Walter Wadas: This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VIII Issue 39). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online.
For a few months short of ten years, Joe LeSueur and Frank O'Hara lived together. From the summer of 1955 to January 1965, they shared four different Manhattan apartments in the bumptious way that gay men who are sometimes lovers but just as likely less than friends may do. “Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara” is LeSueur's memoir of their experiences during that time.
In those years, O'Hara and LeSueur were both still young but not immature.
Born in Baltimore in 1926, O'Hara grew up in Massachusetts and moved to New York City in the autumn of 1951, where he soon had a job at the Museum of Modern Art. Although he previously studied piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, O'Hara graduated from Harvard after Naval service in the South Pacific and Japan during World War II. Taking his AB in English, he went West to the University of Michigan for his master's degree. But his first books of poems “A City in Winter,” published in 1952, shows that Manhattan is the place O'Hara would settle in and call home.
LeSueur had a similarly circuitous route to his roost. Born into a Mormon family and raised in Depression stricken California, he served in the Army Medical Corps in Italy and earned a Bronze Star. Although his WWII experiences resulted in “psychosomatic ailments” that surfaced later, LeSueur graduated from the University of Southern California in 1949. Within a month, he rode a Greyhound bus East to New York City. There he lived with the poet and (later) social critic Paul Goodman, whose “Growing Up Absurd,” first published in 1960, became a sort of pocket bible for the counter culture. He also befriended Timothy Hudson, who was Alger Hiss's stepson
Whether for his boyish good-looks or his personality - a classmate at USC chimed that LeSueur “like Madame Bovary” was “languishing in the provinces”—Joe LeSueur attracted or was attracted to a panoply of greater and lesser artists and literary folk, socialites, bohemians and hoi poi-loi who make his book the dishyest sort of gossip-fest. Although two years older than O'Hara, he figured in his friend's life sometimes like a younger brother tagging along, sometimes like an impresario of campy shenanigans. But mostly LeSueur played second fiddle to Frank O'Hara's class act as poet, art critic, or MOMA curator.
About first meeting O'Hara, LeSueur has two stories. The better known, about New Year's Eve 1951, is related in City Poet, Brad Gooch's often censorious biography of Frank O'Hara. Originally published as “Four Apartments” in the March 1969 issue of The World, a mimeographed publication of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on East 10th Street, LeSueur's full retelling now makes a valuable and more durable appearance as the “Introduction” to Digressions. In the book's first chapter - “Who I Am and Where I Am Coming From” - which is more particularly about his early his pre-O'Hara years, LeSueur limns a charming vignette of how he and the poet had a brief, chance encounter at a Town Hall concert in the fall of 1951.
Digressions's other chapters—There are 40, raging mostly from three or four pages, with eighteen as the longest.—each “digress” from a poem or part of a poem, which is quoted at its beginning as a subject or motif for rumination. These chapters are arranged chronologically. Because subjects or themes sometimes overlap, LeSueur shifts various poetical referents, meanders where he will, dawdles as he chooses. While brimming with details, minutiae and trivia, Digressions is always engaging and often irreverent; it's never cumbrous or pedantic.
Here's something particularly interesting about the book. Because of the years it spans: 1955-1965 - LeSueur's memoir makes into a decade ten years that straddle a cusp others would customarily demark as a divide. What results is an oblique way of showing - of being evidence - that gay men and women who served in the Second World War and thus came late to post-secondary education as well as the wunder jahre of post-college experience converged in New York city vigorously and with determination. And they colonized it, so to speak, in a doubled wave of immigration with their more youthful contemporaries. Pioneers like Frank O'Hara and Joe LeSueur staked claim to Manhattan as gay turf. Thus New York City became the place where every homosexual is a native.
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