On page 51 of Martin Wachadlo and Francis Kowsky’s 2013 work, Reconnaissance Level Survey of Historic Architectural Resources in the Village of East Aurora, New York, I was astonished to read the following: 

784 Chestnut Hill Road (c. 1928) James Marcus Schuyler House.

This house appears to be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places for both architecture and history.

What! That bungalow? The smallest house on the smallest lot on Chestnut Hill? The James Marcus Schuyler house? That was the Ridenour’s house, to me, and in the 60 years my family lived on Chestnut Hill (two doors down), I never heard the name James Schuyler.  

Well, at least not his given name. In the 7th grade, for Mr. Henry’s social studies class, I wrote a “History of Chestnut Hill Road.” My chief source of information was Richard L. Slosson (1883-1973), who built the first house, designed by local architect Aaron Merritt, at number 800 in 1911. Slosson had a dirt road constructed running east from Olean St. to the crest of the hill where he built his house (the road was later extended the full block to Elmwood Ave). He was able to tell me the year each house on the road was constructed and for whom. I indicated these on a map, along with the current owner—this was in 1962. Number 784 is marked “Schuyler/Ridenour 1928.” Mr. Slosson told me stories about many of the families, but I neither wrote down nor recall anything he might have said about a Schuyler.

A little research told me that James Marcus Schuyler (1923-1991) was the son of Margaret Daisy Connor Ridenour (1890-1981) by an earlier marriage to Marcus James Schuyler (1882-1942), a reporter. James lived with his mother, stepfather F. Berton Ridenour (1892-1964) and half-brother F. Berton Jr. (1933-2019) at number 784 from 1937 until his graduation—as “James Ridenour”—from East Aurora High School.  Only in 1947 did he learn that his name had never been legally changed to Ridenour. Thereafter, he primarily lived in New York City, but visited his mother regularly. He spent the summer of 1976 with her and wrote “The Morning of the Poem” that July and August. This 61-page work forms the greater part of a book with the same title; the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1981.

Just as one may be astonished and pleased to see a friend’s name in print somewhere, so was I astonished to encounter in “The Morning of the Poem” people, places, plants, trees, lawns, views and weather I know so well—the more so to see them so beautifully, so precisely captured by Schuyler’s pen.

“The Morning of the Poem” is about many things: the poet’s contentious but loving relationship with his mother, her house and garden, the street, the neighborhood, rain and moonlight.  It recalls Cazenovia Creek and “Stinking” Ponds; The Roycroft Inn and Bells Supermarket; the Courier Express. But it is much more: it is a work that references New York City, Long Island, Maine, Vermont, Virginia, Canada, Switzerland and Italy. It references family, neighbors, lovers and friends.  At least 50 individuals are mentioned. It is a work about memory, loss, aging, death, resurrection and immortality. At its most elemental, it’s a poem about a rainy summer in East Aurora.

Anyone who has spent summers in Western New York will recognize and savor Schuyler’s description of that rainy July and August of 1976, of the look, the smell, the sound and the feel of a sudden downpour or a thunderstorm, of the cold that can follow it and of the sun breaking through at last.   He captures the essence of a certain kind of summer there:

…it began heartily

to rain: not in drops,

In liquid shafts driving into the lawn and earth

drilling holes, beating up

The impatiens, petunias, lilies…

Rain! this morning I liked it more than sun…

…wet weavings of a summer morning

As well as the morning after a rain:

in the silken dawn each leaf and blade and

Needle bore its crystal drop, diamonds cut into pearl-shaped

perfect globes (I never have seen a round

Diamond: why not?  I’d like a few to rattle in my pocket…)

…and the silk

Grew worn, and strained and frayed away and sister sun sipped

the droplets up, not all at once, nor one at

A time, a steady vanishing into the air, sweetening, freshening,

endewing the day.  The days go by like leaves

That fall in fall, not yet, soon, so soon, I feel my death in

currents of damp air on the back of my neck…

Note his sense of humor: “round diamonds, why not?,” “sister sun sipped…” Humor and the darkest thoughts come rattling one after the other.

Schuyler had a deep appreciation for the natural world. He was unusually knowledgeable about plants and trees—I counted in his work 24 tree and 54 plant species, plus 20 ways to describe the grass—but no insects. The mosquitos must have had a banner year that rainy summer!

A word about geography: Chestnut Hill Road and Elmwood Ave. form the southeast corner of the Village of East Aurora. Here, the land transitions from the flat plain on which Buffalo lies to the Allegheny Plateau, the hills that fill the rural eastern and southern towns of Erie County. In the late 1930s, there were no houses across the street from 784, and the trees were smaller or non-existent—it  had been farmland only 20 years before—so that James had an unobstructed view south into the valley that cradles Olean Rd., the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and Cazenovia Creek.

Charles Burchfield noted the beauty of this bit of countryside in a diary entry of February 24, 1936:

Beyond E. Aurora on Hill above Olean Rd, painting—the first trip painting outdoors since last August—

A mild soft breeze from the south, the sky partly cloudy & with a misty sun at times…

On the way up the hill… I was overcome with the beauty of the day, it did not seem possible the world could be so beautiful, and I felt anew my utter baseness, and unworthiness of such delights.

As I work, the roar of the wind in the tree tops was exciting—at times the wide open nearness of roaring trains from the railroad below…I was loath to leave the place…I paused often to look—the sky had a vibrant electric, steel gray quality to it, trees rocked back and forth swaying majestically from their very bases.

Leaving the woods I came out to the brink of the valley. It seemed tremendously vast & wide; the snow had a peculiar yellow light on it, the woods on the far hills was smoky violet in color, and the sky was a mud gray, misty and looming forward.

And here is Schuyler’s adolescent memory of a venture into that same valley, almost that same year:

…we got up

In the starry night and went downhill,

down Olean Road, downhill again

And through the pasture where the cows coughed

and exhaled warm breath,

Barefoot among the cow flops…

and stands of thistles and

Buttercups…

to where Cazenovia

Creek made a big bend and the warm and muddy water was deep

enough to swim in.  Starlighted silent

Ripples as you stroke…

Like Burchfield, Schuyler was moved by weather, by the sound, feel and color of the sky and landscape, by the effect of changing light: 

This day, I want to

Send it to you, the sound of stirring air, soft

sunlight, quivering trees

That shake their needles and leaves like fingers

improvising on a keyboard

Scriabin in his softest mood, and the wind

rises and it all goes Delius…

Poets often animate scenery. Schuyler does this; he also eats and breathes the scenery: the half-moon “scooped out of lemon ice”; “tonight there’ll be a bigger serving”; and

….Thank God the

Sky cleared:  I think it is tonight that the moon is full!

…riding slowly up a rural sky, a wheel

of Gourmandise with the foil peeled off, smelling

Sweetly of cherries…

And he wears it: “the silken dawn,” flooded Cazenovia Creek, “a tossed-out length of coffee-colored satin”; the moon “perhaps with a ring on the blue-serge night.”

He even finds eroticism in rain, remembering that as an adolescent he

used to climb out my first-floor bedroom

Window, naked, into it: the slippery wet bathmat grass, the

rain, both cool and warm, plastering down

My hair, rain running all over me as I danced or stood in it,

the long persistent tongues of summer rain.

…the walks and road shine slick as though

Greased with Vaseline…

One can live next door, enjoying cordial relations for years and years, yet never really know one’s neighbor or, at least, know only his or her public face. To this adolescent, Mr. and Mrs. Ridenour were a nice old couple who sometimes asked me to take care of their dogs—a dachshund named Frieda and a beagle, I think—when they went away, and to occasionally mow their lawn. Relations between Bert Ridenour and “Jimmy” were cool at best—Schuyler refers to his stepfather as “the old book burner.” Bert once found Jim reading James Joyce’s (scandalous!  forbidden!) “Ulysses.”  “I have to write a book report…” he lamely explains. Bert:

“…Here,

Let me see that book”:  he leafed through it, not knowing where

to look for Molly Bloom, and tossed it at me:

“Still can’t catch: go mow the lawn”…

The lawn–I followed in the poet’s footsteps, literally!  In a later poem, written in 1993 and titled “A Few Days,” he says to his mother about his stepfather, “I realized…that in his way he loved me.” She cuts to the quick: “He did not.  Burton [sic] hated you.”

Mother-son relations were scrappy, but based on mutual affection. Their battle of wills started early. He recalls that he and another little boy “went paddling bare-ass in a brook.” Returning home, he is confronted: “‘I told you not to go in that brook!’ ‘I didn’t go in the brook.’ I thought I was such an accomplished liar.  ‘Then why are your B.V.D.’s on inside out?’”. 

Now, in 1976, the fray continues. It was raining one morning. He’s trying to stop 

My mother from slamming every window and shutting out

the smell

The sweet, sweet, sweet smell of morning rain, in

your nose, on bare skin.

“Don’t shut that window:  it isn’t coming in.”  “Well,

it might come in and

I’m the one who will have to clean it up.”  Slam. I

open it again: “This

Rain will last about thirty seconds (it did), I’m watching

it and if

It starts to blow in I’ll close the window.”  “See

you do: and you can

Mop it.”…

[I] feel like smashing dishes…

“Don’t you dare…”

Two people obstinate as mules, who

love each other:  I wonder

Though, do I really love anybody? I think I’ll can

it with this love

Stuff for a while…

One has to wonder how mother and son survived his adolescence.

Schuyler can be snippy, ironic or harsh about East Aurora, Buffalo and the people who live or lived there, yet nostalgic, too, about the past. East Aurora is “this green unlovely village” in which “one need never seek or fear…”; the doctor who lived across the street moved to Buffalo—“I’d rather stay here and starve…”;  his mother serves “beef in tomato sauce—ick”; the neighbors “all eat Jell-O.”

He names or refers to several neighbors: Addison Talbott, the newspaperman, lived at number 835, the second house built on Chestnut Hill Road.  Joseph Palmer, another newspaperman, lived up the street at number 840.  Elsewhere, he recalls James Westland, number 845, riding his horse in the still-vacant farmland that afforded a view “down the valley that leads to Olean.” The house across the street with “overgrown foundation planting” now blocks the view. That is number 787, built by engineer George Bartlett in 1949-1950. He, Larry Smith and my father, all friends from Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, built their three houses together in East Aurora. And Schuyler hears children splashing in a backyard pool: that would be my brother’s girls in the pool my father built, two doors downhill.

Curiously, Schuyler saves a little dose of venom for a couple I knew quite well. He complains that he and his mother are finally invited to tea at 

a house I’d lived next door to for

forty years and never been inside

Of, not once, before.  Mrs. Blank, the dead, the former

owner, wasn’t much for

Entertaining high-school boys…

Her husband

the arborist, he’s

Gone too…

Did the adolescent James Schuyler really care that he had never been invited to tea? Perhaps his mother cared. The house next door is number 800, and “Mrs. Blank” was Julia Smith Slosson (1880-1973). The invitation to tea must have come from Barbara Crowell, who bought the house in 1954.  That year, the Slossons built their retirement house at number 770, the lot on the west side of 784. Why chide the Slossons? My guess is that some small-town social class distinction kept them at arm's length.

Schuyler refers to Mr. Slosson as “the arborist.” Dick was in the insurance business, but the epithet is apt. In 1912, he planted 50 Silver Paragon chestnut trees, shipped from a nursery in New Jersey, on the lot where 784 now stands. These soon succumbed to the chestnut blight but gave the hill its name. Initially, Mr. Slosson wanted to name the street Brotherhood Lane, in honor of the then-current village president, who declined the honor.  Or perhaps, Alfred Brotherhood (1846-1930) had already given his name to a private road, an extension of Elmwood Ave. on the north side of Main Street. Dick also planted elm trees all along Chestnut Hill; these survived until the 1960s when the bark beetles arrived. A proud graduate of Hobart College in 1905, he grew red oaks from acorns gathered from the Hobart College Oak and had stainless plaques attached to each tree to say so.

Dick had a specific landscaping idea that led to a further, implied Schuyler complaint: each Slosson house was built on a large lot, centered between lot lines, and set well back from the road. Conifers fanned out from the corners of the facade to the intersection of the street and lot line—welcoming evergreen arms, you might say, and screening, too. But, by 1976, the Ridenour’s rather narrow lot was hemmed in to east and west by now-very-tall spruce, pine and firs. The poet observes:

the firs crowd too thickly on these village

lawns:  Chestnut Hill Road...

Yet he can later write:

out the [window] to the east, enclosed by trees, the

Broad and pointed leaves of Solomon’s-seal are thickly set with

water drops, as easy to gather…

as beads on a Patou dance frock:

green barely freaked with blue and glitter…

If you’re given lemons, make lemonade—and Schulyer does!

The truth, the absolute of feeling, of knowing what you know, that is the poem…

The “Morning of the Poem” is about poetry itself. In a poem within the poem, he explains:

So many lousy poets

So few good ones

What’s the problem?

No innate love of

Words, no sense of

How the thing said

Is in the words, how

The words are themselves

The thing said: love,

Mistake, promise, auto

Crack-up, color, petal

The color in the petal

Is merely light

And that’s refraction:

A word, that’s the poem.

Here is an example of what he means:

….how I love roses!

Bunches of roses on

The dining table, Georg Arends, big and silver-

pink with sharply

Bent-back petals so the petals make a point: no

other rose does that:

Or Variegata di Bologna, streaked and freaked

in raspberries and cream,

A few gathered into an amethyst wineglass:

The subject here is not roses but the sound of words—the alliteration of “bent-back petals…petals…point," of “streaked and freaked”— and the color red:  rose, pink, raspberry, amethyst, wine. And if that isn’t rich enough for you, he goes on:

…rich

as those Poiret robes

And dresses I went to see in the cellar of the

Fashion Institute of Technology:

A brown that isn’t purple, gamboge, celadon lined

with jade, fat fur cuffs,

Turbans stuck with black aigrettes, luxury and

wit…

More colors: brown, purple, gamboge (a yellow-orange), celadon, jade and, for punctuation, black. Black introduces a darker theme in lines that follow: sadomasochistic bars, men dressed in nails and boots and leather, clanking keys, a man whose back has been sliced with a knife in a game of tic-tac-toe and speed.

Schuyler said in a 1992 interview, “I never have a plan beforehand.” He waits to see what comes to mind. He may seem to skip from one subject to another in a stream of consciousness way, but there’s method in it. He turns the prosaic into poetry. Take pavement, for example: 

Wake up

In the night, after midnight, and open the casement screen and

study the road gliding downhill brightly

Lighted by a misshapen half moon, almost white, scooped out of

lemon ice.  How can macadam (or is it called

Asphalt or blacktop?) return this lunar light as a river or

creek might?  On this quiet small-town street,

Whose car coasts quietly up the hill at this late hour?…

About

now Mr. Talbot used to drive home from the

Buffalo paper for which he wrote a nature column, hunting and

fishing, the ways of wildlife and what was and

Wasn’t burgeoning in fields and swamps.  And a little later Joe

Palmer’s sedan slid by…

Other people live in

their houses:  I know a lot of dead people…

Wake up…a misshapen half-moon…a river of black macadam (a shroud?)…dead people. That’s how Schuyler seduces and shocks you.

“The Morning of the Poem” is a love letter to East Aurora; it begins in rain and color:  blue jays, a hummingbird “hanging on speeding wings in fierce blue delphinium depths” and a morning “green more gray”—cheerful and melancholy at the same time. Schuyler’s acute eye captures the present moment as he reminisces about the past. Near the end, he thinks “this poem seems mostly about what I’ve lost,” yet life stirs—“robins are garnering earthworms from the lawn.” He looks forward to September, to the “glittering blue skies” and late goldenrod and asters of October, to snow falling in Chelsea.  As it began, so the poem ends in color with a touch of the bittersweet: “Tomorrow: New York: in blue, in green, in white, East Aurora goodbye.”

Dr. Paul Trautman is a graduate of East Aurora High School and SUNY Buffalo School of Medicine.  He recently retired from the practice of child, adolescent and adult psychiatry.  He lives in New York City.