“Baby, I Am the Garbage”: Camp Recuperation in James Schuyler

Abstract

For James Schuyler, more than any other writer considered in this project, the recuperation of waste bears not only on aesthetic practice but also on his subject position, a limit case in abjection. Schuyler was not merely a poet but a poet maudit: impecunious, mentally unstable, queer, unpartnered, ungainly of body—far outside the charmed circles of sexual propriety and economic productivity. Even within the relatively bourgeois “avant-garde” of the New York School (and indeed, its bourgeois embrace of mass culture may be its most transgressive aspect, emerging as it did from the background of an academic high modernism and cold war fear of kitsch),¹ a line can be drawn between Schuyler and the other poets. While the more privileged male members in this group—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara—were initially dubbed the “Harvard Wits” for their early meetings around the Harvard Advocate as undergraduates, the working-class Schuyler flunked out of Bethany College in West Virginia for playing too much bridge (Schuyler, Just the Thing xi). Schuyler then fled into the navy, from which he was discharged for going AWOL on a visit to New York City. As the poets embarked on their careers in the city, the schism widened.²O’Hara became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art; Koch and eventually Ashbery ascended to distinguished professorships; Schuyler meanwhile did not maintain regular employment beyond his thirties and in his later years was supported by a trust created by his moneyed friends.