“The Chateau Hardware” is John Ashbery’s fable of escape and connection. Like all fables, it stems from the real, the world of facts and traditions and social convention, and tells us something about that world. Like all fables, the world it presents is unlike our own, resembling the everyday as a dream resembles waking life. Douglas Crase recalls driving through Rochester, New York, with Ashbery, the older poet pointing out precisely the location on Monroe Avenue where the titular store once stood. It’s good to know that the Chateau Hardware was, in its way, real: Crase calls the poem “a greeting card from the place that formed [Ashbery].” [1] Still, a greeting card is not a map, and a map is not the terrain. The kitschy name of an old supply store also, in its status as a poem title, figures the point at which mundanity and fantasy meet. Marianne Moore wrote of ‘“imaginary gardens with real toads in them’”: farm implements hang in Ashbery’s castle in the air.

“It was always November there.” Shades of the oldest opener in the book, perhaps, but while “once upon a time” tells us not to worry too much about exactly when, Ashbery’s incipit evokes a zone separated from normal cycles. Why November, the penultimate month? Cold and grey, certainly, but there is also a sense of not-quite attaching to a locale of permanent November. Holidays, the New Year, spring somewhere down the line—these things will never come. Even the first syllable’s incidental hint of the novel sits unhappily alongside that slam-shut ‘“always’.”.

“The farms / were a kind of precinct”: is there anything more evocative of America—by which I mean less the country than the country’s perception of itself—than that notion of ‘the farm’? Self-sufficiency, abundance, deprivation, isolation. Standing out alone under a big sky. But here, as in the poem’s title, Ashbery is writing both of an imagined and archetypal farm, the farm as founding myth, and of a cluster of real fruit farms, those around Sodus, New York, where he grew up. Cherry-picking and loneliness filled the young poet’s days. A “precinct” is a space defined by its limits: most commonly, in the US, those subdivided for the purposes of policing. Agricultural and carceral spaces alike are subject to a principle of enclosure. Ashbery doesn’t say that the farms were a precinct, though, but rather that they were a “kind of” precinct. There is a Shakespearean ambivalence to the phrase (Coriolanus, for instance, is a “kind of nothing”), as though the farms were both in some way like a precinct—and so the principle is semblance perceived, a constitutive blurring of boundaries—and also partaking of the precinct’s essence, its kind. “A certain control / had been exercised.” Read one way, “certain control” is tautologous, the characteristic overkill of the control freak. Read another, it is not clear what sort of control this is, and maybe that’s the point. Whatever it is, the passive—“had been exercised”—further obfuscates the agent, places them outside of the field (or fields) of view. Who’s running things here?

Not the birds, who are on the fence. “Collect” is used intransitively here, but the absence of an object is felt: the little birds are collecting a thing like nothing. The verb can denote connoisseurship or a need for charity, or both at the same time, as with Wallace Stevens’ “being of sound,” from whom “we collect.” A collect is also a prayer, and the image of the birds arrayed along the boundary-line is ecclesial, in its way, even if that way is a little sinister.

“It was the great ‘as though,’ the how the day went.” Ashbery is fond of ‘it,’ here as often in his work fulfilling its function as ambient pronoun or dummy subject. Which is to say, it’s futile asking what exactly was the “great ‘as though’”: it was. The same, or perhaps a different, ‘it’ as, earlier, was “always November,” the same “it” in which we all live, whether we like it or not. Here, “it” might be the grandeur of comparison, the embodiment of the principle of imagination, how consciousness can sense one thing and think of another. But an “as though” is also a wish—something closer to a wistful ‘If only!’—and in this poem the capacity to imagine anything at all is bound up with the need to imagine things being different.

But here come “the police,” patrolling their precinct. Their excursions are evidently unlike Wordsworth’s (in his long poem of that name), even if, coming after the previous line, there is a faint sense of the day out—a macabre vignette of a band of cops traipsing across the arable. Ashbery’s “bodily functions” might be sexual, but here they aren’t sexy. We know that his earliest queer experiences were furtive, confusing, and on one occasion exploitative. [2] A “function,” though, is not only what a body does, but the things a body can do: the uses to which it can be put, including but surpassing those necessary for subsistence. “Wanting,” as the final word of the line, hovers in ambiguous space. As in the famous opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it is not immediately clear whether ‘want’ is desire or lack, or one because of the other.

Follow the syntax through to the next line, though, and the tone begins to shift. Ashbery, or his young avatar, wants— or wants for—no elements. There is a new confidence burgeoning , brimming, in the poem. From a beginning stuck in time, a place stuck in itself, we are going somewhere. This long final sentence cannot help but pick up speed as it piles on clauses. At the same time, there is a sheer assurance to the sense of self-containment. “Neither fire nor water.” Negation is its own form of assertion.

Ashbery is like Stevens in that he is attracted to words which appear initially to be not quite right. But to use a word which ‘looks wrong’ is really to challenge our notions of what constitutes rightness in poetry, to throw open the conventions we have imbibed. [3] The verb “vibrating”—a present participle, aligning thereby in its processual aspect with the earlier “wanting”—prepares, or seems to prepare, us for pitch, but we get “pinch.” We are wrongfooted; we pinch ourselves. A ‘pinch’ is also a form of ‘wanting’, in the sense of being pinched, in a pinch; Ashbery resonates to the frequencies of lack and desire, takes the side of the ‘distant’, the searching. The poem is then a sort of Bildungsroman, or Künstlerroman, or the latter by way of the former: an aetiology of the artist.

That the poem is a just-so story, a fable of the artist as a young man, is borne out in part by the final line, but also subverted by it. “‘And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.” In a piece on a portrait by the artist R.B. Kitaj, Ashbery reaches for the same idiom, describing the couple depicted as “able to deal with the world which made them turn out this way.” [4] This is a beautifully tender and subtle account of our constant dance with the world, and Ashbery’s phrase, as with so much of his language, gathers up a wealth of meaning and strangeness into the ostensibly familiar. If something turns out a certain way, there is an element of chance. You might be smartly turned out at a party, or to ‘greet’ someone. Still, in this poem of an unhappy childhood, a poem about home in which home, as word and as sensibility, is an absent term, there is also perhaps the faintest sense of one turned out of the house, one who, having made the choices they have made, can never go back. And so they set out down the path, not ‘meeting’ – for that is too easy and a little too untheatrical for Ashbery —but “greeting” another, the elusive “you” of this and of all lyric—waving to them, maybe, or perhaps taking their hand, pulling them close, recounting how it is that you came to be there together.






Notes

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[1] Douglas Crase, “Driving by the Lake with John Ashbery”, Lithub (28 October 2020). https://lithub.com/driving-by-the-lake-with-john-ashbery/.

[2] See Karin Roffman, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

[3] I develop this idea more fully in ‘The Comedian as Wallace Stevens’, Essays in Criticism 74.1 (January 2024), 48-65.

[4] Quoted in Matthew Bevis, ‘In Search of Distraction’, Poetry (November 2017).