A Double Life: Frank O’Hara’s Amazing Versatility

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.”

--Frank O’Hara

Matthew Holman’s exhaustively researched and methodically written book, Frank O’Hara: New York Poet, Global Curator, manages to be not only a superlative biography of this gifted poet but also a revealing memoir of the heady times in which he lived, a detailed chronicle of the city he so loved, and a tender portrait of the important Museum of Modern Art that many people, myself included at first, did not realize counted him among its most effective ambassadors of contemporary visual art. This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that O’Hara undertook for MOMA in New York and abroad. The day after his premature death in 1966, The New York Times ran an ironic and slightly ambiguous headline: “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator/Exhibitions Aide at Museum of Modern Art Dies – also a poet.” Also a poet? That strikes some of us as a surprise, since we felt it might well have read “Frank O’Hara, 40, NY poet dies—also a curator.”

Molière & Menotti

Clockwise from left: Amber Gray, Matthew Broderick, and David Cross in Tartuffe. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

As Tartuffe, the titular character of Molière’s most famous comedy, Matthew Broderick is so preternaturally calm that he barely seems to be breathing. Nothing unsettles him; without blinking an eye, he absorbs any threat to his power over Orgon – who takes him in, offers him his daughter in marriage and even makes Tartuffe his heir –and simply applies to it a nonsense logic that makes you think of the discourse in Through the Looking-Glass. Tartuffe is a scam artist who uses Christian piety as both a façade and a weapon to control the credulous – Orgon and his ridiculous mother, Madame Pernelle. Broderick takes Tartuffe’s cold-heartedness literally: he’s so unmoved that he might have the body temperature of a reptile. The text tells us that Tartuffe enjoys good food and sex, but even when Orgon’s wife Elmire, in an effort to expose him while her oblivious husband is watching from under the table, comes on to him, he responds greedily to her overtures but there’s no evidence in his face or his tone that she’s given him an erection. We’d swear there was nothing remotely human going on under those Puritan bangs if we didn’t see the way his machinations turn Orgon’s family’s lives upside down.