ASHBERY, John; James SCHUYLER. A Nest of Ninnies.

ASHBERY, John; James SCHUYLER. A Nest of Ninnies.Lee Harwoods Copy ASHBERY, John; James SCHUYLER. A Nest of Ninnies. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. 1969. 8vo. Original quarter turquoise cloth over lavender boards, spine lettered in metallic lavender, in the dust jacket designed by James McMullan, priced $4. 95 to front flap; pp. 191, [1]; some spotting to top edge and three or four small spots to fore edge of textblock, jacket a touch rubbed to spine tips and corners, 5 mm closed tear to upper

Lee Harwood’s Copy

ASHBERY, John; James SCHUYLER. A Nest of Ninnies. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. 1969.

8vo. Original quarter turquoise cloth over lavender boards, spine lettered in metallic lavender, in the dust-jacket designed by James McMullan, priced $4.95 to front flap; pp. 191, [1]; some spotting to top-edge and three or four small spots to fore-edge of textblock, jacket a touch rubbed to spine tips and corners, 5-mm closed tear to upper corner of rear flap; a bright, near-fine copy in like wrapper; presentation inscription in blue ink to front free end-paper from John Ashbery to Lee Harwood, dated 5 May 1970 (see below).

First edition, first printing, collaboratively written by Ashbery and Schuyler over the course of nearly two decades, this copy with an uncharacteristically extended presentation inscription from Ashbery to his friend and sometime lover, the English poet Lee Harwood (1939–2015).

According to Ashbery, A Nest of Ninnies was conceived as an amusement during car journeys from the Hamptons to New York City. ‘[Schuyler] pulled out a pad and said, “Think of a first line.” So I did, and he thought of the second line. We proceeded along that way, gathering inspiration from the suburban countryside we were going through [...] But we never had any intention of finishing it, much less publishing it [...] There was a period of seven or eight years in which we didn’t do anything on it at all, because I never saw Jimmy while I was living in Europe’. Although the writers initially began by contributing alternate lines, they gradually began to contribute longer passages, ‘but it did seem to require us being together; we once tried to do it by correspondence, but it just didn’t work at all’.

The resulting novel – named for Robert Armin’s 1608 jest book and published in an edition of six thousand copies – is both very funny and very literary, an American novel of manners owing its particular brand of high camp to England, and to Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton Burnett in particular. Although it received little critical attention at the time, the novel’s most generous review came from W. H. Auden in The New York Times (4 May 1969): ‘Like many folk tales, the idylls of Theocritus, the Alice books, The Im-portance of Being Ernest, the novels of Firbank and P. G. Wodehouse, A Nest of Ninnies is a pastoral: the world it depicts is an imaginary Garden of Eden, a place of innocence from which all serious needs and desires have been excluded.’ The jacket features a blurbs from Ned Rorem and, more unexpectedly, Anthony Burgess (‘Very neat and funny and – for a foreigner like myself – most informative of American life today’).

Provenance: Inscribed by John Ashbery to the English poet Lee Harwood: ‘For Lee | with love | John | New York | May 5, 1970’, followed by two quotations from the novel in Ashbery’s hand: ‘“Or you can have the zuppa inglese – the English trifle soup”. – p.138’ and ‘“To think that the Gradus ad Parnassum should end—here”. – p. 180’. The zuppa inglese is perhaps a playful nod to Harwood’s origins.

Ashbery lived in Paris for most of the 1960s, but met Harwood in London, at a reading of Ashbery’s at the US Embassy. Harwood got to know him at a party afterwards, and recalls that ‘after that I went over to stay with him several times in Paris. Then he had to move back to the States. In the mid-to late 60s I was spending a lot of time going back and forth to New York, and I usually stayed with him. A lovely warm friendship built up between us.’

The two were, for a while, lovers; Harwood’s The Man with Blue Eyes (1966) is a poetic chronicle of sorts of the affair the two poets conducted between 1965 and 1966. Alt-hough Harwood was the ‘junior’ figure, he was among a handful of contemporary English poets important to Ashbery (others including F. T. Prince and Mark Ford), and poetic influence moved in both directions.

Kermani A14. See Ford, ‘No one else can take a bath for you’, LRB (March 1988).

SKU: 2124830