A Carnival of Losses Read online

  Suppose I am the 150-year-old maple outside my porch. When winter budges toward spring, I push out tiny leaves, which gradually curl yellowish green then enlarge, turning darker green and flourishing through summer. In September flecks of orange seep into green, and October turns the leaves gorgeously orange and red. Leaves fall, emptying the branches, and in December only a few remain. In January the last survivors flutter down onto snow. These black leaves are the words I write.

  Back then, I wrote all day, getting up at five. By this time I rise scratchy at six or twitch in bed until seven. I drink coffee before I pick up a pen. I look through the newspaper. I try to write all morning, but exhaustion shuts me down by ten o’clock. I dictate a letter. I nap. I rise to a lunch of crackers and peanut butter, followed by further exhaustion. At night I watch baseball on television, and between innings run through the New York Times Book Review. I roll over all night. Breakfast. Coffee.

  When Jane was alive, our dog Gus needed walking every day. Jane walked him when she waked, feeling sleepy before breakfast. When they left I lifted my hand from the page, waving goodbye. Midday we had lunch and a nap and then I walked Gus. In my car I drove him up New Canada, the dirt road near our house, and parked where the single lane widened. We walked the flat earth, not for long because I wanted to get back to manuscript again. Now when someone brings a dog to the house, I barricade myself in a big chair. An attentive dog would break my hip.

  Louise is my cat. Ten years ago, her vigorous sister Thelma squirmed out of the house and discovered Route 4. My assistant Kendel dug a hole and we set a half-barrel over the grave to impede hungry animals from enjoying a Thelma snack. Louise is passive, too shy to scoot through an open door. At night when I watch MSNBC, she annoys me by rubbing my knee, but she never knocks me over.

  Striving to pay the mortgage in the late 1970s and ’80s, some years I published four books. Now it takes me a month to finish seven hundred words. Here they are.

  Losing My Teeth

  When I trekked into my eighties, my last teeth wiggled loose in my bottom jaw and I was toothless. For decades an upper plate had sufficed, but now I also needed a full lower plate, if I were to gnaw meatballs into my gullet. Dental machinery is difficult for me, because my jawbones and gums are so thin that hardware can’t find a purchase. Because of the vacuum my uppers stay stuck with only a touch of glue, but not the lower plate. My tongue flails up through the dental horseshoe and the polymer teeth fly out even though I have applied a pint of adhesive. Sometimes they slip loose while I’m chewing in a restaurant. I hold a napkin to my face and tuck the loathsome slimy pink object into a jacket pocket.

  Between meals at home, I used to keep my lowers on a shelf beside my blue chair, and every day I lost them. I lost them because I couldn’t abide them. Since I can’t go outdoors, they had to be nearby. I don’t have a dog that eats dentures, and my cat’s mouth is too small. Each time I lost my teeth, I stared at every tabletop and shelf top. I looked at places where they couldn’t possibly be, and once or twice that’s where they were. My trainer Pam comes Tuesdays and Thursdays to stride me on a treadmill and punish me with weights. Once as I was pacing through cardio, my teeth shot out. I tucked them into a small tray beside the treadmill’s panel of knobs and buttons. Did I hide them on purpose? I gummed my food for two days until Pam came back. Only a woman can find what I lose. A few years ago I spent three months in New York. I had my own teeth then, and never misplaced them, but I wore bifocals, and when I couldn’t find them I telephoned Kendel in New Hampshire and she told me where they were. (I don’t lose my bifocals now because I no longer wear them. I won’t tell you why.) Once I was in my bedroom when the telephone rang on the far side of my bed. I was talking to my friend Jeff when my teeth flew out. Talking often flies them out. Linda sleeps on that side of the bed and found them that night.

  Another time I couldn’t find them anywhere, and Linda was soon to arrive. My fecklessness shamed me. I remembered putting them on top of my rollator, under a throwaway piece of cardboard next to a mug of cold coffee. I tossed the cardboard, set the mug beside the coffeemaker, and when I got back to my blue chair, my teeth were missing. I checked the wastebasket where I threw the cardboard. I checked the coffeemaker. When Linda walked in, I told her I had lost my teeth, and she reached down beside her chair and picked them up. Later that day, they zapped out of my mouth onto the floor of the bathroom between the washing machine and the dryer. Linda poked them out with a broom handle.

  It was a week before I lost them again. I heated up supper one night, take-home flatbread with shaved steak and stewed tomatoes and hot peppers. I warmed it in the toaster oven and brought it to the parlor, where every night I watch the Red Sox. Often I eat supper in my mechanical chair, so I keep a tube of glue beside it. This time I found the glue but not the teeth. They weren’t among the strategic piles of papers, tucked away so that I would never forget them, where I always forget them. The flatbread went cold and I stuffed it into the take-home box and back into the refrigerator. I gummed a banana, not difficult, and tried gumming cheddar, not easy. When Kendel brought me my breakfast sandwich I wrapped myself in a bath towel and chomped my oozy meal, slithering sausage, fried egg, and English muffin into my mouth and onto my beard, my bath towel, and my lap. When Linda dropped by at noon, she wouldn’t look at me, but she picked my teeth out of the wastebasket.

  She also had a great idea. After every meal, after my lower plate flopped out after every meal, I should lift up my rollator seat—my rollator confronts me at all times—and plop my pink horseshoe plate (horseshoe crab, crabby horseshoe) into the bin under the seat. Her great idea is virtually foolproof, but some fools can outdo any proof. In one month after Linda’s suggestion, I lost my teeth twice. Staring at the empty bin of the rollator, I wailed out loud, “Where are my teeth?” The wailing did it. My teeth were in my mouth.

  Depravity

  What is the worst thing I ever did? there must be many worst things. I recollect shameful moments in my first marriage, and in behavior with my small son. A momentary scene fixes itself in my head. Andrew was three years old, noisy and affectionate, needy, darling, and annoying. Mother, father, and son lived in a ranch house outside Boston. I wrote my poems in the cellar, where I kept a desk, a wormy sofa, two chairs, and books on shelves held up by bricks. To the door at the top of the stairs I hammered a hook and eye so that I could close myself off. One morning I left the house briefly. When I returned I was eager to get back to a poem at my desk, but Andrew stood in my way. I pushed past him and set a foot on the top stair, trying to fasten the hook behind me. Andrew called, “Daddy! Daddy!” and held on to my leg. “You’re a bad boy,” I told him in rage. “You’re a bad boy!” His face crumpled and reddened. Being called a bad boy was the most devastating accusation possible. With passionate humiliation at the age of three, his red curls shaking, he insisted, “I’m not a bad boy, Daddy! I’m not a bad boy!”

  I hooked the door shut, climbed down to my desk, and picked up my pen.

  Paris 1951

  From Oxford, in 1951, I flew over to Paris between terms, and dated a French girl once or twice. Her mother was English, which helped her when we chatted, but sometimes she got the tone wrong. When I asked her what she’d like to do next—Drink a sérieuse blonde at Brasserie Lipp? Take a look at the Luxembourg Gardens? Listen to Sidney Bechet at Vieux-Colombier?—she always told me benignly, “I couldn’t care less.”

  Cutting a Figure

  My mother in her mid-eighties wore the same thing every day, a long and voluminous device that she called a caftan. It reached from her shoulders to the floor, was easy to put on and take off, and required no underwear. When she walked hunchbacked to warm her oyster stew or to squat in the WC, her caftan was sufficient.

  From birth to death, we inhabit one sort of clothing after another. At first I dressed transgender. I keep a photograph in my bedroom in which I am one year old, sitting on a baby’s rocking chair with long blond ringlets and weari
ng a fancy dress, smiling as if the camera were a nipple. (It remained the best picture of me until the cover of Essays After Eighty.) In kindergarten five-year-old girls wore skirts, and when they did cartwheels you noticed the underpants. Little boys always wore knickers. How long ago did boys stop wearing knickers? Knickers were corduroy pants that went from the waist to just below the knee, where elastic clamped them on top of long socks. Football players today wear knickers, but with their helmets and shoulder pads they don’t look like 1936 fifth-graders. Some baseball players tuck in their uniform pants at the knee, above their stockings, and resemble the boys of Spring Glen Grammar School.

  Finally came the year of long pants, a step up the ladder of manhood, like playing with yourself or shaving. Was there a comparable moment for girls? From knee socks to garter belts? I wore long pants into my eighties. For my poet laureateship appearances in Washington, DC, I bought a tailor-made brown tweed suit. It fit my two hundred pounds. Then an incompetent medical facility prescribed me, off-label, an atypical antipsychotic called Zyprexa, “to encourage sleep.” It encouraged depression, it encouraged Parkinsonian symptoms, it encouraged no appetite. Without knowing I was doing it, I smacked my lips together every thirty-seven seconds. I lost sixty pounds, and my pants didn’t fit anymore. I tried wearing suspenders, and my trousers dangled eight inches beyond my belly. Finally rid of Zyprexa, I gained weight back and could wear the suit, but had nowhere to wear it. Later, for a ceremonial occasion, I wanted to wear my tailor-made tweed again, but moths had consumed the trousers. When President Obama bemedaled me, I wore khakis. Later, a series of belts never cinched my waist, and my pants fell down. For Christmas I asked my son for pants with suspender buttons on the inside, but my shoulders sagged toward my knees and my pants fell down.

  When I had trouble tying my tie and it took half an hour to button a shirt, I graduated to T-shirts all year, long sleeves in winter, in summer short. But for my legs? Linda thought maybe sweatpants might work, and bought me two mediums. They were too big and my pants fell down. Then Linda found small sweatpants, five dollars each at Walmart by way of Bangladesh. I am equipped for the remainder of my life, except for the penultimate johnny and the ultimate shroud. I dress almost as easily as my mother did in her caftans. The sweatpants hold up all day and don’t fall down. Gradually the elastic cuffs crawl from my ankles up to my knees, returning me to the knickers of Spring Glen Grammar School, or much better, to the Boston Red Sox.

  “The Wild Heifers”

  My first prose book started, more or less, in 1944 at Exeter, when I wrote a free theme for my English teacher about chasing wild heifers with my grandfather. With Exeter’s remarkable grade deflation, I was pleased to get an unprecedented A. My summers on the New Hampshire farm were the passion of my life from fifth grade on. When I went off to college, those days remained at memory’s center. After graduation, alone in London in late summer of 1951, on my way to Oxford, I wandered in the city of pubs and sausages remembering my grandfather and my summers of haying.

  Oxford took over. In my second year I married and my New Hampshire grandfather died. The following year I took a fellowship in California and my son Andrew was born. Then for three years I reveled in a grant that allowed me to do anything at all, so of course I worked on poems every day. After six years on the academic dole, at last I had to get a job. What ignominy. I became an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan. My chairman understood that I wanted to teach afternoons only, saving the mornings for writing, but in the second term of my second year he gave me a 10 a.m. class. When I reminded him of my preference, he smiled sweetly and remarked, “We can’t always have what we want, can we?” I accepted his appropriate rebuke.

  Shortly thereafter another university, many miles east, invited me to read my poems aloud, then asked me to join their staff. They offered me tenure, a full professorship at double my Michigan salary, with classes only Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I could take leave without pay whenever I wanted. I flew back to Michigan with regret. I understood that I had to move out of Ann Arbor where I was just making friends. Also the Detroit Tigers were only an hour away, and the Detroit Lions, and the Detroit Pistons. I told my chairman about the offer I could not refuse. He told me that of course I could have whatever I wanted.

  My wife and I would remain at the University of Michigan, but first I would take leave without pay and spend some time in England so that I could write all day. I had saved up two thousand dollars to take a year off for writing. In England, I reviewed books, performed small literary tasks, and talked on BBC radio—enough so that we sailed back home with two thousand dollars. It was my first year of freelancing. Every morning I got up early and worked on poems, and after Andrew left for the village school I attended to my correspondence and did chores. After lunch and a nap, I retreated to the music room on the second floor of the house and tried to write prose. I began with a story about pursuing wild heifers with my grandfather.

  Earlier my prose had been only book reviews and academic papers or lectures, so at first my paragraphs about chasing virgin cattle sounded like an English professor promoting the New Criticism. I required a different voice to describe pursuing untethered young cows. When I showed my wife a draft of the first chapter, she prodded my language from lit crit toward hay chaff and Holsteins. After eighteen drafts, at last I finished “The Wild Heifers” and continued in afternoons to accumulate other stories for the book I published two years later as String Too Short to Be Saved. I wondered if a magazine might publish a chapter. I sent “The Wild Heifers” to The New Yorker—they had printed my poems—and received a polite refusal. I decided this book wouldn’t do for magazines. After almost a year we sailed home.

  Back in Ann Arbor, I sent the manuscript of String Too Short to Be Saved to the Viking Press, which had published books of my poems. They liked it and scheduled it for publication. Pat MacManus (I don’t forget her name) handled promotion for Viking, and sent bound galleys to magazines for review, or to anyone who might take notice. Most of her prepub copies had left the office when she thought of sending one to E. B. White. The famous essayist had lived in Manhattan and written for The New Yorker (with a sideline of children’s books) but had returned with his editor wife Katharine to Maine, where he was devoted to the countryside, and continued to write measured and majestic prose. My telephone rang and it was Roger Angell, E. B. White’s stepson by Katharine’s first marriage, who had become a New Yorker editor. He spoke with excitement about the book his stepfather had mailed him. Everyone loved my stories, he told me, and The New Yorker wanted to publish “The Wild Heifers” and another chapter, about picking blueberries on Ragged Mountain. He added that if they had known of these stories earlier, they would have published more of them. In delight and revenge, I told him that The New Yorker had rejected “The Wild Heifers.” He looked at the editorial notes and found that two editors had liked it before they rejected it. He apologized with chagrin and asked me never, ever, to tell anyone this story.

  Sycophants and Sisters

  Back in the old days, you could donate your letters or papers to a rare book library, usually at some university, and deduct the value of your gift from your income tax. As a senior in college, I edited an anthology of celebrated juvenilia from Harvard’s undergraduate literary magazine, gathering letters of permission from the estates of two dead presidents named Roosevelt and from living writers like Norman Mailer and Wallace Stevens. In his letter Stevens wrote, “Some of one’s early things give one the creeps.” In the sixties, I donated these letters to the Houghton Library at Harvard and took my deduction. A few years later, when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, he donated his papers to the National Archives and paid no income tax for the rest of his life. An indignant Congress passed a law that ended tax deductions for one’s papers. Soon I read about universities buying archives from novelists and poets. The Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas, seemed especially avid.

  Some institu
tions, naturally enough, still labored to acquire manuscripts and papers as gifts from writers, exploitation by the engines of sycophancy. Maybe attention is what a writer wants? Whenever the telephone rings, it’s the king of Sweden: “The Nobel Prize Committee has asked me to inform you . . .” Vain flattery is as close to the king of Sweden as most of us are likely to get. Vanity presses profit by printing the books of unpublishable writers. Vanity anthologies advertise POETS WANTED, accept everything submitted, and charge contributors a C-note for the repellent sequent assemblage.

  In my English Department mailbox some years ago I found a letter from a librarian:

  Dear Mr. Hall,

  I am sure that many institutions have been in contact with you asking that they might become the repository of your manuscripts and correspondence files. I write to say that Boston University would be honored to establish a David Hall Collection, and to plead our particular cause for these reasons.

  We are in the midst of planning the building of a magnificent new library on our Charles River Campus and we hope to make this library a center of study and research in contemporary literature. Up to the present time Boston University has been growing so rapidly as a “national” institution, that we have waited until we were ready with the proper facilities before establishing such a literary research center. With the advent of our new building we are now ready to embark upon this project.

  It is our hope to collect the papers of outstanding contemporary literary figures, house and curate these materials under the optimal archival conditions, and attract to us scholars in the field of contemporary literature who would utilize our institution as a research base.