A Carnival of Losses Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Notes Nearing Ninety

  You Are Old

  Solitude Double Solitude

  Dictaters

  In Praise of Paragraphs

  My New Hampshire Grandmother

  Seven Hundred Words

  Losing My Teeth

  Depravity

  Paris 1951

  Cutting a Figure

  “The Wild Heifers”

  Sycophants and Sisters

  Geography

  The Beard Generation

  The Vaper

  Generations of Politics

  The Return of David

  Wuk, Woik, Work

  The Dictated Pig

  Roads to Rome

  The Stapled World

  Open the Damned Door

  Civilization

  Your Latest Book

  Walking to Portsmouth

  Pharmacies and Treasuries

  The Last Poem

  Anonymous

  Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

  Who I Am

  The Selected Poets of Donald Hall

  Theodore Roethke

  Robert Creeley

  Louis M ac Neice

  W. C. W.

  John Holmes

  Stephen Spender

  Geoffrey Hill

  James Dickey

  Allen Tate

  Edwin and Willa Muir

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Seamus Heaney

  Joseph Brodsky

  Prosaic Laureates

  Richard Wilbur

  E. E. Cummings

  Tom Clark and the Lower East Side

  James Wright

  Necropoetics

  A Carnival of Losses

  Milltowns

  My Connecticut Grandfather

  Mudfish Pissing

  Richard at Oxford

  From Andrew All the Way to Lucy

  The World of Meats

  The Triple Thinker

  The Worst Thing

  Five of Them

  The Boys March Home

  Down Cellar

  Reviewing My Life

  An Old Hermit Named Garrison

  Fucking

  The Widow’s House

  War Cards

  Abstract Expressionism

  Amo Amas Amat

  Frying Pulp

  There’s One, There’s One

  Romance

  Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Frankenstein, and T. S. Eliot

  Way Way Down, Way Way Up

  Tree Day

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from Donald Hall

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by Donald Hall

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hall, Donald, 1928– author.

  Title: A carnival of losses : notes nearing ninety / Donald Hall.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017061816 (print) | LCCN 2017049735 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328826312 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328826343 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hall, Donald, 1928– | Poets, American—20th century. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3515.A3152 (print) | LCC PS3515.A3152 Z46 2018 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54 [b] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061816

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  Author photographs © Uldis Tirons

  Author photograph © Linda Kunhardt

  v1.0618

  for the helpers

  Kendel Currier

  Carole Colburn

  Pam Sanborn

  Louise Robie

  Mary Blake

  I

  Notes Nearing Ninety

  You Are Old

  You are old when you learn it’s May by noticing that daffodils erupt outside your window. You are old when someone mentions an event two years in the future and looks embarrassed. You are old when the post office delivers your letters into a chair in your living room and picks up your letters going out. You are old when you write letters.

  In your eighties it gets hard to walk. Nearing ninety it’s exhausting to pull your nightshirt on.

  You are old when the waiter doesn’t mention that you are holding the menu upside down. You are old when an essay of reminiscence takes eighty-four drafts. You are old when mashed potatoes are difficult to chew, or when you guess it’s Sunday because the mail doesn’t come. It might be Christmas.

  In your eighties you take two naps a day. Nearing ninety you don’t count the number of naps. In your eighties you don’t eat much. Nearing ninety, you remember to eat.

  You are old when your longtime friend Melvin, turned seventy-five, writes you in rage about becoming old. Working to finish a new book, the author of Essays After Eighty tells Melvin that Melvin knows nothing about old age: Melvin can walk upstairs! Melvin flies to the West Indies with his girlfriend and his wife!

  In your eighties you are invisible. Nearing ninety you hope nobody sees you. At nineteen you were six foot two. At ninety-one you will be two foot six.

  Solitude Double Solitude

  Late in my eighties I remain solitary. I live by myself on one floor of the 1803 farmhouse where my family has lived since the Civil War. After my grandfather died, my grandmother Kate lived here alone. Her three daughters visited her. In 1975 Kate died at ninety-seven, and Jane and I took over the house. Forty-odd years later, two decades after Jane’s death, I spend my days alone in one of two chairs. From an overstuffed blue chair in my living room, I look out the window at the unpainted old barn, golden and empty of its cows and of Riley the lame horse. I look at a tulip, I look at a 150-year-old maple, I look at snow. In the parlor’s mechanical chair I write these paragraphs and dictate letters. Also I watch television news, often without listening, and lie back in the generous comfort of solitude. People want to come visit, but mostly I put them off, preserving my continuous silence. My friend Linda spends two nights a week with me. My two best male friends from New Hampshire, who live in Maine and Manhattan, seldom drop by. A few hours a week Carole does my laundry and counts out my pills and picks up after me. I look forward to her presence and feel relief when she leaves. Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

  Born in 1928, I was an only child. In the Great Depression there were many of us, and Spring Glen Grammar School was eight grades of children with few siblings. From time to time I made a friend during childhood, but friendships never lasted long. Charlie Axel liked making model airplanes out of balsa wood and tissue. So did I, but I was clumsy and dripped cement onto wing paper. His models flew. Later I collected stamps, and so did Frank Benedict. I got bored with stamps. In seventh and eighth grade there were girls. I remember lying with Barbara Pope on her bed, fully clothed and apart while her mother looked in at us with anxiety. Most of the time I liked sitting alone after school in the shadowy living room. While my mother was out shopping or playing bridge with friends and my father added figures in his office, I daydreamed.

  In summer, I left my Connecticut suburb to hay with my grandfather on this New Hampshire farm. I watched him milk seven Holste
ins morning and night. For lunch I made myself an onion sandwich, a thick slice between pieces of Wonder Bread. At fifteen I went to Exeter for the last two years of high school. Exeter was academically difficult and made Harvard easy, but I loathed it—seven hundred identical Republican boys, living two to a room. Solitude was scarce, and I labored to find it or to make it. I took long walks alone, smoking cigars. I found myself a rare single room and remained there as much as I could, reading and writing. Saturday night the other students gathered in the basketball arena, deliriously watching a movie. I remained in my room in solitary pleasure.

  At college, dormitory suites had single and double bedrooms. For three years I lived in one bedroom crammed with everything I required. In my senior year I managed to secure a single suite: bedroom and sitting room and bath. At my Oxford college I had two rooms to myself. Everybody did. Then I had fellowships. Then I wrote books. Finally, to my distaste, I had to look for a job. With my first wife—people married young back then; we were twenty and twenty-three—I settled in Ann Arbor and taught English literature at the University of Michigan. I loved walking up and down in the lecture hall, talking about Yeats and Joyce or saying aloud the poems of Thomas Hardy, John Keats, and Andrew Marvell. These pleasures were hardly solitary, but at home I spent the day in a tiny attic room working on poems. My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart. For the only time in my life I cherished social gatherings, Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. Back then, I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. On two or three such occasions, on Friday and more on Saturday, we flirted, we drank, we chatted—without remembering on Sunday what we talked about on Saturday night.

  After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced.

  For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girl who bragged that she drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, rarely two in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in a happy licentiousness. I didn’t.

  Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. After the term ended, because I knew she lived in a dormitory near me, one night I asked her to house-sit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, 1970 was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in that decade always included breakfast. Often we saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week—then three or four times a week, seeing no one else. One night we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older, and if we married she would be a widow so long. We married in April 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, then left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house.

  For almost twenty years I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was on the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was on the second floor in the rear, by Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude we each wrote poetry in the morning. We met for lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without chatting. Then we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom.

  For several hours afterward I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s Prelude, Henry James’s The Ambassadors twice, the Old Testament, William Faulkner, seventeenth-century poets, Raymond Carver’s stories, more Henry James. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at The New Yorker while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a good dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom and garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from Jane’s plot across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we spoke of our separate days.

  Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun tanning while I read magazines in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then we would plunge into the pond. Sometimes for an early supper we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty-three years of an extraordinary marriage, twenty New Hampshire years living and writing together in our double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven in 1995.

  Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.

  Dictaters

  People who dictate letters must proofread, because one word sounds like another. Especially they must proofread addresses. I live on Eagle Pond Farm, named by my great-grandfather for its twenty acres of water nearby. The Red Sox broadcaster Ned Martin wrote me a letter at Evil Pond Farm. I tack the envelope on a parlor wall alongside an envelope from the late Stephen Jay Gould. He and I also exchanged a letter or two. Gould was a biology professor at Harvard, eloquent and vastly intelligent, who wrote short scientific essays crafted in witty prose. It’s true that when we read him we detect his appropriate and exalted opinion of Stephen Jay Gould. He addressed me at Ego Pond Farm.

  In Praise of Paragraphs

  When I stopped writing poems, in 2010 or so, it was a relief. Quality had diminished along with testosterone. How many good poems are written by people in their eighties? I hoped that prose might continue. One day in the mail came a letter from a small press that designed and set exquisite books printed in editions of fifty at a notable price. This press had beautifully executed small collections of my poems as well as the handsomest broadside I ever saw. They knew that in old age I sat all day in a chair looking out my window at the cow barn’s unpainted vertical boards. They asked if I would write an essay called “Out the Window,” which they would make into a small and elegant book. I said I was sorry but I couldn’t do it.

  The next day I started “Out the Window.” It took me fifty drafts over six months, and when I finished, I wanted the essay to find readers, not collectors. I sent the manuscript to the fine press, thanked them for the topic, and asked if I could please show it to a magazine. It came out in The New Yorker and started me on Essays After Eighty.

  Most of my life, I’ve been at my best early in the day. These days I start writing prose first thing in the morning, as I used to do with poems. After “Out the Window,” I worked on further essays with passion and concentration. Some pieces took as many as eighty drafts. Rewriting, I turned an adjective-noun into a particular, more appropriate noun. I removed an adverb and tried twenty verbs before I found an exact and witty one. New topics kept arriving. “Three Beards” could recall student protests during the Vietnam War, grief over Jane’s death, laughter, recipes, tears, and a widower’s lust.

  My prose continued in a direction that my poems had taken over the years. When I was young, my language wore coats and shirts and trousers, neckties, bespoke shoes. In my lifetime as a writer I have cast off layer after layer of clothing in pursuit of nudity. I hold nothing back except transitions that might once have elaborated notes into an essay. In a paragraph or two, my prose embodies a momentary victory over fatigue. As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin. I tell short anecdotes, I hazard an opinion, speculate, assume, and remember. Why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?

  My New Hampshire Grandmother

  Kate never had any
money, but she loved to save it. When she was ninety-three her youngest daughter took her to a dollar store where she found an elevated tray filled with tiny aluminum percolators, one-cuppers. The frank and ethical enterprise attached a notice informing its customers that these percolators did not work. They were only 5 cents, so Kate bought two of them anyway.

  Seven Hundred Words

  When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn’t mind the light on my side of the bed. I read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and six huge volumes of Henry Adams’s letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over again. After Jane died I kept reading books, at first only murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to be, and I realize that I haven’t finished reading a book in a year.

  An athlete goes professional at twenty. At thirty he is slower but more canny. At forty he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, sixty, seventy. Anyone ambitious, who lives to be old or even old, endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment. In a Hollywood retirement home to meet a friend, I watched a handsome old woman in a wheelchair, unrecognizable, leap up in ecstasy when I walked toward her: “An interview!” she said. “An interview!” A writer usually works until late in life. When I was eighty, still doing frequent poetry readings, audiences stood and clapped when I concluded, and kept on clapping until I shushed them. Of course I stayed to sign book after book, and returned to my hotel understanding that they applauded so much because they would never see me again.