A Carnival of Losses Read online

  A David Hall Collection would certainly be a distinguished nucleus around which this University could build a great literary center. Your papers would be preserved for future generations. I do hope that you will look sympathetically upon our request. May I say personally how much I have enjoyed your published work.

  Sincerely yours,

  Howard B. Gotlieb

  Chief of Reference and

  Special Collections

  Boston University Libraries

  In the extremity of his personal enjoyment, the Chief of Reference and Special Collections mistook the name of his nucleus. Of course I thanked him on David Hall’s behalf. Mr. Gotlieb answered, apologizing, saying that he “dictated my letters and when my secretary puts them on my desk for signature, I sign without reading.”

  His letter didn’t sound dictated. Could he have said “Donald” out loud three times, in address and in tribute, and his secretary have mistaken “Donald” for “David” three times? It’s true that his praise was dazzlingly general. The letter could have been addressed to a novelist or a cookbook writer or a gossip columnist or a poet. Maybe Gotlieb told his secretary to send the letter to W. S. Merwin, Ellery Queen, Danielle Steel, David Hall, and Irma S. Rombauer. If Gotlieb solicited the papers of 400 writers, and thirty years later his praise had entrapped one Nobel Prize winner, his institution could cheerfully discard 399.

  Then an English novelist friend of mine forwarded me the same letter, word for word, except that it proposed “the John Bowen Collection” as its nucleus for a great literary center. My Oxford friend had asked BU if they might give him a pound or two, and Mr. Gotlieb hadn’t answered. I had already mailed several friends a copy of the David Hall letter. A poet from California replied, sending me a column from the Saint Magazine in which Leslie Charteris, author of the Saint thrillers, bragged to his fans that he had received undoubtedly the most flattering letter of his whole life. He printed a letter proposing “the Leslie Charteris Collection.”

  With enthusiasm I wrote a brief essay for the American Poetry Review called “The David Hall Collection.” As a result, I received a letter from John Silber, the president of Mr. Gotlieb’s Boston University. The Boston Globe often referred to “Silber Shockers,” the president’s misogynistic or homophobic letters attacking folks who slighted the institution he promoted. With his notorious good taste, Silber asked me what I would prefer—that my sister sell it or give it away.

  In 1975, Jane Kenyon and I moved to my family farm to freelance and I resigned my Michigan professorship. To make a living, I wrote magazine editors to solicit assignments, and a year or so later the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Sports Illustrated were soliciting me back. But first, to pay the mortgage, I sold half a ton of manuscripts, letters, and publications to the University of New Hampshire. UNH continued to buy my annual crop into my eighties. I’m told they have accumulated and preserved a monstrous archive of letters, among which Silber’s and Gotlieb’s impeccably reside.

  Geography

  In Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was looking for employment. When it seemed possible that the University of Michigan might offer a job, I looked on a map to see which side of the Mississippi it was on. It was the usual boring easterner stuff. American geography is bizarre. Once in California I chatted with an eighty-year-old Los Angeles cousin who spoke of Texas as the Middle East. When I moved to Michigan, Ann Arbor astonished me. People could talk; they could even read and write. The city had an art museum and an auditorium for musicians on tour. Executives from the automobile business in Detroit took residence in Ann Arbor for music and theater and notorious cocktail parties. One such was our neighbor Robert McNamara, who ran Ford Motor Company before he ran the Vietnam War.

  Naturally there were differences between one place and another. When I was in Boston, I told an anecdote about something that happened when I was “at Harvard.” In Ann Arbor—as in Des Moines, as in Santa Monica, as in Atlanta—it happened when I was “in college.”

  The Beard Generation

  Just lately, I have watched beards return to the United States.

  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, the Adams boys, and James Madison were shaved mostly by slaves with straight razors. Then Abraham Lincoln grew a beard. Poets with three names wore beards, except for Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ezra Loomis Pound wore a beard. T. S. Eliot wore initials. I grew my first beard halfway through the twentieth century, when they were shocking. The English Department where I taught had a hundred teachers with hairless faces, only three of whom were female.

  Sixty years later, baseball players grow beards. Imagine Lou Gehrig with a beard! Jackie Robinson! Babe Ruth! Ted Williams! The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series wearing beards. There are beards under football helmets and above Lebron James’s basketball uniform. Some hockey players wear beards, although they are Canadian. In Waco, Texas, police arrested 170 bikers for shooting at gangs of other bikers. Nine dead. Bail was set at a million dollars each biker. When newspapers published 170 mug shots, you could count 168 beards.

  Soon everybody will shave.

  The Vaper

  In Essays After Eighty I wrote a piece called “No Smoking,” about my forty-odd years of Chesterfields, Kents, and Pall Malls. The first paragraph listed fifty-two places where in 1955 everybody used to smoke, including at the movies and in a thoracic surgeon’s office. It ended with a list of places where now nobody smoked, including a thoracic surgeon’s office and at the movies. No one knows what happened next in my life until he or she reads these words. I never thought I would stop smoking, because I had tried nicotine patches, lozenges, self-abuse, mood-altering pills, starving to death, eating too much, and chewing nicotine gum. While Essays After Eighty was slogging into print I read in the paper about electronic cigarettes. I’ve always avoided everything electronic, but I bought an electronic cigarette in order to brag that I tried it out. I boosted up the battery, assembled it, and took a drag. I took another drag, then another. I liked it. I preferred vaping to smoking because it hurt my chest more than cigarettes did. When your lungs hurt, you know they’re there. In order to make sure I wouldn’t regret giving up tobacco, I kept a carton in the freezer. Each day I lit one Pall Mall before bed, to give cigarettes a chance. The next morning I vaped again. Each day I enjoyed more agony. One day I didn’t end with a Pall Mall before bed, but merely vaped. Then day after day I merely vaped. I gave Carole my last frozen carton. Just in case, I keep one pack frozen behind the Stouffer’s.

  Back in the day, when my “No Smoking” essay first appeared in Playboy, it added the joy of notoriety to the joy of misbehavior. When I printed “No Smoking” in my book, some reviewers found it amusing, some took pity on me, some found me disgusting. Now when somebody praises the frankness of my old confession, I accept their compliment hoping they never find out what I’ve done. It’s been four years of virtue and health. My life has changed. No longer do visiting friends turn blue. Vacuum cleaner salesmen don’t run away when I open the door. My grandchildren drop by and stay for a visit.

  Generations of Politics

  Politics began early in connecticut. As a child I heard much of “that man in the White House.” My father was as Republican as his father, H.F., who was burly and mustachioed and had already retired from running the Brock-Hall Dairy, which delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons to back porches in southern Connecticut. For years H.F. was a state representative, then a state senator. When his Republican associates wanted him to run for the US Congress, he turned them down because he had stopped school in the fifth grade. FDR went to Groton and Harvard. H.F. was an archetypical self-made man, uneducated and honorable and reactionary.

  In New Hampshire the politics was just as firm. My mother’s father, Wesley Wells, was a one-horse farmer in a moneyless world who had been a Democratic state legislator in a state without Democrats. Districts were so sparsely populated that voters chose a person, not a party. When I spent summers with Wesley and my grandmother Kat
e, I heard his stories and the funny poems he had memorized for his one-room school. Sometimes he made a noise like a Fourth of July orator about “Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved this country from revolution!” My grandfather’s father, the Civil War veteran John Wells, was a New Hampshire Copperhead and proponent of states’ rights. He hated Lincoln and left behind him an enclave of Democrats in Danbury and Wilmot, New Hampshire. My grandfather said his father was wrong about Lincoln and not much else.

  The Return of David

  When I worked on my book about Henry Moore, I drove all over England interviewing Moore’s old friends. The New Yorker would do it first as a Profile, giving notable attention to the sculptor as well as to the people I interviewed. No one knew me by name, but they were happy to talk to The New Yorker. In Scotland I chatted with Eduardo Paolozzi, the pop sculptor, and bought four of his Electric Etchings. In London I interviewed Moore’s former assistant Anthony Caro. The longest and most important trip was to Cornwall and the city of St. Ives, where Barbara Hepworth lived. I needed to interview her about the 1930s and ’40s, when she and Moore were rivals, living near each other in London’s Hampstead. According to their friends from that time, you needed to peek into one studio and then quickly check out the other, to see who was first at a sculptural innovation.

  When I talked with Barbara Hepworth, she was intelligent, competitive, cool, affectionate, and sharp-minded, full of old stories and details. We talked for perhaps an hour. I took many notes. As I stood to leave, she reached behind her and pulled out a large volume titled Barbara Hepworth, which she signed and gave to me. I thanked her mightily and left. Back at the hotel, I opened the book—large handsome photographs of large handsome sculptures—and glanced at the title page. She had inscribed the volume to David Hall. The ubiquitous David Hall. Of course I was happy to tuck the book away and drive home with a joke about Barbara Hepworth. First there was a knock on the door. A messenger brought me a Barbara Hepworth inscribed to “Donald Hall” and would not leave without retrieving the humiliation of “David . . .”

  Wuk, Woik, Work

  “Woik! woik! woik!” my Connecticut grandfather raged. In the nineteenth century everybody spoke with a Brooklyn accent, even if they lived in Brooklyn. (Walt Whitman wrote pomes.) My Connecticut grandfather praised “woik” and repeatedly recommended it. His self-made Hall Dairy delivered pasteurized milk to suburban back porches. During my father’s high school summer vacations, he heaved twelve-quart crates into horse-drawn carts at 5:30 a.m. I didn’t. I was paid five dollars at the end of each August for my haying with my New Hampshire grandfather. It wasn’t woik; it was wuk. The best job of my youth shouldn’t be called woik nor wuk nor even work. In the Christmas rush, somewhere in the 1940s, I helped to sell books in a small New Haven bookstore called Judd’s. Maybe for a dollar a day? I brought my salary home in discounted books.

  New Haven when I grew up was grandly mercantile, acres of railway yards crowded with freight cars, passenger trains transporting the world from Washington and Philadelphia and New York to Providence and Boston. Yale University didn’t count, or maybe it was optional. Railway hands inhabited three-decker houses, along with factory workers who manufactured rifles, iron parts for steam engines, and first-rate toothbrushes. Inconspicuous in lush neighborhoods were the residences of New Haven’s haut bourgeois, descendants of the grandfathers who built factories and railroads. Miss Judd who owned the bookstore was a formidable woman of sixty who inhabited one of those mansions, and by day gravely presided over her enterprise with the help of one employee, a small man named Mr. Kronish. They spoke once a day. Miss Judd, arriving, said, “It’s a fine day, Mr. Kronish,” and Mr. Kronish said, “Yes, Miss Judd.”

  After a year of college I needed to find a real job for the summer of 1948—which meant not my New Hampshire grandfather nor Judd’s nor the dairy. My uncle had gone to college with the chief Yale librarian, who hired me to fill in for a sub-librarian on summer vacation. Minimum wage was 45 cents an hour, but rose to 65 cents before my first paycheck. I took a few days to learn from the man I would replace. He was a White Russian named Gregory Staritsky, reticent and so quiet he was almost speechless, skinny as an umbrella and not much taller. Before the revolution he had been a judge in St. Petersburg, then found his way to Connecticut to work in the Yale library, cataloging Uncataloged Periodicals. If Yale received, say, bundled issues of a 1942 army camp newspaper and the library found no record of it, he would fill out a library card in his czarist cursive to catalog it. With Staritsky on holiday, I tried to do the same thing. In the seventh grade I had flunked handwriting, and my cards were illegible.

  Staritsky’s office was a desk that sat beside another desk where Wilma Resclaw governed Duplicates. Behind Wilma was a dark vault, shelves containing thousands of books, willed to Yale, of which Yale already had a copy. Wilma told me to take what I wanted—books even cheaper than Judd’s. My lunchtime exhausted itself in Wilma’s vault. I picked out two three-volume editions of Thomas Hardy novels. I took home a seventeenth-century collection (broken leather binding) of poems by Abraham Cowley. I had never read him, but I knew that he invented the pseudo-Pindaric ode. I took home a split-spined Thackeray, boring poems by Carl Sandburg, three versions of Song of Myself, and a ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica missing one volume. Sometime in July, Wilma told me nervously that I’d better stop.

  The Dictated Pig

  In October of 1974, Jane and I attended an eccentric dinner party in Ann Arbor that exploded me into a poem. Two of my students, Ric Burns and Stephen Blos, bought a suckling pig at the Eastern Market in Detroit to serve at a dinner for friends and teachers. They cooked it in the big oven at Stephen’s family house following directions from a cookbook, which told them to remove the pig’s eyes first so that they didn’t burst during cooking. Ric said that cutting the optic nerve was like severing a steel cord. Carrying the cooked pig across town to their rooms, Stephen and Ric put poles over their shoulders and dangled dinner between them. They marched down South University Avenue, across Washtenaw, and trekked through campus to their flat. When guests arrived, the corpse occupied one end of the long dining table, a raw apple in its mouth. I sat beside it, shrieking with delight, and transferred the apple to my own mouth. Jane had to look away. Stephen’s camera clicked beside me, preserving the dinner forever.

  At the table carnivorous guests devoured the pork in frissons of ecstasy. Two centuries earlier, Charles Lamb wrote “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” which asserted that “there is no flavor comparable.” The next morning I ran to my workroom and began to scribble pig lines of poetry. Out roared a tsunami of images and diphthongs and obscurities. My handwriting could not keep up. I picked up my DeJur Grundig Stenorette microphone (I dictated letters) and recorded pig poetry, line after line at unprecedented poetic speed. Later, of course, in illegible handwriting I revised “Eating the Pig” a hundred times until I finished it. In my lifetime of poems, it remains the only pig I ever dictated.

  Roads to Rome

  Early in the 1960s we lived for two years in the English village of Thaxted, two thousand people and six pubs. The first year we rented a big old house, built in 1493, which had been altered to suit the centuries, two-story Jacobean wall paintings in the hall, an elegant Georgian staircase, wooden or plaster details everywhere illustrating English architectural history. The village enjoyed gossip about its centuries. A building beside us, sharing a wall, was rumored to have been first a monastery, then a butcher’s, now a pub. Another tradition had it that houses on our side of the main street used to face the other way. A dirt lane ran along the bottom of our garden. A teacher at the elementary school consulted ordnance survey maps—created for the military in the seventeenth century, still employed during World War II—elaborately and accurately detailed with roads, streams, elevations, footpaths, and history. When the young man lined up two maps on the floor, a trace of buried Roman road turned up on a map that centered on Thaxted, and on the ordnance ma
p of an adjoining area he found another trace of Roman road. Roman roads are notoriously straight, and a yardstick, laid from one map to another, ran directly in back of our house. The teacher took his class to a patch of unused land near our dirt lane, and three feet down found a Roman road paved with local stone and cambered for drainage.

  Someone had told me about another nearby imperial remainder. An hour’s drive east were the ruins of a Roman fort called Othona, from which the last legions departed England in AD 400. I drove to see it. In a field on the straight Roman road to Othona, there were relics of more recent military history. Beside a long green strip of meadow was a crumbling concrete pillbox where Home Guards waited in 1940, World War I rifles ready for a World War II invasion. At the field’s edge lay concrete obstacles that had been set out on the meadow to welcome Nazi gliders. In coastal waters fronting the ruined fort, English soldiers digging pits against German landing craft encountered a Roman seawall.

  The ancient fort lifted towers, still to be seen as I visited, walls layered with the flat bricks of Rome. In a corner of Othona’s ruins were the remains of a Christian church, erected in AD 600 by a Celtic priest named Cedd, later a bishop, who sailed down the English coast to convert the natives to Christianity. (Christianity had departed with the centurions.) From local wood and Othona’s flat bricks, Cedd assembled St. Peter-on-the-Wall, a Roman church married to imperial Rome.

  The Stapled World

  There was a little street to the side of spring Glen Grammar School, and sometimes a battered car parked there, a battered man standing beside it holding a canvas sack of magazines. One day he approached me, and on an autumn afternoon in 1939, when I had turned eleven, I spent two hours after school walking through my neighborhood pushing doorbells. Suburban women didn’t have jobs in 1939, so it was mostly wives who opened the doors. For a nickel I offered the Saturday Evening Post. Many houses told me they subscribed already, and I sold only one copy. When I went home my father asked me not to peddle anything again. The family dairy delivered milk all over town. People might get mad, he told me, if they thought that Brock-Hall, which bothered them to pay their milk bills, bothered them again with young Hall flogging magazines.