The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life by Karin Roffman (review)

Most devoted readers of John Ashbery know the strange story of his first poems to see print: how a prep-school classmate submitted Ashbery's work to Poetry as his own, a fact their author discovered, to his intense chagrin, only when he read them in the magazine. Or, at least, most of us thought we knew this story. In Karin Roffman's gripping account of the poet's formative years, however, the incident forms part of a still stranger tale. The poetry thief, a boy by the name of Bill Haddock, haunted Ashbery during their time at Deerfield Academy like a demonic doppelganger out of a Patricia Highsmith novel, alternately befriending and tormenting him, spreading rumors that he was "an h.o." (homosexual; true) and public masturbator (not true) (105). Haddock himself was gay, and an aspiring poet who envied his friend's precocious talent; the one real edge he had on Ashbery was that he was upper-middle-class, while Ashbery was made to suffer for being a farmer's son from the moment he entered Deerfield. The two boys, in other words, could be seen as distorted mirror images of one another, bound together by anxieties about class and sex, as well as an ambition that only one would realize.

"The Thief of Poetry," "My Erotic Double," "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"—these Ashbery titles inevitably came to mind as I was writing the previous paragraph, still more evidence that this poet is always steps ahead of his would-be interpreters. Still, I hesitated to cite the poems. An aesthetics and ethics of impersonality is central to Ashbery's writing; by deliberately omitting recognizable biographical details, he means to leave room in the poem for the reader. He often said that, like Gertrude Stein, he wanted to write "every-body's autobiography," and famously described his anthology piece "Soonest Mended" as a "one-size-fits-all confessional poem" (Poetry Review, vol. 75, Aug. 1985, p. 25). One startles at the scant handful of moments when bits of the life do surface in the poems; when Roffman cites one such moment, in "The History of My Life" (from Your Name Here [2000]), she remarks on the poet's "unusual candor" (78). "Once upon a time there were two brothers," the poem begins, "Then there was only one: myself" (qtd. on 78). The lines refer to what emerges, in Roffman's sensitive narration, as the first great earthquake of Ashbery's life: the death of his younger brother Richard, at the age of nine, of leukemia. Richard had been their father's son—masculine, sports-loving, outgoing—as John never could nor would be. "This otherness, this / 'Not-being-us' is all there is to look at / In the mirror," Ashbery insists, in "Self-Portrait" (Collected Poems 1956–1987, Library of America, 2008, p. 486): for all his differences from John, Roffman suggests, Richard remained for his brother the model of the haunting other, the absent-present second self.

So, perhaps the Haddock story, for all its cringe-inducing adolescent pettiness, can be made relevant to the poems after all. In one of Roffman's many fascinating and telling citations from the young Ashbery's unpublished writings, the high-school senior tackles the vexed question of why modern poetry must be so difficult: "the poems are complex because they spring from a mind which has been made complex by its double existence—its social responsibility and its inward enigma" (qtd. on 121). One recognizes in this phrase the Ashbery who follows Wallace Stevens in conceiving poetry as "a violence from within that protects us from a violence without," "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality" (CPP 665). Stevens has been central to discussions of Ashbery's poetic development at least since the mid-1970s, when Harold Bloom portrayed Ashbery, eloquently if too insistently, as an "ephebe" almost wholly shaped by "the necessary anxiety induced in him...