ALSO A DAUGHTER

"Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me" by Ada Calhoun | Grove Press, New York, 2022

I don’t often read memoirs. Yet Ada Calhoun’s “Also A Poet” compelled me because it was so very human, and because it made me feel that the author and I might have something in common. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Each of us lives a life characterized by complexity, by layers within layers of identity. The story behind this memoir is concerned with the lives of three distinctly different writers, with the demi monde of their collective existence, and with the debts of influence that they share, in a cascading history, from one famous poet, to a poet who became an art critic, to the daughter of the art critic who also became a writer, and who wrote this book to deal with all the exigencies of affinity and legacies of doubt and identity that flow between them.

The famous name in the title is the poet, Frank O’Hara. Calhoun attempts to tell his story, or rather she attempts to create a version of the story her father once attempted, to resuscitate the fair intentions and interest in heroic poesy that a biography of the poet Frank O’Hara might achieve. She only gets as far as her father did, despite owning up to similar fair intentions. Yet the problem in telling a story and the telling of a life are different. Calhoun is herself not a storyteller, but an explicator of truth as epochally, generationally, and personally defined. Her books are a mixture of each of these kinds of truth, and though she makes a concerted effort to follow the stories about O’Hara that each of his peers made in their contribution to those tapes, yet she never gets at the real heart of what made O’Hara great. There are touches and flashes of his humanness and idiosyncrasy. We are made to see him mainly as others did, which is to say that each person may have seen themselves reflected in their memories of O’Hara, or they may have revealed some innate aspect of his personality outside of his brilliance as a writer.

A large part of the story behind Also A Poet has to do with the gatekeeping of his legacy by his younger sister, Maureen Granville-Smith, and her resistance to having her brother’s story told. She rejects both Calhoun’s father, Peter Scheldjahl, a respected art critic, and Calhoun, a bestselling nonfiction writer. She holds each of them at arm’s length until the last possible moment, and then shuts the gate on their hopes of realizing a book on Frank O’Hara, for personal reasons given dramatic exposition here, though they remain obsequious. From a writer’s perspective it seems selfish to so defensively guard a story that, if it were to be successfully expanded upon, would serve O’Hara’s legacy well. Yet with one minute exception, the gates of estate ship have remained shut.

Calhoun’s story continues with another writer, the father mentioned in the book’s title, who began as a poet himself. Peter Scheldljahl followed his poetical hero to New York only to become a hanger-on in the poetry scene, and later, after giving up his poetry, a celebrated art critic. Scheldjahl got married, had a kid, kicked alcohol, and lived a long and selfish life. The fact is that Calhoun is related to someone known for his accomplishments but not for the excesses named. They are described truthfully and in details that only a close family member would know, and that they could validate through an emotional connection that would bear out its truths as understandable. Many creative individuals have difficult temperaments, and despite Scheldjahl being in some ways a failed poet, he seems to have kept many of the bad habits of a creative writer in his role as a critic. It’s as if failing to do one thing, he took up another and filled his life with angst and compulsion to make up for the loss. The celebrated role he played, and continues to play, as an art critic, never dissuaded him that there’s any other way for a real writer to live. However, he seems to have been able to marshal the full strength of his poetic abilities to fill his criticism with the sort of lyrical gravitas the practice is mostly lacking, both then and now. 

The story is told by, and eventually focused upon, the third subject: the Me in its title, Calhoun herself, who is the daughter of the art critic. She is also a writer, and a very successful one, though in radically different ways from her father and the hero they both share. Calhoun has had many accomplishments as a popular journalist, and that she has previously wrote semi-autobiographical books about growing up as a downtown kid; the idiosyncrasies of married life; Generation X women and their struggles, sometimes leading to a midlife crisis; and now, how the generations of New York writers have produced different creative personas that each succeed and fail on their own terms. By this point, she has become someone who’s comfortable stating her truths.  Yet it’s one thing to devote oneself to a book that exemplifies a concept, and it’s another thing altogether to unearth the sources of one’s existence, many of which may not seem literarily palatable. In order to come around to an understanding of truth, and to be content with what results from the experiences described and the realizations gleaned, is another thing altogether. Someone who is successful in non-fiction writing must be willing to tell less. The question at the heart of this book centers around the identity of its author. It’s something that she approaches with difficulty. The difficulty of knowing yourself through others. What matters are the truths we attain after a long process of introspection, like the one following the winding up of a long project, like writing a book. These truths emerge sometimes too far after the fact, but it’s important to include them, so that others can be provided with a view upon your real world. It's a complex story that Calhoun wants to tell, and though she clothes herself in the mien of the journalist, about three quarters through the book, she undergoes a crisis of confidence in the viability of the project, and falls back on talking about her life in the context of what followed a difficult Cancer diagnosis for her father and the dealing with Covid. The story changes from an introspective one about the lost past into an honest and forthright one about the present. She stops being the writer here and emerges as the daughter. It’s a sobering change both for herself and for us.

ALSO A POET is about the life of the writer, from different perspectives, and in differing parallels, exposing some degree of the reality that bleeds through such obsessions. A writer’s curiosity is derived from the purest of motives, such as to explicate what is unclear or unseen, to manage disparate facts, and to expand the sum of human knowledge. All of these notions were moving through Calhoun’s mind when the visit to her family’s basement storage area that precipitated discovering the box of audio tapes from her father’s early and aborted project to write a book about Frank O’Hara motivated her to consider the worthiness of such an endeavor. Sharing a love for O’Hara that derived from her father’s early gift to her of Lunch Poems, it was an easy decision for her to make, although it resulted in unintended consequences not too dissimilar from the ones her father had encountered. Some books will never be written, for undue forces lay in wait to deny them. Anyone who has ever written a book on the lives of real people, or even a book making people think of real people they know or have known, ignites an anger and a defensiveness that results in an immediate rush to judgment. Because Granville-Smith, never granted access to O’Hara’s own letters or his literary archive, Calhoun never had the chance to investigate the full depth of O’Hara’s identity as a writer. The work of the poet is a daily struggle to ascertain just what is essentially important to the practice of poetic intent, and then binding it up in a stylistic discipline which gains strength as poetic resolve. This is the surface texture beneath which truth lives. Safeguarding an image of her famous brother made a villain of Granville-Smith. Likewise, in adverse fashion, relinquishing the truth about her own father, Calhoun has emerged in triumph.