Ashbery, the Aesthetic, AIDS

Two and a Half Things I'm Against

I brought with me to Bulgaria the Library of America volume of Ashbery (to 1987). I started reading him a couple years ago, when every week for some months my boyfriend and a poet friend and I would read aloud together through Double Dream of Spring, Three Poems, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I found comforting but also baffling how the often-annoying jokes and dodges of Double Dream could become the river of sublime and apparently spontaneous discursivity of Three Poems and then the tighter work (canal?) of Self-Portrait—and comforting and baffling too that all this change was happening to a poet in his 40s (whew, I am not after all so old—there are new styles to w/ring out of me).

It seemed impossible not to find Ashbery’s continual evocations of discovering that it was “late afternoon” and sense that time might not be redeemed or regained but nevertheless be made more easeful, modestly grand, and satisfying, that something albeit unfinal might yet be accomplished, that the disassembled pieces on the front lawn of life might be put back together and drive, an attempt to reassure and reinvigorate middle age, when we want some combination of coziness and resoluteness to face how what’s been and what’s left undone are the sum of what is.

In the past few days I’ve been reading forwards into the 80s, when it occurred to me, shouldn’t there be some AIDS here?

I’d already seen, in an article from Christopher Street in the late 70s, a rather bitter critique of Ashbery for his closeted-ness. Those were the days when the first insistently gay poets like Richard Howard and Thom Gunn were writing for gay audiences about gay topics (as well, of course, as other ones), and scholars were reaching back to show—in the face of we forget how much homophobic forgetting—Whitman and Crane constituting an American tradition of gay male poetry.

O’Hara does not, from my reading, seem to have been much of interest to this crowd—not only because he was faggy, fey, writing about female celebrities in that breathlessly queeny “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” voice, but also because for all his retrospectively self-evident gayness he seemed from the vantage of Christopher Street (which published Howard and Gunn) to belong rather to the pre-gay homosexual world of camp, smoke-and-glitter indirectness, feigning female love interests and perfuming lines with delicate allusions.

It’s not only that the late 70s clone was meant to have a masculine style rather a pansied one (the cringing effeteness of Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon or Warhol’s “Mae West Shoe” type paintings) but that the latter—for all its flamboyance—was read as a symptom of the closet. It was publicly effeminate—in that sense, queer—but not publicly invested, as Holleran’s best novel is titled, in The Beauty of Men. It marked a personal difference, an aberrant kind of maleness that isolated or connected one to other such cases who made up at most a dusky demi-monde—from which gay men in the 70s would have to exit to enter the world as an unashamed minority (queerness is as perennial as gender-variance, or simple weirdness; gay male identity is only a few generations old—it is emphatically not the case, whatever you may have heard, that queerness as it is celebrated now, fluidity and polymorphousness, identifying with a refusal of identity, mixing-and-matching sexed styles, is the newer, more radical and historically progressive [whose progress? whose measure?] successor to the outmoded gayness and its bad attachments to masculinity and exclusion; queerness is older, more general, less political, less a mode of building together a form of life from which to gather power. A re-submergence of gay male identity in an O’Hara-esque wry, campy, quirky-girly way of enjoying mass culture—Diva worship, celebrity gossip, aggressive piffle and smirking horniness—is a return to the old normal, which some welcome as a liberation).

In other words, the macho clone look, ancestor of the masc-for-masc ethos that progressive queers are always complaining about (because they, too, want those problematically masculine men, and hate being excluded from their desire—meanwhile, you know, some of those guys do date faggots, as my own track record proves! There’s a moment in Bros when the hyper-desirable masc-for-masc love interest says sarcastically, “I love guys who are frail and never stop talking,” but some men, God bless them, really do)—which Gunn celebrates in his BDSM-informed poetry of that era—is not about passing for straight, assimilating to normative masculinity, or kicking out the queers to establish a more conservative gay culture, but rather on insisting that same-sex desire, a desire for men, be at that newly emergent culture’s center.

O’Hara now is available for gay poets like Alex Dimitrov (boo!) to appropriate into the gay male canon with Crane and Gunn, and perhaps so much the better, but at the time the winking indirection of those earlier New York poets struck gay-identified writers as the last gasp of the pathetically anachronistic homosexual aesthetic.

Or rather, second-to-last, since there into the 70s—and beyond—was Ashbery, hinting, hinting. Once being as falsely direct as: “One time I let a guy blow me. I kind of backed away from the experience,” but mostly filling poems with ungendered addresses to “you” (dedicated to David Kermani) or with tenderly sexless talk about “girls.”

The studied shifty vagueness of so many of the poems—with their “weather” and “dust,” unspecific atmospherics—is hard not to read, in one sense, as a pained attempt to conceal the minoritarian vulnerability of a homosexual in mid-century America (think how different the 50s in this respect were from the 70s) with a valorized, heroic minoritarian vulnerability of The Aesthete (ripped from a Baudelaire-Laforgue handbook on Self-Aggrandizing Wimpiness), one reaching out to other “minor poets” as Ashbery falsely insisted on describing himself and such admired figures as Laura Riding (what was minor about a poet who tried to make poetry “tell the truth” and then abandoned it for being inherently untruthful? These are the most major moves; she was the Major Man!). Nor hard to read, in another sense, as the price—apparently happily—paid for the massive mainstream (that is, heterosexual) success Ashbery enjoyed from the mid-70s on.

Now being closeted in this way doesn’t prevent someone from being a great writer (it certainly helps him be celebrated by straight institutions as one), and it might even be, for this or that particular person, one of the psychological requirements (we were not all built for autobiography). Although I have wondered whether Shelby Foote concealing his Jewishness didn’t have something to do with his never being able to write a great multi-generational family drama the way he’d meant to—and in my essay on him revealed, with my admiration for his prose, and my appreciation of the pose of the Aesthete that he imitated out of Proust, a contempt for his self-concealment and a questioning of his concomitant resistance to politics (writing about the Civil War at the moment of the Civil Rights struggle, about which he had nothing to say), or rather his way of melting politics and aesthetics down into a common substance: a potentially tyrannical ambition for preeminence.

I don’t think every homosexual writer owes the rest of us his being gay in his avowals and subject matter, any more than Foote owed anyone but himself (and I suppose his mother) a better relation to his Jewishness—but then, who can tell, as Auden, a great poet of the closeted homosexual mode once wrote, what poems you might have written had your life been good? Doesn’t art too lose something in this apparent preference for what’s mistakenly called the ‘aesthetic,’ conceived as a retreat from the public world of collective projects?

Ashbery always avoid falling into slogans, which are the essence of political speech—but also of so much of what passes for aesthetics, as I’ve said to the ire of the NYRB Classics collectors—who buy their books the way people they sneer at buy Funko-pops (Uphold ___! Smash ___!, I say, is what such ‘aesthetics’ amounts to).

I don’t have a position on the relative priority of the political and the aesthetic, or on what a “minority” writer owes to his collective identity rather than the “minority” tradition of apolitical individualism within which he might quite rightly choose to work. Ashbery must be one of the latter’s most seductive figures. Take this poem from April Galleons (1987)—which as I’ll scream about in a minute, was published in the middle of the AIDS crisis, when thousands and thousands of gay men, particularly from Ashbery’s New York, were dead and dying—about the beautiful avoidance of responsibilities to the world:

Finnish Rhapsody

…

Many there are, a crowd exists at present,

For whom the daily forgetting, to whom the diurnal plunge

Truncates the spadelike shadows, chops off the blades of darkness,

To be rescued, to be guided into a state of something like security.

Yet it falls off for others; for some, however, it drops from sight:

The millers, winnowers of wheat,

Dusted with snow-white flour, glazed with farinaceous powder,

Like Pierrot, like the white clown of chamber music;

The leggy mannequins, models slender and tall;

The sad children, the disappointed kids.

And for these few, to this small group

Forgetting means remember the ranks, oblivion is recalling the rows

Of flowers each autumn and spring; of blooms in the fall and early summer.

But those traveling by car, those nosing the vehicle out into the crowded highway

And at the posts of evening, the tall poles of declining day,

Returning satisfied, their objective accomplished,

Note neither mystery nor alarm, see no strangeness or cause for fright…

One wonders what roadblocks were set up for, we question barricades:

Is it the better to time, jot down the performance time of

Anything irregular, all that doesn’t fit the preconceived mold

Of our tentative offerings and withdrawals, our hesitant giving and taking back?

For those who perform correctly, for the accurate, painstaking ones

Do accomplish their business…

The one who runs little, he who barely trips along

Knows how short the day is, how few the hours of light.

Distractions can’t wrench him, preoccupations forcibly remove him

From the heap of things, the pile of this and that:

Tepid dreams and mostly worthless; lukewarm fancies, the majority of them unprofitable.

Yet it is from these that the light, from the ones present here that the luminosity

Sifts and breaks, subsides and falls asunder.

And it will be but half-strange, really be only semi-bizarre

When the tall poems of the world, the towering earthbound poetic utterances

Invade the street of our dialect, penetrate the avenue of our patois,

Bringing fresh power and new knowledge, transporting virgin

Might and up-to-date enlightenment

To this place of honest thirst, to this satisfyingly parched here and now,

Since all things congregate, because everything assembles

In front of him, before the one

Who need only sit and tie his shoelace, who should remain

Seated, knotting the metal-tipped cord

For it to happen right, to enable it to come correctly into being,

As moments, then years; afterwards ages

Suck up the common strength, absorb the everyday power

And afterwards live on, satisfied; persist, later to be a source of gratification,

But perhaps only to oneself, haply to one’s sole identity.

Wow—Pierrot lunaire as Daoist sage! Ashbery heir to the ecstatic visionary lineage Bloom traces through whatever Anglo-American poets he likes (Blake, Shelley, Stevens)! The poet in retreat from the press of business, his poems invading and ennobling the world he has escaped. He saves the rest of us (maybe, for a moment) by leaving us behind.

Except that it’s 1987. The world is too much with us—AIDS, Reagan (who is only now getting around to noticing it), the winding down of the welfare state and hopes for socialism if you’re into that sort of thing, but, from my more limited perspective, above all AIDS, his own people dying. What might well have been the end of the only recently invented gay male identity and culture. In that context the celebration of aesthetics against everyday business, commerce, politics, history, strikes me not as a bit of Watteau-colored whimsy, but as evil.

There have been efforts by tenderqueers lately to save Ashbery from himself, to say he really was writing about AIDS and wasn’t the apolitical poet—the poet of antipolitical aesthetics, the last poet of the closet—that he so strongly made himself out to be. Because of course, now our institutionally approved ‘aesthetics’ is of (pseudo)-politics, of striking the right postures of identitarian engagement. If we can’t show that Ashbery made them, we’d feel guilty enjoying him.

Get a load of this loser Sam Huber, the senior editor at the Yale Review, and a living emblem of what happens to gay men’s brains when they identify too much with being good little boys of whatever regime (in this case, a woke-ish feminist one—this imbecile used to write for Feministing!) rather than with being men who love each other. He writes:

John Ashbery’s “How to Continue” is the most moving elegy I know for the HIV/AIDS epidemic’s early losses. It’s also the most moving tribute I know to the solidarity engendered by those losses, though Ashbery is an unlikelier witness in this regard. Our late patron poet of idiosyncrasy—recognizable by his digressions and reversals, who once wrote of “fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal”—was roused by AIDS into the clarity of a group perspective. “How to Continue” eschews documentary details for the neater tools of parable. Once upon a time, the poem tells us, there was an island with a “shop / selling trinkets to tourists.” On that island a community flourished, a refuge for its inhabitants and a curiosity to outsiders:

And it was always a party there

always different but very nice

New friends to give you advice

or fall in love with you which is nice

and each grew so perfectly from the other

it was a marvel of poetry

and irony

Like the past half-century of gay life, “How to Continue” is cleaved by a trauma, with AIDS marking off a clear before and after. In the 1970s, gay liberation had unleashed new forms of political and sexual experience, promising communal pride and promiscuity without consequence—“always a party,” but also “a marvel.” Like the urban enclaves of that decade, Ashbery’s nest of intimacies is porous (“always different”) but coherent (“very nice”). The poem’s island is more vibrant and satisfying than its residents might have ever dared wish for: “everybody was happy to have discovered / what they discovered.”

Until one day, without warning, the party sours. The former revelers, now “sleepers / in heavy attitudes,” hang around their old haunts like zombies. The tourists leave, abandoning the islanders to their new condition. A “gale” descends and announces, “it is time to take all of you away.” Oddly, the natural disaster seems both to break up the scene and to arrive after its end has already been set in motion. Cause and effect are murky. Whatever its source, the disruption gives rise to a new kind of beleaguered fellow feeling:

And when it became time to go

they none of them would leave without the other

for they said we are all one here

and if one of us goes the other will not go

and the wind whispered it to the stars

the people all got up to go

and looked back on love

AIDS is never mentioned in the poem, but what other referent might there be for a melancholic gay man in 1992? By then, the epidemic had torn through communities, enveloping every thought, dream, and desire in its terrible context. Governmental inaction, blinkered public health initiatives, a rabidly homophobic and racist news media, and a scientific establishment stalled by lack of funding and researchers’ competing egos allowed the virus to spread practically unabated for the better part of a decade. By the time Ashbery’s poem was published, AIDS had laid waste, in the eyes of many, to entire ways of living.

The poem is not at all obviously about AIDS. And Huber, trying to make his stupid point, goes on to discuss other poems that obviously were about AIDS, making Ashbery’s poem look even less about AIDS by comparison. No one would ever find that this poem is about AIDS in the first place except moved by a logic like

Good poetry is responsible to politics/society/whatever AND Ashbery was a good poet SO Ashbery couldn’t have ignored AIDS with the grotesque irresponsibility he actually preached (and what’s so aesthetic about preaching?)

Now if you want to discover, through a prowess of hermeneutic dishonesty, that Ashbery wrote about AIDS, you don’t have to wait till 1992, you can catch A Wave (1984)

If we could finally pry open the gate to the pasture of the times

No sickness would be evident.

***

 The body is fresh again,

For the trials and dangerous situations that any love,

However well-meaning, has to use as terms in the argument

That is the reflexive play of our living and being lost

And then changed again, a harmless fantasy that must grow

Progressively serious, and soon state its case succinctly

And dangerously…

Meanwhile I have turned back

Into that dream of rubble that was the city of our starting out

Or from April Galleons three years later:

But it’s like a new disease, a resistant strain.

***

Where were you when it was all happening?

Night is full of kindred spirits now,

Voices, photos of loved ones, faces

Out of the newspaper, eager smiles blown like leaves

Before they become fungus.

***

Have I worn out God’s welcome?

There is enough dark green to cover us,

Yet will we always be speechless to the end,

Unable to say the familiar things?

***

And as I lie shut in this long coffin

Of an apartment…

These hidden moments

Of respite and rage, not moments for our times, though,

Remember…

***

Imagining the crisis as something to be survived by being slept through:

We will all have to just hang on for a while,

It seems, now. This could mean “early retirement”

For some, if only for an afternoon of pottering around

Buying shoelaces and the like. Or it could mean a spell

In some enchanter’s cave, after several centuries of which

You wake up curiously refreshed…

O don’t you see how necessary it is to be around,

To be ferried from here to that near, smiling shore

And back again into the arms of those that love us,

Not many but of such infinite, superior sweetness

That their lie is for us and it becomes stained, encrusted,

Finally gilded in some exasperating way that turns it

To a truth plus something, delicate and dismal as a star,

Cautious as a drop of milk, so that they let us

Get away with it, some do at any rate?

***

And the demands of politics, which can’t be avoided forever, although one would like to so much:

  To do that, though—get up and out from under the pile of required reading such as obituary notices of the near-great—“He first gained employment as a schoolmaster in his native Northamptonshire. Of his legendary wit, no trace remains”—is something that will go unthought of until another day. Sure we know that the government and the president want it. But we know just as surely that until the actual slippage occurs, the actual moment of uncertainty by two or more of the plates or tectons that comprise the earth’s crust, nobody is ever going to be moved to the point of action. You might as well call it a night, go to sleep under a bushel basket. For the probability of that moment occurring is next to nil. I mean it will probably never happen and if it does, chances are we won’t be around to witness any of it.

These are all lovely—how much better than such political poems as September 1939 or Spain, the claptrap of Auden (the subject of Ashbery’s undergraduate thesis, the selector of Ashbery as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize). And one might prefer them, if those were the only options, to the self-important huffing of the New York Times poetry editor, or contemporary gay degenerates like Sam Sax (who appears to be a they/them, so maybe ‘gay’ doesn’t apply) for whom the tasks of poetry are equally denouncing Israel and championing (in the most moralizing, unerotic way) unsafe sex. The two things I hate most are borders and condoms, and that’s a poem.

However much, in the face of tedious, politically ineffectual and aesthetically vacuous speechifying that passes everywhere for poetry, one might be tempted to say the latter should be apolitical, seeing Ashbery’s evasion of the topic of AIDS, I’m horrified out of such a position.

My disgust with him—which is more my disgust with his failure as a gay writer than a statement about the relation, as such, between politics and art—clarified, or at least sharpened, how all the recent talk, not least among Substack friends, about an ongoing aesthetic turn and an end of overly political writing sits wrong with me.

I am not sure that there is such a thing as an answerable question about “how much politics?” or a way to shout “Aestheticism Now!” that isn’t an obvious performative contradiction (what could be less aesthetic than a bumper-sticker injunction?). When I write, as when I make a sandwich, I do not, could not think, “how is this thing to be done, in general?”—how should a sandwich be?—or even what is desirable? what is possible? really, unthinkingly, I do it.

I perhaps have to go on record: I am not against politics, identity, or identity politics. Whatever I’ve written in the past few years apparently critiquing all those things has been directed against a certain kind of apparently hyper-politicized pseudo-politics, a spectacle of narcissistic display that subsumes or voids politics—with pleas for the return of politics, of which the state is, properly, the engine. Politics of course is scary, as is identity; and the two are inseparable. I’ve said:

the history of modern politics appears as the endless churning of ressentiment, as groups of ostensible victims come forward one after the other… demanding, with impassioned self-contradiction, to participate in their natural rights and to take their historical revenge.

Politics—I agree with the aesthetes—threatens what’s most precious about our lives, their being our own. A quality that has been variously aligned with art, sexuality, authenticity, perversity, and humor. I’ve sometimes written that politics is both what menaces these things, and the unfortunately necessary platform for their (that is, our) survival. Same deal for identity: can’t live without it.

We have to be figuring out, again and again, how to have enough politics, how to have the right kind of identity, enough identification (but not too much! not the wrong kind!) with collective projects for producing the future. If I’m thinking more about more about gay identity in its present state and past half-century, it’s because I’m starting to suspect that producing a non-retarded version of identity politics is the problem all my essays critiquing this or that thinker had been bumping into with their eyes closed.

My critiques of Paul Ricoeur, Bernard Henri-Levy, Jurgen Habermas, and Timothy Garton Ash for Foreign Policy; Carl Schmitt and Raymond Geuss in American Affairs; Eve Sedgwick, Hannah Arendt, Eric Marty, and Andrea Long Chu in Tablet are all in some way, maybe the most fundamental one until now unclear to me, about the fraught desire—cherished and feared—to participate in a collective identity, and the relation of that identity to politics (is the former a resource to be instrumentalized by the latter? is it something precious to be protected from it? are both to be eschewed in favor of, or harnessed cautiously to offer the minimal conditions for, a preciously non-self-identical individuality?).

My wager lately is that thinking about these issues in terms of clashing abstractions isn’t going to get me any further, that instead I need to be taking them up through my own identities—gay, southern, etc.—tracking the feelings of betrayal, elation, etc., that this or that text, stance, etc., evokes. It must be concrete as another ancestor of Ashbery said.