My final interview with John Ashbery took place at his Hudson home on August 24, 2017. For the last decade, I saw him about once a month. This past summer, we met every Thursday. These interviews lasted—with breaks for lunch, snacks, visiting nurses—most of the day. With vacation plans for the end of August, I scheduled our next interview for September 5. He died on September 3.
John had recently celebrated his 90th birthday on Friday, July 28. As it approached, he would often joke that he just hoped to make it that far. Once that milestone was reached, however, it seemed quite possible other thresholds might be crossed as well. His mother lived to well past 90. His maternal grandmother passed away just shy of 100. He had longevity in his genes. In our final interview, which I at last listened to a few weeks ago, we spent several minutes I had totally forgotten about discussing a tentative plan to watch the next eclipse in his birthplace of Rochester in 2024, when he would be “a mere 97.”
Like most of our interviews, our last few were digressive, winding conversations and not standard models of question and answer. Many years ago, I discovered that asking when or why an episode occurred was one of the quickest ways to end our discussions, but asking about where something happened was a portal to a new story. This discovery was a real revelation to me, and notably changed my preparation for our interviews. My research about both people and poetry for my biography of John Ashbery became more precise: I noted street names, house numbers, and shifting addresses not as clutter or minor asides but as crucial memory provocations and plot points.
Even better, I almost always learned “when and why” by focusing on “where.” The first time this happened was an accident. I was packing up to leave at the end of one long day at John’s house when I casually mentioned reading some small news item about Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester. John replied that the parents of a childhood friend had lived in Greece in a house he loved, in fact the very home where his parents sent him to stay when his brother was dying of leukemia. For the next few minutes, John told me in a very detailed way exactly how his parents had tried to get him back home to Sodus from Greece on July 5, 1940, the day his 9-year-old brother died. I stayed very quiet while he spoke because I had asked him several times before what happened that day, and he had always responded that he couldn’t remember.
This conversation occurred many years ago, and I never let on that I had learned this trick for it seemed to me, having seen Ashbery publicly undo very skilled interlocutors on occasion, that I might need at least one ace up my sleeve. And when we would sometimes have one of those conversations that felt like a ride in a sputtering car, I would ask him about a place he had lived in, a hotel he had stayed in, even a street in Rochester or Buffalo where he had spent time as a child. These names and addresses worked on his brain like oil on an engine and would get the whole enterprise of conversation humming again. Twice when I drove upstate with John and his husband David Kermani, we spent more than three hours at a time meandering through streets in Rochester, Sodus, and Pultneyville, talking about who had lived where. Through John’s incisive and vivid descriptions, each place, like a palimpsest, revealed pieces of its long history and stories about the inhabitants.
John never told me directly that he knew what I was up to, yet I am quite certain he did. I came to think about our “where” talks as a conversational equivalent to walking, which he loved to do but physically was less and less able to over the last decade. (Up until the 1990s, he almost always walked before he wrote, and there is a thoughtful 2007 interview on this subject with Jeffrey Brown.) His remarkable memory, however, allowed him to stroll virtually through almost any place he had visited even only once, and he could observe again what he had seen as though for the first time. Once, we “visited” the men’s bathroom just outside the University of Buffalo rare book archive, where he read for me a dirty limerick spotted on the stall wall in 1945, giggling as delightedly as he probably had the day he found it. I cut this episode from an early draft of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, but it did provide me with further evidence that material details—urinals, stalls, messy scribbled poems—mattered to him and were not merely passive pieces of his memory bank but deft provocations for remembering experiences.
My conversations with John Ashbery, in fact, only deepened my sense that tangible things about places provoked his memory and imagination. I learned, too, from reading his childhood diaries, early letters, and adolescent witty plays that he probably understood this essential aspect of his creativity at a very early age, and he tread lightly as he preserved and developed it. He practiced describing things by sculpting sand on empty beaches into models of medieval French villages and by collecting antiques and then drawing detailed pictures of period houses, clothes and objects he liked; he memorized long lists of student addresses and amazed his classmates at Deerfield Academy by reciting them perfectly. He devised these unusual pastimes ostensibly to amuse himself, but they served him all the more powerfully as literary training because they seemed at the time to have nothing to do with poetry. In college, he finally put these ideas about the relationship between material and imaginative life into writing as a way of making sense of Andrew Marvell’s “The Mower to the Glow-Worms,” concluding that: “in all great poets, we are released from the things of the world to find a new significance in the world of the imagination, though the separation from ‘things’ is never complete, and the higher meaning of the poem will invariably have its roots in them.” When he talked about specific places and things, he was always also acknowledging the origins of poems—even if the link between them seemed fully sundered.
In our final interviews, we continued to discover the same subjects anew. On August 17, John was tired, so we spent most of the day listening to Ben Johnston quartets, and he asked me some questions about my upcoming trip to Europe. Before I left, he mentioned that he could point out specific places for me to visit if we looked at a map together. I arrived on August 24 with several, and we unfolded them on his bed and then “walked” for hours through the streets of Madrid and Rome, eventually returning to the neighborhood in Paris near his former home in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. When we looked up, it was already late in the day, and I made some silly joke about the map. He agreed that a nap sounded like just the thing, so I packed up my things and said goodbye. When I reached home, I immediately ordered more mid-century European city tourist maps, the first of which arrived at my house on the morning of September 3.
March 2018
Images originally published in The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (FSG, 2017). Copyright 2018 The Estate of John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc.