A New Biography Examines John Ashbery's Youth

At Harper's, Matthew Bevis reviews a new John Ashbery biography that focuses on the revered poet's childhood. The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, by Karin Roffman, looks into his relationships with family, early academic accomplishments, and, most revealingly, his diaries. Bevis writes, "The biography is certainly revealing, but it’s noteworthy that the poem from which Roffman takes her title raises some doubts about intimacy: 'Or do ya still think that I’m somebody else?'" Let's start there:

Ashbery has said that “artists are no fun once they have been discovered.” Roffman’s portrait of the artist as a young man made me think of what the young man said to his friend and fellow poet Kenneth Koch when they were undergraduates at Harvard in the 1940s: “I try to erect a smokescreen near the end of my poems so I can withdraw unperceived — I never like to be around for the last line.”

The songs, poems, and lives we know best frequently tell us how little we know. Although Ashbery is fascinated by biography — Roffman says that his enthusiasm for the mode is “at the service of his desire to become a better reader of the writers he liked” — many of his favorite writers drew attention to the limited ability of life writing to explain either the self or the work. As Gertrude Stein, one of Ashbery’s first literary loves, wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography: “Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.” Ashbery’s work — often funny-amusing as well as funny-peculiar — has flourished in such knots of conviction and incredulity. In the early poem “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” he is inclined to call the “comic version of myself” — that is, the childhood self he’s recalling — the “true one,” and part of the truth of this springs from the comedy of imagining that you have a self to call your own. (“My life story,” he writes elsewhere: “I am toying with the idea.”)

The question so often asked of Ashbery’s poetry — “What does it mean?????????????” — is one that the poetry asks of his life, although neither the question nor any possible answer to it is ever allowed to steal the show. He is not so much concerned with what one’s life story adds up to as with what it may subtract from.

Continue reading at Harper's. And if you want to dig into the cover art (featured at the top), you'll want to head to Work in Progress to get Roffman's take.