A Day Like Any Other by Nathan Kernan

A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler

By Nathan Kernan

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025

Nathan Kernan’s big new biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler abounds with qualities its subject almost entirely lacked: it’s generous, broad-minded, warmly personal, and unfailingly judicious. Kernan, who did a pricelessly thorough job as editor of Schuyler’s diaries, buttresses this great book with an enormous amount of original research; the sheer number of times “Author interview with [x]” appears in the lengthy end notes is both a reassurance and a tide-marker. Here is an expert assessment of Schuyler’s life and times by a scholar who’s been studying both for decades, a consummate collection of what all the survivors remember. If there are any future biographies of James Schuyler, they’ll all have to start here, with Kernan’s edition of the diary and his life of the poet.

His life of the poet is exhaustively detailed, but its most involving aspects are collective rather than singular: Schuyler in Auden’s circle on the idyllic little island of Ischia, Schuyler in all his residences later in life, and most importantly, Schuyler embedded in the extended group of artists and writers known as the New York School. This group, including John Ashberry, Frank O’Hara (who had, Kernan rightly attests, “a gift for friendship”), and Kenneth Koch, knew they were a clique and yet resisted the idea of artistic conformity (“Perhaps the closest any of them ever came to verbally acknowledging a common aesthetic,” Kernan writes, “was when one of them veered from it”), and even from very early on, they respected Schuyler for his poetic talent while sometimes raising a collective eyebrow at his choice of gay lovers. When Schuyler (“Jimmy” throughout the book, like we were all sharing pasta in the Village) became besotted with tall, handsome, and very much married Robert Jordan, for instance:

At first, Jimmy’s friends were happy that he had begun a new relationship, but very soon after meeting Jordan, almost to a person, they began to find him strange and unappealing. He seemed “sleazy,” in hard-to-define ways. Jane Freilicher claimed she “didn’t know him very well, but I didn’t like what I saw.” “I think he wore plaid Bermuda shorts to the beach or something.”

Kernan also chases down the recoverable details of the sordid sadomasochistic elements of this and other relationships in Schuyler’s sexual CV; the easy and correct inference is that this was a defining aspect of sex for the poet for most of his life. In fact, this and kindred inferences bubble quietly under the discreet surface of Kernan’s book and keep bubbling long after critical acclaim and public plaudits might have been expected to induce the poet to tamp things down a bit. Years later, we find an older Schuyler living in the old Chelsea Hotel and taking on Eileen Myles as the first of his paid “assistants” tasked with organizing his mail, getting his appearance straightened out, and marshaling his medication for the day, among other things:

Myles arrived every morning with Jimmy’s medication and The New York Times – a routine that would be followed by a series of assistants over the next few years. She made him breakfast – often French toast – and sat with him for several hours in silence as both of them read. As she recalled, “I would just sit down and he would read and I would read for – five hours! It was a great job!”

The French toast was doubtless tasty, but, as Kernan notes, another regular feature of these visits was for Myles to relate to the great poet (with, one imagines, increasingly anatomical specificity) her amorous activities of the night before.

Kernan wreathes these and all other such anecdotes in the warm affection that suffuses this book despite its critical acumen. The author was at Schuyler’s hospital bedside on the last night of the poet’s life. Schuyler, felled by a heart attack and a stroke, was very much conscious and alert, though unable to speak. “As I sat there,” Kernan writes, “he kept gesturing with his eyes to the window, where the last daylight still lingered.”

A Day Like Any Other is a better, more mannered, and ultimately more humane biography than its subject mostly warranted; it will stand with Kernan’s edition of the diary and the superb 1993 Collected Poems (also by FSG) as the foundation of whatever literary afterlife is granted to James Schuyler.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News