Essays After Eighty Read online

  Whatever the season, I watch the barn. I see it through this snow in January, and in August I will gaze at trailing vines of roses on a trellis against the vertical boards. I watch at the height of summer and when darkness comes early in November. From my chair I look at the west side, a gorgeous amber laved by the setting sun, as rich to the eyes as the darkening sweet of bees’ honey. The unpainted boards are dark at the bottom, and rise toward the top in a brownish yellow that holds light the longest. At barn’s end is the horse’s window, where Riley stuck out his head to count the pickups and Fords on Route 4. I study the angles of roof, a geometry of tilting, symmetrical and importantly asymmetrical, endlessly losing and recapturing itself. Over eighty years, it has changed from a working barn to a barn for looking at. Down the road, I see the ghosts of elm trees, which lined the road when Route 4 led to the Grafton Turnpike. A hundred and fifty years transformed them from green shoots to blighted bark. Out the window, I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.

  Essays After Eighty

  STARTING IN THE seventh grade I wrote lines of poetry, poetry, poetry. After two books of poems, I wrote String Too Short to Be Saved, about childhood summers on my grandparents’ New Hampshire farm. I wrote in paragraphs, not in lines, in order to tell family stories.

  Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels. As I grew older—collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five—poetry abandoned me. How could I complain after seventy years of diphthongs? The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual. The shadow mind pours out metaphors—at first poets may not understand what they say—that lead to emotional revelation. For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones. When testosterone diminishes . . .

  My last book of poems came out. Writing paragraphs, I looked out the window and wrote about what I saw. Snow was falling, later daffodils were bursting. I luxuriated in the paragraph, the sentence, varieties of fast and slow, rise and fall—improvising toward a final fullness.

  The greatest pleasure in writing is rewriting. My early drafts are always wretched. At first a general verb like “move” is qualified by the adverb “quickly.” After sixty tries I come up with a particular, possibly witty verb and drop the adverb. Originally I wrote “poetry suddenly left me,” which after twelve drafts became “poetry abandoned me”—with another sentence to avoid self-pity. When my doctor told me I had diabetes, I was incredulous. I said, “You mean I am pre-diabetic.” Writing in this book, I changed a verb to mock my silly presumption. “‘You mean I am pre-diabetic,’ I explained.”

  Revision takes time, a pleasing long process. Some of these essays took more than eighty drafts, some as few as thirty. Writing prose, I used to be a bit quicker. Maybe I discovered more things to be persnickety about. More likely age has slowed down my access to the right word. Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.

  Once I worked with William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker from 1952 to 1987, who is well remembered for his fastidious scrutiny of sentences, his polite and fierce insistence on repair. First from the magazine I would receive galleys of text with suggestions or requests for changes, maybe a hundred each galley. When the pages of the corrected version arrived, there were thirty more queries on each. A week before publication, my telephone rang at six p.m. “Do you have time, Mr. Hall, to go over your essay? It might take a few hours.” “Go ahead, Mr. Shawn.” “In the first sentence we have found a serial comma we think we might with profit remove.”

  As I work over clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little connection to import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey. Sentences can be long, three or more complete clauses dancing together, or two clauses with one leaning on the other, or an added phrase of only a few syllables. Sentences and paragraphs are as various as human beings. I like the effect—see John McPhee—of a paragraph three pages long, glued together by transitions that never sound like transitions.

  After a three-page paragraph, maybe a one-line blurt.

  There are problems in writing one can learn to avoid. Almost always, in my poems or essays, the end goes on too long. “In case you don’t get it, this is what I just said.” Cut it out. Let the words flash a conclusion, then get out of the way. Sometimes the writer intrudes—me, myself, and I—between the reader and the page. Don’t begin paragraphs with “I.” For that matter, try not to begin sentences with the personal pronoun. Avoid “me” and “my” when you can. Writing memoir, don’t say, “I remember that in my childhood nothing happened to me.” Say, “In childhood nothing happened.”

  Nevertheless, for seventy-odd years I have been writing about myself, which has led to a familiar scene: I meet someone, we chat, something stirs my memory, I begin to tell an anecdote—and the head in front of me nods up and down and smiles. She knows this story because I have put it in print, possibly three times.

  Avoid the personal pronoun when you can—but not the personal. My first book of poems said “I,” but the word was distant, a stiff and poetic “I.” In my best poems and prose I’ve become steadily more naked, with a nakedness that disguises itself by wearing clothes. A scrupulous passion of style—word choice, syntax, punctuation, order, rhythm, specificity—sets forth not only the writer’s rendering of barns and hollyhocks, but the writer’s feelings and counterfeelings.

  Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails. When I looked out the window taking joy in sparrows, snow, Mount Kearsarge, lilacs, and wild turkeys, my essay was incomplete. It required contrast, required something nasty or ridiculous. Happily I found it. When “Out the Window” appeared in print a hundred letters arrived. Terry Gross interviewed me for Fresh Air. Almost everyone paid as much attention to a goon’s baby talk as to the landscape. I thank a museum guard at the National Gallery.

  A Yeti in the District

  VISITS TO WASHINGTON have punctuated my life. I watched a victory parade in 1945. My last trip was the most memorable, early in March 2011, when I received the National Medal of Arts. Linda and I went down two days early to look at paintings and sculpture—mostly the National Gallery, the Hirshhorn, and the Phillips. I can’t stand long, so Linda has pushed me in a wheelchair through the thousand museums. On the day of the medal, she wheeled me from the Willard InterContinental Hotel to the White House. Waiting at the entrance to go through security, I looked up to see Philip Roth, whom I recognized from long ago. I loved his novels. He saw me in the hotel’s wheelchair—my enormous beard and erupting hair, my body wracked with antiquity—and said, “I haven’t seen you for fifty years!” How did he remember me? We had met in George Plimpton’s living room in the 1950s. I praised what he wrote about George in Exit Ghost. He seemed pleased, and glanced down at me in the chair. “How are you doing?” I told him fine, “I’m still writing.”

  He said, “What else is there?”

  In 1945, when I was sixteen, I took the train to the old Union Station, District of Columbia, where my Exeter friend Ted Lewis picked me up. The railroad station was a lofty cement cathedral, like city depots everywhere before airplanes took over. Ted drove us to the family flat in Alexandria, where I met his parents and his younger brother Jay. Ted Lewis Sr. wrote a Washington column for the New York Daily News, an old liberal serving up conservative opinions for his bosses. He was cynical, sharp, and funny. For a week my friend and I talked and drove around. He brought me to a Saturday-night YMCA dance, where I flirted with a pretty girl not quite sixteen. She told me she was a Methodist. Cocky and a year older, I condescended to tell her about Dr. Method and Mr. Ist, of whom she had not heard. Ted showed me the D
istrict, taking me to the Lincoln and the Jefferson memorials, and to Washington’s penis on the Mall. We never looked into the National Gallery or the Library of Congress or the White House. One thing we did no one would ever do again. Ted and Jay and I stood at the edge of Pennsylvania Avenue for Eisenhower’s homecoming parade. Not long after V-E Day (not long before V-J Day) the general rode past us standing upright in the back of a convertible with his arms arced over his head in the victory sign. We cheered him, celebrating the end of a long and murderous war. None of us voted for Ike when he ran for President. None of us forgot the parade.

  My next trip to the District of Columbia was twenty-four years later, November 15, 1969, in the company of my teenage son Andrew. From Ann Arbor, where I taught, we rode all night on a bus to march against the Vietnam War and President Nixon—before Watergate, before the resignation. I don’t remember much of our demonstration except for the hordes alighting from buses, mostly from college campuses, to parade with honorable, noisy enthusiasm. In those days we wore long hair whether we were fifteen or forty-one. I remember passing the Justice Department, delighting in the notion that John and Martha Mitchell were quaking above us. On the telephone I had told Ted Lewis what Andrew and I were doing; he and his father asked us to the National Press Club for lunch. Privileged, at midday we edged from the multitude and entered the dining room where our friends were waiting. Just inside the door we saw two men at a table, and I was surprised to recognize one of them. It was Charles Waldo Bailey II, whom I had known at Exeter, a bright and supercilious boy who had become the Washington correspondent for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Chuck Bailey wore a suit, as his tablemate did, as did the rest of the room. Andrew and I dangled pigtails, wearing T-shirts that attested to our politics—like our beads, like our rude buttons. When Bailey looked up from his table in response to my greeting, he was as cold as his Manhattan on the rocks. His companion glared at a glass of ginger ale. I was annoyed at Bailey, and when we joined the Lewises I spoke of his rudeness. Ted’s father squinted across the room. “He’s having lunch,” he told us, “with Ron Ziegler.” We knew the name of Nixon’s press secretary.

  After Ziegler left the table, doubtless to conceal plans for bombing Cambodia, Charles Waldo Bailey II walked to our table and was cordial.

  I did not return until Jane and I flew to Jimmy Carter’s poetry do, in January of 1980. The President himself had not yet published his book of poems, but it was known that he liked the stuff. A year before Reagan took over, the Carters decided to honor American poets. Jane and I circled the White House in a taxi looking for our entrance, and passed a bunch of tourists waiting to enter. “Look at the poets,” I said, laughing, “trying to get in.” When the taxi followed our directions, we joined the poets trying to get in.

  The poetic crowd was huge. There must have been sixty poets, and each brought a guest. The line budged slowly through security toward its destination. I seemed to recognize the face in front of me, surely from a book jacket. Then I realized he was the best-selling poet of the era, Rod McKuen, who wrote Listen to the Warm. In every generation there is one poet whom high school boys read to high school girls in order to get into their pants. In my day it was Walter Benton, whose This Is My Beloved was endorsed by the anthologist Louis Untermeyer in publishers’ ads (“I certainly do not find these poems pornographic”) that swept a teenage mob into bookstores. Rod McKuen’s poems didn’t approach pornography—though they did approach Hallmark. The White House had asked the National Endowment for the Arts to list poets for invitation, and the original list did not include McKuen. Pressure crashed on the NEA—from furious agents and publicists, and from Congress, which controls the budget. Rod McKuen stood in line.

  A dozen poets read their poems, in groups of three. Jane and I were not among the readers, so we listened to Phil Levine and his gang. Afterward we gathered to mingle, chatting and drinking white wine. I had not seen John Ashbery or Adrienne Rich for years; they had been my classmates at Harvard. We talked to my old friend Jim Wright, who walked with a cane. (Soon I saw him at Mount Sinai, then at a hospice in the Bronx, where he died.) There were Maxine Kumin, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Creeley, and De Snodgrass. We shook the President’s hand. He greeted us all, looking in our eyes, asking where we came from. Of course he expected everybody to be a professor, but by that time I had resigned from Michigan and moved to the old family house. When I told him “New Hampshire,” he said, “Dartmouth?” with a little nod of his head. I was flustered and named my hometown, “Wilmot.” He said, “Oh,” almost as if he remembered Wilmot State. There is not even a store in Wilmot.

  The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson was President. It gives grants to artists and to arts institutions: painters and museums, writers and publishers. Late in the 1980s, I returned to Washington for NEA panels, once to support poets with fellowships, another time to fund literary organizations. Then in 1991 I became an NEA councilor. (I took the job in order to defend obscene art from congressional attack.) I spent boring sessions in the NEA quarters at the Old Post Office, and attended the 1991 White House ceremony for the National Medal of Arts. I sat in an auditorium to observe Bush the First bestow the medals. (I had seen him before, in 1948, when I was a Harvard freshman and the World War II veteran played first base for Yale.) As Bush stood on a raised platform, I watched a Marine help the country singer Roy Acuff climb two steps for the bestowal. I do not remember some of the honorees, but others included the painter Richard Diebenkorn, the dancer Pearl Primus, and the violinist Isaac Stern. The President said a word or two—this oilman from Texas with a desiccated Ivy League accent—and put a bemedaled ribbon around each neck. In the receiving line, I shook Bush’s hand. (Jane wouldn’t touch my hand for a week.) We repaired to another room for lunch. The President made mild introductory remarks, and lunch was exemplary. During coffee, Bush rose rapping on his water glass with a spoon. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know about you artists, but I have work to do.” We murmured the required laugh. “You’re all heroes of the arts, but there are other heroes too. Fifty years ago Joe DiMaggio hit in fifty-six straight games, and Ted Williams batted .406.” He swept his arm toward the end of the room, and we turned to see Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams standing in the doorway smiling. The artist-heroes leapt in a standing ovation. Isaac Stern, short and plump and old, thundered his palms with gusto—while the tall men in the doorway disappeared as swiftly as they had arrived.

  In time the word spread. This afternoon the President’s work would fly him with Williams and DiMaggio to the All-Star Game in Toronto.

  In 1995 Jane died of leukemia. I grieved, I mourned, I wrote about her. I read her poems and mine at colleges and conferences. Much later I was Poet Laureate of the United States for a year, which allowed me more of Washington’s museums. The Library of Congress was welcoming and helpful, but I was not a productive Laureate, and resigned after one year. I returned to the District with Linda for an interview with Diane Rehm. I returned for my daughter Philippa’s fiftieth birthday party.

  Then, in February 2011, came a telephone call from the current director of the NEA. President Obama would award me a National Medal of Arts on March second. I would go back to the District of Columbia to be adorned, as twenty years earlier I had watched Bush the First adorn others. Recipients in 2011 included several musical sorts—Van Cliburn, James Taylor, Sonny Rollins—as well as artists and directors and biographers and institutions. Meryl Streep could not attend because she was being Margaret Thatcher in London. Ella Baff received an arts medal on behalf of Jacob’s Pillow and its dancers. The National Endowment for the Humanities honored its recipients on the same occasion, and somehow included three novelists. Philip Roth had already received the arts medal, during the Clinton administration, and I was delighted to find two other literary friends—Joyce Carol Oates and Wendell Berry. I asked a humanities administrator why novelists belonged to humanities and not to art, and she told me
that no one had any idea.

  The night before the awards, the two endowments sponsored a huge, fatuous, black-tie dinner, I suppose an annual perk for ill-paid staffers. The high point of the evening was when the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair gave an elegant keynote address. All of us were splendidly outfitted. It was shocking to see Wendell in an immaculate rented tuxedo instead of his usual overalls. Linda had brought a long and fancy dress with a sparkly top, which cost her $37.45 at a consignment shop. My formalwear was a fifty-year-old acrylic tux, a plain white shirt, and a clip-on tie.

  Next afternoon, we arrived at the White House an hour before the ceremony. Men and women in uniform gave us a brief tour of decorative rooms, then showed us the empty East Room, where we would receive our medals. Each of us sat in an assigned chair, and we rehearsed protocol—how we would climb to the platform, how we would turn toward the President, how we would return to our seats. A small Marine practiced saying our names aloud. Van Cliburn corrected a vowel. Mark di Suvero gave detailed instruction. My name was no problem. Most of us wore dark suits. Sonny Rollins wore a flowing red silk shirt and Mark di Suvero a bright red jacket. Ella Baff’s shoes were equally red. I had planned to use my one remaining suit, blue silk bought in Bombay in 1993, but the pants no longer fit. My Poet Laureate outfit and my gray flannels had been perforated by moths. I wore khakis, and found a black jacket that would cover my white shirt from the night before. I added a cherished red silk necktie bought in Shanghai.

  We waited next door while the guests arrived and settled in. Then we marched in order down the center aisle to take our seats up front. The band stopped, and we were applauded. Michelle Obama sat in the front row wearing a shiny green dress. The President in a grave suit entered past a table heaped with medals. He declared that this occasion was more pleasing than most of his work. He praised the centrality of art and literature, and talked of Robert Frost’s visit to Russia, and of Portnoy’s Complaint. Mostly, all I could hear was my heartbeat. When he stopped, the Marine summoned us each by name, and identified me as a former Lorit. A military man took my arm to help me climb two stairs, as I had seen another do for Roy Acuff. I told the President how much I admired him. He hugged my shoulder and bent speaking several sentences into my left ear, which is totally deaf. I heard nothing except my heart’s pounding. When my friends watched on the Internet, seeing the President address me, they asked what he had said. I told them that he said either “Your work is immeasurably great” or “All your stuff is disgusting crap,” but I couldn’t make out which.