A NEST OF NINNIES

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Inscribed association copy (Lee Harwood's copy). Original quarter turquoise cloth over lavender boards lettered in metallic lavender to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by James McMullan. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents bright and clean throughout. Light spotting to the upper edge, three or four spots to the fore-edge. In the near fine dustwrapper, a touch rubbed to spine tips and corners with a half-centimetre closed tear to the upper corner of the rear flap. A lovely association copy of Ashbery and Schuyler's jointly-authored novel.

Inscribed and lined by Ashbery in blue ink to the front free endpaper, "For Lee / with love / John / New York / May 5, 1970", followed by two quotations (also in Ashbery's hand) from the novel, with page numbers: "'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 recipient is the English poet Lee Harwood (which may explain the first quotation). Ashbery lived in Paris for most of the 1960s, but the two poets first met in London. As Harwood recounts: "It was about 1965. [Ashbery] came over from Paris – he was working [...] and writing art columns for the Herald Tribune – and did a reading at the US embassy, and I went along. I was impressed but I wasn't quite sure what was happening there. Then afterwards there was a party and I got to know him there, and 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 volume, The Man with Blue Eyes (1966) is a chronicle of sorts of the affair the two poets conducted between 1965 and 1966). Although Harwood was the "junior" figure, poetic influence was clearly exerted in both directions, Harwood one of a handful of contemporary English poets that became important to Ashbery (F. T. Prince and Mark Ford the two others examined in Old Hazzard's monograph, 'John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange' [Oxford, 2018]). 'A Nest of Ninnies' is that rare thing, a novel truly written by two authors. In his Ashbery bibliography, David Kermani prints part of an unpublished interview where Ashbery describes the novel's genesis: "in 1952 [,] we [Ashbery and Schuyler] were [regularly] being driven into New York from the Hamptons [...]. We were in the back seat trying to think of something to amuse us, and Jimmy suggested we write a novel. I said how could we do that, and he said, 'Oh it's very simple.' He 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. We went past a house in Smithtown and decided that it would be a very good place for the characters to live. But we never had any intention of finishing it, much less publishing it. We would put it aside for years on end and take it down and do some more. 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.... We started out [writing alternate lines] but then we felt it was too hampering. If somebody thought of a good line to follow the one he had just written, there was no reason why he couldn't just throw it in. As we went on we started writing longer passages alone. 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; it lacked a sort of hand-made quality." The resulting work is at very funny and very literary, an American novel of manners which, as Mark Ford has written, owes its particular brand of high camp to England, to Firbank and Ivy Compton Burnett. The novel, whose title comes from Robert Armin's Jacobean jest book, (the ninnies here are upper-middle class surburban American ninnies) didn't receive much critical attention, the one generous review coming from W. H. Auden in the New York Times (4 May, 1969), "Like many folk tales, the idylls of Theocritus, the 'Alice' books, 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' 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, unexpectedly, features a blurbs from Ned Rorem and, more unexpectedly, Anthony Burgess ("Very neat and funny and—for a foreigner lie myself—most informative of American life today"). Published 7 March, 1969 in an edition of 6000 copies. (Mark Ford, 'No one else can take a bath for you', LRB, 31 March 1988; Kermani A14).