Yet I cannot escape the picture
Of my small self in that bank of flowers:
My head among the blazing phlox

—John Ashbery, “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”

Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details . . . whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate.

—Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola

W

hat makes a life? What makes a Critical Life? Impressively concise and critically capacious, Jess Cotton’s John Ashbery is a welcome overview of the life’s work of a major modern poet for students and non-expert scholarly readers. Cotton offers admirably tight narratives of the major phases of a long, accomplished, and worldly life (phases which on retrospect pleasingly replicate those, Childhood, Youth, Maturity, Age, with two or so chapters dedicated to each, which she explains structure his 1964 long poem “The Skaters”).

Cotton’s writerly ability is demonstrated with a minimum of jargon and little begging the reader’s indulgence. Interpretation, which relies heavily on the meaningfulness of Ashbery’s Americanness, flows easily alongside the story of his writing life, turning often to the his phrases, lines, and snatches of poems so we remain in constant conversation with Ashbery’s art. It makes you want to gather his oeuvre around you to follow up on each quotation. Should you have the Library of America’s two large volumes, Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 and Ashbery: Collected Poems 1991-2000, you’d only need the eight additional volumes he published between 2000 and 2016, his 89th year.

Cotton offers a number of ways into Ashbery, a poet, as the commonplace goes, ‘noted for his difficulty but who is really not so difficult after all’. But she starts “laying down the critical tools” with “Ashbery’s Americanness” and indeed Americanness is a primary framing for readings of his major works that follow. She evokes Marianne Moore’s phrase “the plain American which cats and dogs can read”, which seems at odds with Ashbery’s intense cosmopolitanism, erudition, and learned, though democratic, allusion. Americanness is here apparently multivalent but ultimately undefined: Ashbery’s childhood was “typically American”; he was a “queer child growing up in a traditionally all-American family” whose interest in art and literature was “a subtle form of resistance to the American life”. His younger brother, who died tragically in childhood, was “the all-American boy that Ashbery was not”. An early poem, “What is Poetry?” creates a “markedly Surrealist [landscape] from the perspective of an American classroom”. He excelled in spelling bees, “a staple of young American life.” (Is it?). His homosexuality makes Ashbery not just any outsider, but “an outsider figure in small-town America”. Ashbery’s style is “placeless yet saturated with an idea of Americanness”. Jumping to the other side of his life and the volume we learn that AIDS wasn’t just destructive, but wrought “destruction on American life”; Ashbery’s Flow Chart isn’t just long, it is “one of the longest poems written by an American poet” and the poetry of his late style broadly “takes on a heady surreal cast,” while “delivering the breaking news of the American present”. Perhaps Cotton sees an American quintessence invisible to me because I am an American. I am tempted to make a version of the old Brazil nut joke: Ah, the American poet John Ashbery. You know, in America we just call him a poet.

The strength of this accomplished addition to Reaktion’s Critical Lives lies in close readings of individual works and in an eminently readable narrative of Ashbery’s working life. Possibly any critical frame would disappoint this kind of book, which is not exactly a biography and not really an author study, but a thing of its own beneficial to anyone wishing to acquire a starting point for either. The misfortune is that the reader gets the peaks but not the furrows of a life: the resonant details, the salt of the poet’s unique and defining wit are seen only in service to the narrative, or not at all. In the language of Walter Pater’s aesthetic criticism (from “The Genius of Plato”), we may learn about the “fatal, irresistible, mechanic play [of] the circumstances of a particular age, which may be analysed and explained,” but we miss out on “the comparatively inexplicable force of a personality”. Comparatively inexplicable indeed. Andrew Gibson’s Critical Lives: Samuel Beckett, which is warm on the resonant details of Beckett’s life, avoids this generic framing pitfall by using something of an anti-frame lifted from Beckett’s Rockaby: “Fuck Life”! Gibson’s resistance to a narrativizing critical frame doesn’t mean I fail to walk away with a handle by which to pick up Beckett’s life work: Gibson conveys a personality, and what better handle for unwieldy, complex baggage?

John Ashbery compliments Karin Roffman’s brilliant 2017 The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, a contemporary masterpiece of literary biography to which Cotton and any Ashbery scholar owes much. Roffman is Cotton’s first acknowledgment, and in the first half of Cotton’s book (Roffman’s Songs covers until Ashbery’s Fulbright years in France in the 1950s) we are often directed in endnotes to Roffman if we want to satisfy the itch of some tantalizingly curt detail. Cotton’s childhood segment ends, for example, with a “convenient distraction in the figure of a new arrival”, a young man “who was spending the season working on the Sodus Fruit Farm, and their intimacy gave [Ashbery] access to a picture of the romance of homosexuality relations, and thus of the possibility of homosexual desire as something that need not be framed as abnormal”. This single sentence is all we are given on Ashbery’s first relationship. Roffman’s biography, by contrast, has the space to step into detail; from it we learn that within days of meeting this new boy Ashbery was plotting seduction in his diary in charmingly broken schoolboy French: “Demain j’ai l’intention de séduire le beau gar qui travaille à la ferme de fruit”. And the seduction worked! The two corresponded briefly after the summer fling, with Ashbery going off to the prestigious Deerfield academy and from a rural New York farm into the halls of America’s elite. Roffman provides further depths in a footnote: it was Ashbery that stopped the correspondence, “embarrassed both by evidence of his homosexuality and by [the boy’s] lower class”.

The painfully adolescent, perhaps cringey, detail of the diary entry was brilliant for Roffman to include because it crystalizes something, speaks a thousand words about, the bright and pretentious little J.A. (as Ashbery self-refers in his early “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”) and about his seventeen-year-old (quite arch) imaginative world. Cotton’s single-sentence gloss by contrast feels flat and academic, and we miss out on the fact that young J.A. was the pursuer, fully capable from the beginning not only of envisioning homosexual seduction but of doing so with a peculiar bravado. It is true that at Deerfield Academy Ashbery would for a time regress even in his personal writings deeper into the closet, but coming out occurs in progressive curlicues and recursive eddies, often without a clean narrative.

Cotton is best when focusing on readings of the major works, including Ashbery’s own investigation into biographical experimentation, the long poem “The Skaters,” which she explains was particularly informed by Roland Barthes’s first book Writing Degree Zero and what she calls its vision of “a kind of zero degree of autobiography: a place to start thinking about starting life afresh” (p. 102). Barthes would continue to explore how readers should, can, or must relate their aesthetic experiences to the historical author who wrote the things from which they derive pleasure. Barthes formulated (and legitimized) aesthetically attuned yet critical approaches to critical inquiry: “The pleasure of the Text also includes the amicable return of the author. Of course, the author who returns is not the one identified by our institutions (history and courses in literature . . .); he is not even the biographical hero.” Who is he? He is “a mere plural of ‘charms,’ the site of a few tenuous details”.

These details, which he called “biographemes,” resist monolithic meaning but summon the evasive personality. For example from the life of Charles Fourier, preeminent eighteenth-century philosopher and a founder of utopian socialism, Barthes writes: “what I get [. . .] is his liking for mirlitons (little Parisian spice cakes), his belated sympathy for lesbians, his death among the flowerpots”. (Coincidentally, Fourier’s utopian ideals were realized in the Fourier Society’s Sodus Bay Phalanx, a collectivist community in the mid-nineteenth century located five miles from the fruit farm Ashbery grew up on.) Reducing Fourier to his “death among the flowerpots” is a particularly poetic mode of engagement, as when Ashbery’s own early “Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers” captures his own boyhood like a snapshot and draws attention to its key detail, its punctum or prick (another Barthesian idea): “my small self in that bank of flowers: / My head among the blazing phlox”. It does matter that Barthes is an insightful reader of people, trustworthy as a critic to notice and note down for others the very things that may break open a personality.

Nationality is an ever-tempting critical framework, and the century and culture that produce an artist certainly frame the possibilities for an artistic personality; but rarely do they explain it. Cotton does I think prepare a route toward a more interesting, perhaps surprising, framing: a kind of genteel conservatism in Ashbery. Ashbery may have grown up in rural New York, but he also grew up in the grand Victorian home of his grandfather, a learned professor; he had family friends who could pay for his elite Deerfield education; and so from his mid-teens until his 90s John Ashbery enjoyed not an all-American identity but a highly elite one. His queerness is not at odds with a Cambridge-to-Manhattan elite normativity either, but in fact may bolster it for complex and perhaps to gay readers recognizable reasons.

The shadow ‘frame’ to Cotton’s book may well be not Ashbery’s Americanness but his sheer Harvardness. Let us define it by an arch belatedness, the privilege to embody a blithe aesthetic disinterestedness, and what the sociologists call “idiosyncrasy credit”, the social benefit of being “Harvard Educated” such that one can afford in social settings to be a bit off-beat (say, being gay or being a professional poet.) There is a deep well of cultural legitimacy and substantial identity that one may tap into for the midcentury Harvard Man (not to mention an unending series of formal and informal connections, some of which are glossed over by both Cotton and Roffman). Cotton’s details help flesh out this alternative frame for Ashbery, starting with the facts of his education itself:

“The education that Ashbery received at Harvard was, as the artist Trevor Winkfield puts it, not simply traditionally Ivy League, but one of ‘those educations from professors who themselves had received great educations in the 1890s —when as students they were thoroughly disciplined in the Classics and Victorian morals.”

Or in how he grew up “just before the emergence of youth culture”, and thus could retain an element of benign old-fogeyness right into late life when coming to write lines Cotton enticingly cites near the end of her book: “my grayish push boots exhale a new patina / prestige. Exeunt the Kardashians.” Or in how throughout his entire life he wore the armor of suits, favoring those from the stalwart clothiers of Harvard Square, J. Press and the Andover Shop. The frame of Harvardness also comes into Ashbery’s casual but forceful protectiveness of his own artistic and intellectual labor in the face of day jobs: “It was sort of a hindrance to have to go to work every day . . .”. The solution was not to suck it up, but to win a MacArthur. I see Harvardness at play as well in the Andy Warhol-like attitude, “both surprised and slightly bored by his success” that “Ashbery would use in negotiating his own growing cultural status”, and in the increasingly “upper-middle-class comforts that Ashbery’s poetic production represented” to the more countercultural “second generation” New York School poets.

The second half of Cotton’s book seems somewhat freer to deploy interesting tidbits satisfyingly without the pressure of a Roffman’s major literary biography hanging over it. Among the later-in-life biographemic facts, I enjoyed finding that Ashbery only learned to drive at about age 34 in 1971, the same year he began taking planes. Or that Ashbery had a brief but meaningful acquaintanceship with Elizbeth Bishop that left traces on her late work: “Bored and visiting his mother in the mid-1970s (he would spend a couple of weeks there every summer), he found a little textbook that had belonged to a student at a school in Sodus in the 1880s and sent it to Bishop, who included a couple of the lessons at the front of [Geography III (1976)] . . .”. We learn that the poem “Pyrography” (from Houseboat Days with its “This is America calling: / The mirroring of state to state,”) was written on commission for the Department of the Interior: “After initially feeling that he could not write to commission, once Ashbery learned how much they would pay him, he decided it would not be so difficult after all”. Perhaps he is after all an American poet!

I appreciate most moments when Cotton brings attention to works that are off the beaten path of Ashbery. The Vermont Notebook (1974), a joint venture featuring illustrations by Joe Brainard was “in many ways overshadowed by Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, but seems like a fascinating work. Fixated on waste and dumps, it features evocations of Stein, Eliot, Stevens (all American, as Cotton points out, and the volume itself is, too, a “surreal portrait of the Vermont landscape—as representative of America as a whole”). The photographs of John Ashbery are terrific as well and no doubt reflect considerable archival efforts not to mention persistence in acquiring permissions. Cotton is excellent on Ashbery and the visual broadly, providing rich descriptions and photos of his homes throughout his life for example, and offering at least one insight into his periodic sartorial divergences from suits. In the early 1970s, we learn, Ashbery’s staple aesthetic was the “Mexican Bandit Look,” with long hair, full moustache, a fur-trimmed leather jacket, “a loose shirt and an adopted, casual assuredness about his role as an artist”.

The backmatter of Reaktion’s otherwise excellent series leaves a thing or two to be desired. The first is the absence, in Ashbery as in others, of an index of author’s works referenced. This would seem an obvious tool to include for these kinds of volumes, marketed as biographically grounded readings of the artist’s major works. The second is the somewhat unorthodox citation style: while many publishers in our global society have done away with including city of publication, Reaktion opts to remove the publisher. We have: “Roffman, Karin, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (New York, 2017)”, and, “Ashbery, John, Breezeway (Manchester, 2015)”—no mention of Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the first instance, and in the second Ashbery’s late-in-life publishing home, Ecco Books, is (at first, confusingly) replaced by his UK publisher. Carcanet is, admittedly, the likely publisher of a major modern poet in Manchester, but it still feels odd to turn to a biography and find crossword clues.