Subversive Triviality: John Ashbery’s and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies

Abstract

ABSTRACT In a recent study, Christopher Schmidt has analyzed an aspect of James Schuler’s poetry, which he calls “dark camp:” the reevaluation of “waste,” both in the sense of linguistic material which the poet incorporates into his work (phrases gleaned from advertising or the media), and the subject matter which he focuses on (“material detritus:” trashy, kitschy, unpoetic stuff). Schuyler’s “poetics of waste” is a camp strategy of affirming his queer identity. In this essay I argue that the 1968 novel which Schuyler coauthored with John Ashbery, A Nest of Ninnies, can be seen along very similar lines. Nest is commonly viewed as a satire or a comedy of manners. However, I take issue with this characterization and suggest that Nest should first and foremost be seen as classic literary camp, albeit not “dark,” but defiantly and jubilantly bright. I first discuss the early reaction of the novel’s reviewers, then point out the hidden queer themes in the story (which only W. H. Auden, it seems, discerned), and finally I apply Schmidt’s terms to Nest to show how it subversively challenges the bourgeois notion of seriousness in art and, connected to it, assumptions about gender and “normalcy.” The idea to write a novel together occurred to James Schuyler and John Ashbery when they were sitting in the back seat of a car taking them back to New York from East Hampton where they had spent the weekend at John Latouche’s. They did not know the people they were traveling with very well, and so the conversation was hard going. After a while, bored with the sights of the small towns they were passing through (or perhaps inspired by them), Schuyler proposed: “Why don’t we write a novel?” and when Ashbery asked how exactly he imagined doing this, his friend replied: “It’s easy – you write the first line.” Alluding to the opening sentence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Ashbery began with: “Alice was tired.” 1 Schuyler took up the challenge and no doubt recognized the allusion, for in the novel’s first scene he placed Alice in front of a mirror: „Languid, fretful, she turned to stare into her own eyes in the mirror above the mantelpiece before she spoke.” 2 Back in New York, the poets continued playing this literary dominoes in their spare time, adding alternately a sentence each. This lasted three years: from July 1952 until 1955 when Ashbery received a Fulbright scholarship and went to France where he was to spend the next ten years. Attempts to continue writing the novel in tandem via mail failed; the project was discontinued – for good, it seemed. However, when Ashbery returned to New York at the end of 1965, he was already a renowned poet (having received the Yale Younger Poets award for Some Trees) and cooperated with Holt & Co. whose editor, Arthur Cohen, expressed interest in Ashbery’s and Schuyler’s unfinished project. The two thus resumed work on the novel, although they slightly changed their method, adding whole paragraphs or parts of chapters, instead of individual sentences. The book was published in early 1968.