At the conclusion of the opening episode of Mad Men’s second season, the
show’s protagonist, Don Draper, buys a book of poetry after being told by a
hipster in a Greenwich Village bar that he is incapable of appreciating the
writer’s work. The book is Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara.
Draper reads it later that night in his suburban home, and he is captivated
by a haunting stanza from the poem Mayakovsky: Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting,
and modern.
After inscribing the book with the simple message “Made me think of you”, the
ad man slips out of the house to post it to a mystery recipient, adding yet
another layer to this most complicated of television heroes.
It is no accident that the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, chose the work of
O’Hara to echo his hero’s thoughts. In addition to being the most
“interesting, and modern” poet at work during the early 1960s time frame of
Mad Men, O’Hara was also a writer whose voice in many ways shares the show’s
peculiarly American mixture of jazzy style and quiet melancholy. Like
Draper, O’Hara was also a quintessential New York phenomenon, ambitious and
charismatic, his life expressing that city’s contradictory energies during
an era that many view as its heyday.
Francis Russell O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and was raised in a
conservative, Catholic town in Massachusetts. His father was a haberdasher
who later inherited a farm, his mother was a highly strung alcoholic. After
serving in the navy as a sonar operator during the second world war, O’Hara
entered Harvard, where his childhood passion for music gave way to a love of
visual art and poetry. He moved to New York in 1951, where he took a job
selling postcards at the Museum of Modern Art, beginning a lifelong
affiliation with the institution that was to see him rise to the level of
senior curator by the time of his death, 15 years later.
O’Hara also began to publish his poetry and soon earned a spot at the vanguard
of a generation of writers that was to become known as the New York School
of Poetry. Rebelling against the constricting formalism of forebears such as
Robert Frost and TS Eliot, O’Hara and peers such as John Ashbery and James
Schuyler relied instead on spontaneity and vernacular in their work. They
were as strongly influenced by free-form jazz improvisations and abstract
painting as they were by rhymed couplets and iambic pentameter.
O’Hara led this break with tradition. His poetry was impulsive,
conversational, autobiographical, occasionally surreal and often punctuated
by exclamation marks. His work was also deeply sensual, frankly depicting
its author’s homosexuality at a time when gay sex was a crime in many parts
of the nation. His subject matter was usually culled from his immediate
experience, whether it be the death of James Dean, a new painting by a
friend, or an illicit men’s room encounter with a piece of rough trade.
“What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to
avoid, goes into poems,” he once claimed. In many ways, the quick, vivid
strokes of his verse resembled the painting style of abstract expressionists
such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose work he championed in
his day job at MoMA and as a critic for the influential journal Art News.
Nowhere was this spontaneous, sensual, unfiltered approach to poetry more
apparent than when his subject matter was his adoptive city. According to
Ashbery, his Harvard classmate, the “nightmares, delights and paradoxes of
life in (New York City) went into Frank’s style . . . O’Hara is certainly a
New York poet. The life of the city and of the millions of relationships
that go to make it up hum through his poetry; a scent of garbage, patchouli
and carbon monoxide drifts across it, making it the lovely, corrupt,
wholesome place New York is.”
O’Hara’s poetry often has the feel of a late-night taxi ride through Manhattan
in the company of a brilliant friend who is capable of pointing out the
“ozone stalagmites / deposits of light” that make up the city’s skyline. In
this way, he’s not unlike Draper, navigating through the city’s various
strata as he struggles to find the words and imagery to describe the surging
metropolis. Indeed, one of O’Hara’s greatest poems, Second Avenue, was
influenced by de Kooning’s painting Woman, which was itself partially based
on a model from an ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes — a product whose account
Draper handles.
O’Hara the man was just as scintillating as his poetry. With his clean-cut
good looks and penchant for wearing stylish suits, he could have been a
young executive at Sterling Cooper. But unlike Salvatore Romano, the
fictional agency’s conflicted art director, O’Hara was open about his
sexuality, conducting a series of intense relationships with the young male
artists and dancers who served as his muses. He was also comfortable in the
hyper-macho world of the brawling, hard-drinking abstract expressionists who
hung out at downtown dives such as San Remo and the Cedar Tavern.
According to his biographer, Brad Gooch, “as a public personality, O’Hara’s
nervy energy, infectious excitement, love of drinking and total dedication
to a life lived for art’s sake made him increasingly a mascot of an era in
which wild parties seemed as creatively indispensable as they were fun”.
All the while, he was able to hold down an increasingly important job at one
of the world’s most significant museums, working his way up from the front
desk to a position where he was in charge of curating important
retrospectives of Pollock and de Kooning. It is a testament both to O’Hara’s
allure and to his love of the visual arts that he was painted in the nude
more often than any other leading American author.
The last few years of O’Hara’s life were marked by increased alcoholism and
writer’s block, perhaps fuelled by a sense that his day as a poet had
passed, just as his abstract expressionist heroes were being supplanted by
pop art figures such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. O’Hara’s death,
in 1966, at the age of 40, was as shocking and untimely as the traffic-wreck
deaths of Pollock and Dean. While standing on a beach at Fire Island, just
outside New York City, he was struck by a hot-rodding young local man. It
was a sad, but somehow fitting, end for a brilliant mayfly of a poet who
never really stopped selling postcards of the city he loved.
Mad Men is on BBC4, Tuesdays, 10pm
