The New York poet Frank O’Hara was born 100 years ago this week, on March 27th, 1926. But, strange to say, during his tragically shortened life he never knew his birthday was in March, labouring instead under the misapprehension that it was three months later in June.
This was despite an obvious interest in birthdays, a subject he visited more than once in his poetry, which was so rooted in the events of everyday life it has been likened to “entries in a diary”.
His Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and other Births), for example, begins with the lines: “I hardly ever think of June 27, 1926/when I came moaning into my mother’s world/and tried to make it mine immediately.”
Elsewhere, in a poem about astrology written one October, he affects to regret not being born under the star sign of Scorpio, which might have conferred “silver, money riches”, instead of Cancer, “which symbolises instability, suggestibility, sensibility/ all the ilities like a clavichord”.
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Indeed, if it made any difference, he was an Arian, something his parents could have told him but never did. And the confusion was not in the stars. It arose from considerations much nearer the ground.
O’Hara’s mother and father were both of conservative Boston-Irish Catholic stock, but had nevertheless managed to conceive him before their September 1925 wedding.
They relocated to Baltimore for the pregnancy, away from prying eyes, and returned only when the chronology could be blurred. Thereafter, the birth of Francis Russell O’Hara was always celebrated in late June, when his conception could be covered by a marriage certificate.
His mother Kay, originally a Broderick, had grown up in Worcester, Massachusetts, but of first-generation emigrants.
According to the poet’s biographer Brad Gooch, “to step into [the Brodericks’ house] was to enter into the atmosphere of Co Cork. Their friends were drawn exclusively from the local Irish-Catholic community; their walls were dotted with embroidered sayings praising home and God; a daily event was the radio broadcast of the rosary being recited by a priest with a slight brogue”.
On the other hand, O’Hara’s favourite elderly relative was a paternal great-aunt Elizabeth Donahue, known as Lizzie, “who burned all her letters from relatives in Ireland before her death in 1944 because she was embarrassed by her modest beginnings”.
Belonging to a now well-off family funded by a dairy farm, hardware store and other businesses, the young Frank O’Hara at first seemed bound for a career in music. As a teenager, he studied piano at the New England Conservatory and remained a fine pianist all his life, liable to burst into playing Rachmaninov at short notice.
But after serving in the US navy during the war, he won a veteran’s scholarship to Harvard College, where he began publishing poetry. Then, after university in Boston, he moved to New York in 1951 and immersed himself in the artistic and musical life of that city.
He rose to become one of the leading figures in the “New York School”, a loose group of artists, writers and musicians inspired by jazz, surrealism and other avant-garde movements.
O’Hara’s poetry was heavily autobiographical, describing his life and relationships as a gay man while drawing incidental detail from music, film, pop culture, commercials and the detritus of everyday existence.
He thought of writing as “playing the typewriter” and his spontaneous, irreverent style is exemplified by a throwaway verse dashed off on the Staten Island ferry, inspired by a newspaper headline about the film star Lana Turner collapsing somewhere: “I have been to lots of parties/and acted perfectly disgraceful/but I never actually collapsed/oh Lana Turner we love you get up.”
Ironically for a man who wrote in and of the “eternal present”, his association with a certain time and place – New York in the early 1960s – would be immortalised in the 21st century television series Mad Men.
The suave advertising executive Don Draper (Jon Hamm), wrestling with an identity crisis, reads aloud at one point from O’Hara’s poem Mayakovsky: “Now I am quietly waiting for/the catastrophe of my personality/to seem beautiful again,/and interesting, and modern.”
Even so, O’Hara’s writing seems to have transcended its time to remain popular today. Sally Rooney is a fan, clearly. Her epigraph for Conversations with Friends is an O’Hara line: “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.” And in Normal People, when Connell visits Marianne on her birthday, his gift is a collection of O’Hara’s poems.
If the timing of the poet’s own birthday was shrouded in confusion, his death in July 1966 is all too well documented. At the height of his powers and popularity then, he was with friends on New York’s Fire Island late one night when their beach taxi broke down. As they stood around it in the dark, O’Hara was hit by a passing jeep, recklessly driven. He died next day, aged only 40.
