Troy Jollimore reads Bill Berkson's A Frank O’Hara Notebook (no place press, 2019), "a magical artifact, a kind of time capsule," for the Washington Post. "Berkson’s original notebook represents the raw material of a substantial work on O’Hara he had long intended to write, but which remained unfinished as of his death in 2016. This handsome edition offers page after page of photographic reproductions of the handwritten notes, drawings and occasional pasted-in photographs and other ephemera that made up the original." More:
It is no surprise that [O'Hara] and Berkson were drawn to each other. Berkson was young and handsome, and an idealistic and enthusiastic aspiring poet. As for O’Hara, everyone, it seems, was drawn to him, and when he liked someone, he rewarded them with attention and affection. “Frank received young poets on a plainly person-to-person basis,” Berkson writes. “No pretensions, no pulling rank.”
A year later they would cross paths again in Paris, where they cemented their relationship. Berkson was viewed by many, some of whom wrongly assumed the two were sexually involved, as an interloper. “Almost all of Frank’s friends disapproved of, or at least were bemused by, our friendship,” he has written. He didn’t really care what people thought; what he cared about was being with O’Hara, whose “attentiveness to whatever I had to say . . . pretty well lit me up.” Around this time, Berkson began making regular appearances in O’Hara’s poems.
One of the reasons “Notebook” feels so pleasurable is that its method suits O’Hara’s art...
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