Long-gone poet brings child, parent together
Calhoun set out to write bio but found connection to father
In fall 2018, writer Ada Calhoun went into the basement of her parents’ apartment in the New York City borough of Manhattan. She was looking for old toys to give her goddaughter. What she found instead — a cache of dusty cassette tapes — would become her next book.
When she took the tapes upstairs to her father, Peter Schjeldahl, a longtime art critic for The New Yorker, he explained they were what remained of his attempt to write a biography of poet Frank O’Hara.
Calhoun vaguely knew that her father had attempted something of this sort but not how deep he had gotten: Schjeldahl had been, at one point, O’Hara’s authorized biographer. He had a contract with a major publisher for the book. And in the 1970s, he had taped interviews with dozens of people who had known O’Hara before his death in 1966, at age 40.
“I just thought: How could anything get this far and not happen?” she said.
She soon learned the answer. Her father, according to Josh Schneiderman, a Frank O’Hara scholar, had alienated Maureen O’Hara, Frank’s youngest sister and guardian of his estate, by telling her that John Ashbery was the better poet and asking her about her brother’s sex life. (O’Hara was gay, and it was an important part of his identity and his writing.) Soon after, Schjeldahl was exiled from his position as authorized biographer.
Hearing this story, Calhoun became convinced that succeeding where her father had failed was her
next assignment.
“I just thought, I’m so much nicer than my dad, I’m so much more fun,” she said. “Everything he did wrong, I will do right.” She would be respectful, she would do her homework, and she said, “I was totally going to win.”
Calhoun laughed as she recalled her early hubris on the way to writing her new book, “Also a Poet,” now available. Calhoun cuts to the book’s not-so-spoiling spoiler: Where her father had failed in the 1970s, so too did she.
Calhoun, 46, is the author of “St. Marks is Dead,” a history of the neighborhood where she grew up, “Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give” and “Why We Can’t Sleep,” as well as ghostwriter of more than a dozen books.
Tapes in hand, Calhoun had the chance to outdo her father. Forever the “good girl” who got the jobs and hit the deadlines, she was surprised when, after multiple polite inquiries, she received a phone call from Maureen O’Hara, who told Calhoun that she would not cooperate with her research and urged her to drop the book. (O’Hara could not be reached for comment.)
That call was crushing enough, but shortly after, in fall 2019, her father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and was told he had six months to live. One month after that, the apartment where Calhoun grew up and where her father still lived with Brooke Alderson, Calhoun’s mother, burned down in a catastrophic fire.
Calhoun thought her book was dead, but in the months that followed, as COVID-19 swarmed and life locked down, she picked up those interview tapes and started carefully listening. She couldn’t help but notice that her father wasn’t exactly an adept interviewer: He didn’t seem especially curious about the people he was talking to. From an interview tape, Calhoun learned that although her father had met Frank O’Hara two or three times, he had retained very little about him, besides the poet’s “kindness” and the “quality of ‘taking seriously.’ ”
“My father met Frank O’Hara, and what did he take away from it? Only his own reaction,” she writes. “How could you be so self-involved as to not see someone you care about when they’re standing right in front of you?”
This, in essence, is the accusation she is leveling against her father in general, not just when it came to O’Hara, but also when it came to Calhoun.
By 14, she was left alone at St. Marks Place for months at a time while her parents spent the summer in the Catskills. She cooked for herself and got herself
to her first day of high school on time. “Your disinterest has been at once the saddest part of my childhood and the greatest gift of my life,” she tells her father at one point in the book.
“I worked really hard to impress him. And even though he never noticed, the world kind of did,” she said. “I became impressive.”
In “Also a Poet,” she lays bare her fraught relationship with her father. In Calhoun’s portrayal, her father continuously provokes her, apparently without awareness. He plays favorites with his young writer friend Spencer (a pseudonym); he devalues gifts she gives him, including a copy of
David Carr’s “The Night of the Gun,” which he throws in a trash can; and when her 2019 book “Why We Can’t Sleep” makes The New York Times bestseller list, he responds with a one-word email — “Zoom!” — and never acknowledges its success again.
Schjeldahl recently said he was nervous before reading the book. “But it just works so well,” he said. “There’s some embarrassment for me, but I can take it. I can vouch for the truth of everything she says.”
The real point, for him, was the honesty and originality of what his daughter had written. “I have never read anything like it,” he said. “Have you?”
Calhoun teared up when
she described her father’s response. “The way he’s been about the book makes me forgive him for everything he did my whole childhood,” she said.
Soon after Schjeldahl finished reading the book, he wrote his daughter an email.
“I compulsively reread it, deeply joyful,” he wrote. “It is such a gift to me. Sure, I have mixed feelings, because they are the only kind that I ever have, about anything, but irradiated now by your bravery and, by the way, tremendous talent. I could go on and on and will, if you like, when face to face rather than in (excuse the cuss word) writing.
“Love, Dad”