Ada Calhoun comes to terms with a neglectful father in ‘Also a Poet’

Veteran ghostwriter, journalist and nonfiction author Ada Calhoun also happens to be the daughter of lionized, longtime New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl — now 80 — and his wife, former actress Donnie Brooke Alderson.

Calhoun — who uses her middle name as a surname to deflect comparisons with her father — grew up amid the hothouse antics of a coterie of New York School art movement members: “the ones you would push past more famous people to get to.” Their works and lives were dazzling, disruptive; their “beating heart,” per Calhoun, was the late, incandescent poet, curator and adored roustabout, Frank O’Hara — whom Schjeldahl idolized.

Now if, like me and countless others, you’ve loved Schjeldahl’s art criticism — its acuity, its passion — and considered him (quoting a fan) “the best art writer of our era ... one of the best critics ever” — brace yourself. “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,” Calhoun’s brave, blistering new memoir, may force you to — uh — revise your assumptions.

Its genesis: Rummaging in her parents’ East Village apartment building’s basement in fall of 2018, Calhoun came upon “dozens of loose, dust-covered cassette tapes labeled with the dates 1977 or 1976 ... [and] names like Willem de Kooning and Edward Gorey.” Schjeldahl had planned to write a biography of O’Hara, taping those interviews as research. But after meeting resistance from O’Hara’s sister Maureen, who controls the estate, he gave up.

Calhoun immediately asked permission to resume the project.

She, too, revered O’Hara — to Schjeldahl’s surprise, a fact that horrifies and hurts his daughter: “To me this seemed a little like not knowing your child was a vegan or a theosophist or allergic to bees.” Quickly, we grasp that Calhoun (the happily married mother of two sons) has staggered lifelong under a threeheaded albatross: her father’s renown, his looming self-regard and, most sadly, his indifference to her. “My father has been considered the real writer, the tortured artist ... I’ve been the hard worker, meeting deadlines.” Though certain her father “has always loved me ... he’s never seemed particularly interested in me.”

Bluntly: Schjeldahl was a lousy father. “My father never bought me Christmas presents. He did not know my teachers, my friends, or my shoe siz . ... I can’t remember him once asking about my day, making me a snack, or helping me with my homework.” True, Calhoun’s was not exactly a Norman Rockwell childhood: “That my father was in the picture was more than half my friends growing up in the 1980s could say.”

Thus (borrowing language from O’Hara’s famous “Mayakovsky”): “Maybe writing this book would make my father’s ... catastrophic personality, seem beautiful to me ... And ... maybe ... I would seem interesting and modern to him.”