Queer Places:
326 E 49th St, New York, NY 10017
Little Portion Friary Cemetery Mount Sinai, Suffolk County, New York, USA, Plot Little Portion Friary Cemetery
James Marcus Schuyler (November 9, 1923 – April 12, 1991) was an
American poet. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980
collection The Morning of the Poem. He was a central figure in the
New York School and is often associated with fellow New York School poets
John
Ashbery,
Frank O'Hara,
Kenneth Koch, and
Barbara Guest.
James Marcus Schuyler was the son of Marcus Schuyler (a reporter) and Margaret Daisy Connor Schuyler.
Born in Chicago, he spent his teen years in East Aurora, NY.[1] After graduating high school, Schuyler attended Bethany College in West Virginia from 1941 to 1943, though he was not a very successful student; in a later interview, he recalled, "I just played bridge all the time."[2]
Schuyler moved to New York City in the late 1940s where he worked for NBC and first befriended W. H. Auden. In 1947, he moved to Ischia, Italy, where he lived in Auden's rented apartment and worked as his secretary. Between 1947 and 1948, Schuyler attended the University of Florence.[2]
After returning to the United States and settling in New York City, he roomed with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. James Schuyler met Frank O'Hara at a party in John Bernard Myers's 9th Street apartment after a Larry Rivers opening at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. O'Hara and Schuyler shared an apartment at 326 E 49th Street, on and off, from 1952 until January 1957.
Featured in
Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay
and Lesbian Writers by Robert Giard [Rights Notice: Copyright Jonathan G. Silin (jsilin@optonline.net)]
FAIRFIELD PORTER
Portrait of James Schuyler
1955
oil on canvas
48 x 48 inches
James Schuyler by Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter’s double portrait of John Ashbery and James Schuyler
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF ANNE E.C. PORTER
Fairfield Porter
JIMMY
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975)
Jimmy Schuyler
John Button was an American artist, well known for his city-scapes. He moved to New York City in the early 1950s and became friends with Fairfield Porter and Frank O'Hara and assumed his part in the New York School of Painters and Poets. At one point Button was in a relationship with James Schuyler.
Toward the end of his life, William Aalto was poet James Schuyler's lover, and features in the latter's poem Dining Out with Doug and Frank.[9]
In April 1991, at age sixty-seven, Schuyler died in Manhattan following a stroke. His ashes were interred at the Little Portion Friary (Episcopal), Mt. Sinai, Long Island, New York.
Schuyler was not known for revealing much about his personal life. It is known that he was gay, was manic depressive,[3] underwent several years of psychoanalysis and withstood many traumatic experiences. One of these includes a "near death experience" in a fire which he caused by smoking in bed.[4]
In a spring 1990 special issue of the Denver Quarterly that was written by Barbara Guest in devotion to Schuyler's work, Guest refers to Schuyler as an "intimist," saying:
...for me Jimmy is the Vuillard of us, he withholds his secret, the secret thing until the moment appears to reveal it. We wait and wait for the name of a flower while we praise the careful cultivation. We wait for someone to speak, And it is Jimmy in an aside.[2]
My published books:
