Essays After Eighty

by Donald Hall

  The dean sitting beside me on the platform whispered in my ear, “She doesn’t mean it the way it sounds!”

  Once I flew half a day to be picked up in Oklahoma for a reading the next morning in a corner of Arkansas, to read at chapel—a compulsory gathering of all students—at a small Christian college. Sometimes at such places a self-satisfied piety hovers over faculty and students like smog in Los Angeles. Sometimes these places are lively and responsive. It’s hard to plan what to read, but I would never choose a poem to épater my hosts. This time, three people picked me up—a woman who chaired English, shy, who spoke little; a man who ran Humanities, thrilled by poetry and ample in literary knowledge; and the older woman who had brought me there, I think a dean of Honors, who was ebullient and talkative, funny and smart and warm. Because we had a long way to drive, we stopped outside the airport for supper before continuing. I was returning from the men’s room when I heard the dean address her companions: “Well, Ah’m going to tell him.”

  As I sat, she turned to me and spoke sweetly—smiling broadly, saying what she needed to say, unashamed of her language: “Donald, if you say ‘fuck’ in chapel tomorrow, Ah’ll get fahrd.”

  Some readings prove memorable for a single eccentricity. On an occasion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an orchestra was finishing rehearsal in the auditorium as the poetry reading was due to begin. Introducer and poet carried music stands into the wings. In London a reading was to begin at six p.m. in the ancient Church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Evensong prevailed. Another time, in the state of Chiapas in Mexico, eight writers sat onstage waiting hours for the governor to arrive. A large audience had departed by the time he walked in, surrounded by bodyguards with machine guns. In fatigue we each read to the governor for five minutes.

  “Gracias,” we said. “Gracias.”

  As I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did. Performance held up, but not body; I had to read sitting down. When an introduction slogged to its end, I lurched from backstage, hobbled, and carefully aimed my ass into a chair. For a while I began each reading with a short poem I was trying out, which spoke of being eleven and watching my grandfather milk his Holsteins. In the poem I asked, in effect, how my grandfather would respond if he saw me now. When I finished saying the poem, there was always a grave pause, long enough to drive a hayrack through, followed by a standing ovation. Earlier, I had never received a standing O after a first poem; now it happened again and again, from Pennsylvania to Minnesota to California, and I thought I had written something uncannily moving. When I mailed copies of the poem to friends for praise, they politely told me it was terrible. I was puzzled and distressed, until I figured it out. The audience had just seen me stagger, waver with a cane, and labor to sit down, wheezing. They imagined my grandfather horrified, watching a cadaver gifted with speech. They stood and applauded because they knew they would never see me again.

  Three Beards

  IN MY LIFE I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower’s day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, and during the Civil War beards were as common as sepsis. Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair, the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. By the time I was sentient, in the 1930s, only my eccentric cousin Freeman was bearded, and even he shaved once in summer. Every September he endured a fortnight of scratchiness. Many men, after trying a beard for five or six days, want to claw off their skin. They pick up their Gillettes.

  Despite the itch, I persisted until I looked something like a Mathew Brady photograph, or at least not like a professor of English literature at the University of Michigan. The elderly chairman of the department was intelligent and crafty. When he spoke in well-constructed paragraphs, with inviolate syntax, he sounded like a member of Parliament—except for his midwestern accent. He always addressed me as “Hall,” and used last names for all his staff. The summer of the beard I dropped in at the department to pick up my mail. I wore plastic flip-flops, sagging striped shorts, a Detroit Tigers T-shirt, and a grubby stubble like today’s male models in Vanity Fair. My chairman greeted me, noting my rank: “Good morning, Professor Hall.”

  Dinner parties and cocktail parties dominated every Ann Arbor weekend. Women wore girdles; the jacket pockets of men’s gray suits showed the fangs of handkerchiefs. Among the smooth-faced crowds of Chesterfield smokers, I enjoyed cigars, which added to the singularity of my beard and rendered living rooms uninhabitable. When I lectured to students I walked up and down with my cigar, dropping ashes in a tin wastebasket. The girls in the front row smoked cigarettes pulled from soft blue leather pouches stamped with golden fleurs-de-lis. As the sixties began, if I was sluggish beginning my lecture—maybe I had stayed up all night with a visiting poet—I paused by the front row and asked if anyone had some of those diet things. Immediately, female hands held forth little ceramic boxes full of spansules or round pink pills. After I ingested Dexedrine, my lecture speeded up and rose in pitch until only dogs could hear it.

  When I was bearded and my mother visited me, she stared at the floor, addressing me without making eye contact. Why did she hate beards so intensely? She adored her hairy grandfathers and her cousin Freeman. Her father Wesley, of the next generation, shaved once or twice a week. On Saturday night before Sunday’s church, Wesley perched on a set tub. Looking into the mirror of a twenty-five-hour clock, he scraped his chin with a straight razor.

  In 1967 my marriage, which had faltered for years, splintered and fell apart. As Vietnam conquered American campuses, I hung out with students who weaned me from cigars to cigar joints. “Make love not war” brought chicks and dudes together, raising everyone’s political consciousness. Middle-class boys from Bloomfield Hills proved they belonged to the Movement by begging on the streets for spare change.

  I signed the last divorce papers while anesthetized for a biopsy of my left testicle. The tumor was benign, but divorces aren’t. I shaved because the world had altered. Although my mother fretted about the divorce, she looked at my face again. My sudden singleness and my naked skin confused my friends. I was still invited to dinner parties, and therefore gave dinner parties back. I invited eight people for dinner. When I noticed that I had no placemats, I substituted used but laundered diapers, which I had bought for drying dishes. For dinner I served two entrées, Turkey Salad Amaryllis and Miracle Beans. I bought three turkey rolls, cooked them and chopped them up with onions and celery, then added basil and two jars of Hellmann’s Real. It was delicious, and so were Miracle Beans. Warm ten cans of B&Ms, add garlic, add basil again, add dry mustard, stir, and serve. My friends enjoyed my dinner parties. I served eight bottles of chilled Chassagne-Montrachet Cailleret, Louis Latour.

  Five years later I married Jane, then a poetry student, who by the time of her death in 1995 had published four books and earned a Guggenheim. It was exhilarating to live with her as her work became better and better. The more successful her poetry became, the more she permitted herself to be pretty. Late photographs of Jane reveal two sides, both beautiful. In one she is utterly spiritual, almost ready to turn bodiless; in another she is horny. Her poetry combined the two Janes, which is exactly what poems must do. When we married I was clean-shaven. She looked at old photographs and decided that I should grow a beard again. She observed my itchy agony. She wrote a poem called “The First Eight Days of the Beard.”

  A page of exclamation points.

  A class of cadets at attention.

  A school of eels.

  Standing commuters.

  A bed of nails for the swami.

  Flagpoles of unknown countries.

  Ce
ntipedes resting on their laurels.

  The toenails of the face.

  After a few weeks my facial hair looked like a beard, not like carelessness, and after two months it flourished. I wished it would hang straight down and cover my belly, but it always grew tightly curled, as pubic as Santa Claus.

  For three years we stayed in Ann Arbor. We loved the house we lived in, old-fashioned with many bedrooms, but it rose in a crowded part of town, and we did not like living among people. Once a year we visited the farmhouse in New Hampshire, where my grandmother Kate survived in her nineties, and where I had spent childhood summers. We could see from the porch a cottage down the road, built for a farmhand in the 1890s, and nothing else that resembled a house. Jane fell in love with this 1803 solitary clapboard structure with its 1865 barn and collapsing sugarhouse. It backed up to Ragged Mountain, which had provided pasturage for my grandfather’s cattle. Mount Kearsarge was five miles south. Fields of grass filled the narrow valleys. She loved Thornley’s Store down the street—wine and stovepipe, roast beef and souvenir ashtrays—where in the morning the neighborhood gathered to joke and gossip. We drove gawking on dirt roads around Eagle Pond, through a pig farm, and up New Canada Road past Freeman’s collapsed shack. During one visit on a Sunday we attended the South Danbury Christian Church, where my grandmother played the organ for eighty years. My cousins called me “Donnie” and the preacher quoted “Rilke the German poet.”

  After my grandmother entered the Peabody Home, we agreed with my mother and her sisters that we would buy the farmhouse when my grandmother died. In 1975 I quit my tenure and we moved to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing—but it worked and I loved doing it. Our move made for the best years of our existence. My poems improved, and I wrote magazine pieces about baseball and New Hampshire. Year after year Jane committed to the life of poetry and we thrived in double solitude. (The New Hampshire Constitution prohibits dinner parties.) One day followed another, a bliss of sameness—and I plotted a distraction.

  After sporting my beard for thirteen years, I would shave it off in secret on Christmas Day. I bought a can of Barbasol shaving cream and a packet of disposable razors, which I hid in the bathroom with a sharp pair of scissors. That Christmas we had a houseful. My mother Lucy came, Jane’s mother Polly, and my college-age children Andrew and Philippa. Christmas morning we had breakfast followed by the opening of presents. Then came the sleepy interlude while the turkey cooked. I waited until it seemed that everyone had used the bathroom. I sneaked in, closed the door, and unpacked my tools. I picked up the shears and looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. I hesitated. Did I really want to do this? My qualms disappeared when I thought of the family dozing in the living room. With scissors I cut great clumps of hair from my chin and cheeks, depositing handfuls in the wastebasket. Careful not to dig a hole in my face, I removed the bulk of my hair. The tufts left behind were like a hayfield ill cut, ragged clumps sprouting here and there. I lathered and applied the razor. Every inch I scraped, the razor filled up and clogged. I cleaned it under the faucet. My flesh appeared as it had before “The First Eight Days of the Beard”—with a new sag of chin.

  Into the living room I walked. Philippa screamed. Jane and her mother ran from the kitchen horrified, ready to dial 911. Hubbub rattled the plaster on the walls. My mother stared with her mouth open, then grinned. Only Andrew smiled calmly, enjoying my trick on the family world. Through turkey and stuffing, I was aware of eyes that kept looking up to confirm the new face. After three pies on a warm Christmas afternoon, Andrew sat me down on the porch and trimmed away the remaining fuzz. In the days following, responses from the local world were mostly bewilderment, followed by laughter. The farrier who had repaired the range, however, refused to believe it was me. I was pulling out my license, in the store down the street, before Bob Thornley convinced him. My uncle Dick, on the other hand, didn’t notice the alteration. He thought I looked different but wasn’t sure why.

  My face remained naked as long as Jane was alive. We were photographed together, and Bill Moyers did a show called A Life Together. Occasionally today the film is shown in my presence, and I need to proclaim that I am not an imposter.

  Jane died at forty-seven after fifteen months of leukemia. I mourned her deeply, I wrote nothing but elegy, I wailed her loss, but—as I excused myself in a poem—“Lust is grief / that has turned over in bed / to look the other way.” Among spousal survivors, many cannot bear the thought of another lover. Some cannot do without. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom thinks of a graveyard as a place to pick up a grieving widow. Thus I found myself in the pleasant company of a young woman who worked for a magazine—a slim, pretty blonde who was funny, sharp, and promiscuous. (We never spoke of love.) I will call her Pearl. After dinner, we sat in my living room drinking Madeira and talking. I pulled out a cigarette and asked her if she would mind . . . “I was going crazy,” she said, and pulled out her own. She told me about her father’s suicide. I spoke of Jane’s death. When she left the room to pee, I waited by the bathroom door for her to emerge. I led her unprotesting to the bedroom, and a few moments later, gaily engaged, she said, “I want to put my legs around your head.” (It was perfect iambic pentameter.) When we woke in the morning we became friends. We drank coffee and smoked. When I spoke again of Jane, Pearl said that perhaps I felt a bit happier this morning.

  After seven weeks Pearl ended things. Before I received my dismissal, we lay in the backyard sunning, and she suggested I grow a beard. She had seen book jackets. “You’ll look Mephistophelian,” she said. That’s all I needed. It suited me again to change the way I looked because the world had utterly changed. I mourned Jane all day every day, and acknowledged her death by the third beard and the girlfriends. Some entanglements ended because I was needy, others because of adultery or my gradual physical disability. A California friend and I commuted to visit each other for more than a year. She diminished my beard by trimming it into a goatee, getting me to smooth my cheeks from sideburns to mustache and chin. After dozens of assignations amassing airline mileage, we decided we had had enough. I grew the big beard back.

  A dozen years ago I found Linda and love again. We live an hour apart but spend two or three nights a week together. She is an Old Lady of the Mountain in her bone structure, with pretty dimples. She is tender and as sloppy as I am. She abjures earrings, makeup, and dresses; she wears blue jeans and yard-sale shirts. Combs and brushes are for sissies. We watch movies, we read Edith Wharton to each other, and we travel. In 2002 we impulsively flew to London, and later we took many trips for poetry readings without ever combing our hair.

  When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone onto my chest, my beard roared like a lion and lengthened four inches. The hair on my head grew longer and more jumbled, and with Linda’s encouragement I never restrained its fury. As Linda wheelchaired me through airports, and my eighties prolonged, more than ever I enjoyed being grubby and noticeable. Declining more swiftly toward the grave, I make certain that everyone knows—my children know, Linda knows, my undertaker knows—that no posthumous razor may scrape my blue face.

  No Smoking

  WHEN I LOOK at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the NO SMOKING sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago. None of my grandparents smoked. I don’t know when my grandfather nailed up the sign, but I know why. Sometimes a tramp would dodge inside the barn after dark to sleep on a bed of hay, and once my grandfather found cigarette ash when he climbed to the tie-up in the morning. It doesn’t take much to burn down a barn. Whenever I focus on the sign, white letters against red, I pull a cigarette from the pack beside me, flick my Bic, and take a drag.

  When my parents and I visited the farm, way back, my father was required to do his smoking outside. My mother, who learned to smoke when she went to college, pretended to her parents that she never touched the stuff. (My grandmother lived to b
e ninety-seven, and her sense of smell diminished. My elderly mother sneaked upstairs and puffed on a cigarette.) My father was a gentle and supportive man, but he was tense, shaky—and could not do without his Chesterfields. He walked up and down the driveway, dodging horse manure, to work on his four-pack-a-day habit. He started smoking when he was fourteen and wasn’t diagnosed with lung cancer until 1955, when he was fifty-one. Every time I write, say, or think “lung cancer,” I pick up a Pall Mall to calm myself.

  In 1955 I lived with my wife and baby son about two hours away from my parents. In May I drove down for my father’s exploratory operation, and pushed his gurney into the elevator. My mother and I drove home to wait for the telephone call. If the phone did not ring for half a day, it could mean that the cancerous lung had been removed. The telephone rang too soon. When we arrived at the surgeon’s office, Dr. Appel told us that he could not extract the tumor without killing my father. He said the short-term prospects were fine, but the long-term . . . (My father’s radiation would give him two good months. He played golf, and didn’t die until December.) As my mother realized what Dr. Appel was telling us, her fingers twitched at her purse. For her convenience, the thoracic surgeon pushed his ashtray to the edge of the desk.