he had written the previous summer, which asked whether love could survive in such a violent modern world. The poem attacked those ‘‘lovers / [who] Lay on the newsprint,’’ blindly frolicking over a photograph of some new horror. Bob Hunter was impressed by its line ‘‘a famine knowing no appetite,’’ which he interpreted as an indictment of modern man su√ering ‘‘from a deficit of true love and self-respect.’’ At the end of the reading, Giarraputo asked Ashbery why the subject of the poems was ‘‘only love or death.’’ He answered that these were ‘‘very important subjects,’’ a response that Hunter found flippant because Ashbery declined to elaborate. Ashbery had too much to say about both subjects. Not long after the semester began, he spotted a new classmate at the Advocate 3 6 R O F F M A N Y o≈ces, Fred Amory, ‘‘who looked just like the Arrow Collar shirt man.’’ He felt immediately attracted to this extremely tall, ‘‘cleancut ’’ returning G.I., with an open, intelligent, handsome face. Very soon he discovered he also ‘‘liked his mind.’’ They quickly became friends, often...