Companions on Parnassus

THR Web Features   /   June 10, 2026 W.H. Auden and James Schuyler in life and literature

Alan Jacobs

( THR illustration; photograph of James Schuyler and W.H. Auden from the journal Literatura na Świecie, 2007, Warsaw, Poland.) Until I read Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler I did not realize how large a role Schuyler played in Auden’s life in the late 1940s. I knew that they were friends, and that Schuyler served occasionally as a typist and secretary for Auden. But he was for a few years a central part of Auden’s life. Schuyler, then in his early twenties, who had only recently immersed himself in the gay scene of Manhattan, was introduced to Auden by Chester Kallman—Auden’s former lover and life companion—and he (Schuyler) and his boyfriend Bill Aalto became regular visitors to Auden’s apartment on Cornelia Street. When, in October of 1947, Schuyler and Aalto boarded a ship for Europe, Auden and Kallman saw them off at the dock and promised to reconnect the following spring.

They did, first in Florence, where they all spent part of the spring of 1948 and Auden wrote a series of significant poems, including “In Praise of Limestone”; and then in the town of Forio on Ischia, the island in the Bay of Naples where Auden had just decided to live for part of each year, mainly in the summer. (He despised the heat and humidity of Manhattan in the summertime, and would spend the warmer months on Ischia for the next decade.) When Auden returned to New York, he enlisted Schuyler and Aalto to serve as housesitters—but they remained in situ (except when traveling) after Auden and Kallman returned to Forio.

The four of them, plus frequent visitors, were a big, odd, gay family, drinking too much, giggling, quoting opera ceaselessly at each other—Auden called Schuyler and Kallman “Dorabella” and “Fiordiligi” after the sisters in Così fan tutte—until Aalto, whose rages were frequent, tried to kill Schuyler, at which point Auden banished him. (“BILL MUST GO,” he wrote in a letter.) Aalto tried to make it up with Schuyler, but Schuyler, for obvious reasons, was having none of it; and when he found a new boyfriend, well, Charles Heilemann moved right in.

Kallman never stayed in one place very long, and when he was traveling Auden would write him gossipy letters about Schuyler and Heilemann, dubbing them—for reasons easily imaginable—the Mattress Girls (after a recent Italian movie called Le sorelle Materassi, The Mattress Sisters). Auden, under Chester’s influence in this respect, was at the height of his gay-camp phase, in which it seemed funny to refer to “Madame Kallman” and “Baroness Aalto” and even—he kept this habit for the rest of his life—“Miss God.”

So from 1948 to 1958, Auden split his time between Greenwich Village and Ischia. When he was in the US, he made his money giving lectures, writing book reviews, writing introductions to books, editing books, and so forth. Though he wrote some poems in New York, his primary focus in those months of the year was the prose that paid the bills. The person who typed most of his manuscripts in New York was Alan Ansen. Now, Auden could type and often did, but he was a somewhat eccentric typist, and did not spell or punctuate reliably. So he liked having smart people type his manuscripts for him. In the late Forties and in Greenwich Village, that was Alan Ansen. On Ischia, it was James Schuyler—which meant that Schuyler was the one typing most of the poems.

Ansen was a poet himself, and very knowledgeable about poetry.

Though he may have typed the prose, Auden also used him as a sounding board and as a critic of his metrical and formal experiments in The Age of Anxiety. Schuyler, by contrast, was just a typist. At that point, he had no real thought of writing poetry; he was hoping to write fiction, though hadn’t really written any yet. And typing up virtually the entire manuscript of Auden’s collection Nones (which I am currently editing) left him awed, fascinated, and discouraged. When he did finally begin his career as a poet, his model was not Auden—though there are small echoes of Auden in his poems—but rather a poet whose style was about as far from Auden as you could get and still be writing poetry: D.H. Lawrence.

Thus Kernan:

Jimmy later said that, as he typed Auden’s carefully constructed, poised verse, he told himself, “Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.” He clarified that he was “awed by the technical intricacy, the skill, the rhymes, the writing in meter: everything that’s professional and traditional in Auden’s verse.” Jimmy, of course, had been familiar with Auden’s poetry for many years, so its formal qualities were not new to him. Why this disavowal of them now? Clearly it is because he, in fact, was thinking of writing poetry by this time. In two of his recountings of this moment, Jimmy goes on to cite D.H. Lawrence’s very different and seemingly casual free verse poems as a counter-inspiration: “It was very liberating to pick up a book of poems by somebody like D.H. Lawrence and not have to do these things.” When, a few years later, Jimmy wrote his first poems, Lawrence would be his most explicit influence, or so he claimed. At the same time, Jimmy later wrote that typing Auden’s poems and “the experience of so strong a creative gift was, and continues to be, powerfully stimulating.”

Once, when Auden’s old friend Brian Howard was visiting Forio, he commented that Auden was not a visual poet, and challenged him to write a genuinely visual poem. (Schuyler appears to have expressed his agreement with this judgment.)

Auden accepted the challenge. He wrote “Ischia” and dedicated it to Brian Howard. “Ischia” is a poem of strong imagery, and that is indeed uncharacteristic of Auden. But such precise vividness of sight is what Lawrence excelled at—and something that, later on, Schuyler excelled at also. For examples, see Lawrence’s poem “Snake” and Schuyler’s “A Stone Knife.”

Having been so admiring of but also intimidated by Auden’s poetry, Schuyler needed, I think, to pursue poetry in an anti-Audenesque way. And Auden may have (inadvertently) made that decision inevitable. According to Kernan, when Schuyler showed some of his poems to Auden, he received a lecture about the sorts of things he should not do, especially regarding line breaks. Later, when he read a poem by a then-unknown poet named Frank O’Hara and noticed that O’Hara played the very games with line endings that Auden had deplored, Schuyler decided to follow O’Hara’s practice. Soon thereafter he met O’Hara and O’Hara’s friend and fellow poet John Ashbery, and when they read Schuyler’s poetry they were very encouraging. Thus Schuyler’s artistic course was laid.

(Auden was exceptionally generous to Schuyler, repeatedly lending him money when his breakup with Bill Aalto left him in financial precarity, and then, some years later, when Schuyler suffered a psychotic breakdown, paying for his hospitalization and visiting him regularly. But though Auden was at this point only in his early forties, he had already assumed the role of the Grand Old Man of Poetry and often expected younger poets to receive his dictates with obedient gratitude—or so they felt. Later in life, when a younger person disagreed with Auden, he would reply, “Your old mother has done a lot of thinking.”)

And there is another way in which Schuyler distanced himself from Auden, this one apperceptive rather than technical. In the years that the two men were close friends, Auden was obsessed with the idea that human beings are unique in Creation because they live simultaneously in nature and in history. (

For the most concise and memorable expression of this idea, see a poem that Schuyler typed for Auden, “Their Lonely Betters.”) Schuyler, it seems to me, rejected this in favor of a whole-hearted and whole-sighted apprehension of the world as it is in the moment. Reading his poems, I often think of a famous passage from Virginia Woolf’s diary: “If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough.” There is no history in Schuyler’s poems: only this moment, which through his words he persuades to stay. One of his first great poems, “February,” exemplifies this perfectly, especially in its closing line, which gave Kernan the title of his biography: “It’s a day like any other.” And as he says in another poem, his wish was “merely to say, to see and say, things / as they are.”

This total apprehension of the moment is another way in which Schuyler could find a model in Lawrence and separate himself from Auden—but a point worth noting here is that Auden admired Lawrence’s poetry greatly. Indeed, Schuyler may very well have learned about Lawrence’s poetry from Auden: By the time Auden wrote a lengthy appreciation of Lawrence for The Nation, in 1947, he and Schuyler had been friends for three years.

Returning to Lawrence almost a decade later, Auden described Lawrence’s “poetic theory” as “unsound,” then added:

But Lawrence’s poetic theory is a small matter. A man who can write as beautiful and extraordinary a poem as “Tortoise Family Connections” can hold any theory he pleases.

Some years afterward, he revisited Lawrence once more when putting together his great collection The Dyer’s Hand, and made this remarkable comment: “What fascinates me about the poems of Lawrence’s which I like is that I must admit he could never have written them had he held the kind of views about poetry of which I approve.” And he concludes that essay: “Parnassus has many mansions.”