Essays After Eighty

by Donald Hall

  Instead of money, poetry hopes to create beauty, emotion, intelligence, insight, and pleasure all at once, as well as immortality. It rarely does. Whatever their poems try to do, poets are outraged by rejections and editors. (It’s well known that the smaller the reward, the fiercer the competition.) Turned down six times by the New Yorker, a poet decides, “They don’t like me there.” Does the poet think that a magazine (which gets a thousand poems a week and publishes two) checks out an index of forbidden names? “No. We don’t like her.” I have a friend who sent a poem to the New Yorker that was rejected by e-mail in two and a half hours. He was apoplectic. Did he expect that an editor, or sub-sub-editor, would spend two and a half hours to decide? Rejections often take two and a half minutes. When people send poems to a small magazine and wait a year for rejection, did the editor read over the poem seventeen thousand times? Or did he wait until chagrin overcame boredom? “Damn, I’ve got to take care of that pile.”

  My comfort with rejection began by accident, by being fourteen and submitting my poems to the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Review of Literature. The poems returned with a printed slip. I was briefly disappointed, then found two more long white envelopes—one the stamped, self-addressed one, the other to enclose the same poems—and my juvenile endeavors went out again in the next mail. In minutes I zapped from despair to hope. When I came home from high school, my mother would often greet me cheerfully at the door. “Another rejection today, Donnie.”

  It’s helpful for a poet to be an editor when young, though not so young as fourteen. At Exeter and college I started choosing manuscripts for school magazines, and at Oxford I edited four publications at once. Then I became the first poetry editor of the Paris Review. (I knew George Plimpton at college.) I published Geoffrey Hill’s poems for the first time, and Robert Bly’s, and Thom Gunn’s, and in the meantime rejected ten thousand poems and made mistakes. I rejected Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra.” (He told George I wouldn’t know a poem if it buggered me in broad daylight.) Some poems I printed were more humiliating than my dumbest rejections. Still, I learned from editing. There were other ways of writing than the way I had found for myself. I read all the literary magazines, scouting the field. I found friends for life, to whom I later showed my own drafts, with whom I argued usefully. The fellowship of the Paris Review—George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron—extended my literary community. At George’s parties, at East 72nd Street, I met Philip Roth, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, and Kingsley Amis.

  A fellow named Boris visited with a black bag, apparently carrying products not found in drugstores.

  As you might guess, not every editorial encounter was benign. Poets’ letters arrived for the Paris Review saying, “I am the greatest poet alive and if you don’t print all my poems you are an asshole.” “I am a tenured full professor of English who played offensive tackle in the NFL.” “I am a serial murderer.” Editors learn not to offer helpful suggestions when they reject a poem. If I hinted that “bouncing baby” might be a cliché, by return mail I heard that I was an idiot, that the metaphor was innovative genius. Bags of poems arrived each month by mail from the office in Paris. Fifty percent I rejected immediately. The first five lines told me that the poem would never do. The better candidates I kept around, reading over and over, sending some back at each rereading. Finally I took maybe one, maybe two. I know I made mistakes. I was arrogant. At the age of twenty-five I felt cheekier about my taste than I have felt in the sixty years after. Probably I was narrower, more dogmatic, and better.

  Many years ago I discovered that a good poet, a friend of melancholy temperament, was so devastated by rejection that she could not work on new poems. I argued, but she could not shake her despair. I had an idea. If she would let me, I would send her poems out. But if I used my own name, I would seem to be trying to throw my weight around—as if I thought I had weight. I invented Joey Amaryllis, a literary agent who represented only poets, possibly the one poetry agent in the universe. First I rented a post office box at Potter Place, New Hampshire, near where I live but with a different zip code. From the American Stationery Company I ordered letterhead and envelopes with the neonate Joey’s address. Writing to editors, Joey was careful to enclose only brisk notes. If Joey told an editor “It’s raining today,” the editor would suspect that Joey was looking for an angle.

  With her permission, I submitted my friend’s poems to good magazines, without telling her which ones. When the poems came back, I sent them out again, and when they came back again, I tried again. By agreement I kept quiet when I sent things out, and I never reported a rejection. When an editor took a poem, I spread the joy. One time Joey submitted his client’s poems to the editor of an academic quarterly, a man with whom I had a friendly correspondence. Shortly afterward, I happened to write the editor a letter, and without thinking praised my friend. He wrote back that he had recently received poems by this woman, but that they were submitted by somebody else, “and I never read that sort of thing.” (The poems had not yet returned to Potter Place.) When I wrote the editor back to confess, and to apologize for my duplicity, he said that my friend should send the poems herself. Decades later, she continues to publish in the same quarterly. Joey also submitted her poems to Poetry, which bought several. The editor had printed my own poems, but he made it clear that I annoyed him. Even his notes of acceptance were frosty. On the other hand, he took a shine to Joey Amaryllis, and wrote him warm letters about Joey’s generosity.

  Why did I undertake this caper? I helped a depressed friend and I promoted good poems. How nice of me. But why did I like it so much? I adored being a secret agent. After a couple of years, my friend took over her own marketing and thrived. Joey came in from the cold.

  At sixteen, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs.

  Writers, of course, require praise. After Jane and I moved from Michigan to New Hampshire, I received a thick brown envelope from a cocktail party friend in Ann Arbor, a man who wanted to write novels but who settled for a job in PR. The envelope contained a long, long essay clipped from a literary quarterly in which an unfamiliar professor attacked me for everything I had ever written—my poems, my children’s books, a memoir, short stories, even a textbook that the professor’s own university had adopted. The professor said that my textbook was good. In fact it was too good, and he disparaged my book at length for the manner of its excellence. In a note that accompanied the clipping, my old acquaintance said, “I thought you’d be amused.”

  Everyone has heard about the Emperor executing the Messenger. The Emperor was right. From the personals in the New York Review of Books I hired a hit man.

  My generation assumed that the value of an artist proved itself not in contemporary fame but in durability. Lately we have not been hearing much about Robert Lowell, who when he died was at the top of the mountain. We will hear of Lowell again. Will we hear again about his mentor Allen Tate? It can be observed that most poets slide into invisibility, maybe for decades, maybe forever. Andrew Marvell’s resurrection took three hundred years. Biographies or collections of letters draw some attention to the poetry, or away from the writing to the writer. So does the manner of death. More people know the lives of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath than know the poetry. Tennyson’s glory lasted until the twentieth century decided that no Victorian could be a poet. Yeats died in 1939, and his reputation thrived into the 1960s, an unusually long term. Then his grandiloquence disqualified him. (Jane said that she would not buy a used car from this man.) Yeats will revive as Tennyson did, but not my old teacher Archibald MacLeish, who in his lifetime won three Pulitzer Prizes. So did Robert Frost, but the bul
k of Pulitzer Prize winners make a paupers’ graveyard. Theodore Roethke, enormously praised in the fifties, became largely invisible by the eighties. I think I see his vast shape looming again at the edge of the shadows. Early death was clearly a successful move by John Keats.

  Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game. One poet revives; another gets deader. Like the Laureate returning from Stockholm, we understand—and we sigh.

  Garlic with Everything

  WHEN JANE AND I moved to New Hampshire, we often drove to Tilton, where my aunt and uncle lived. On the way, we passed a small white building labeled ITALIAN RESTAURANT, and underneath, repeated on each side of the front door, in letters only slightly smaller: NO GARLIC NO GARLIC.

  The declaration did not surprise me. In the old days, New Hampshire’s food was almost as ruinous as England’s. When I lived summers at my grandparents’ farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours. Sometimes we ate a slice of fried Spam, sometimes sardines. (I puked in the outhouse.) Weekly a butcher parked his truck by the front door and displayed his goods to my grandmother. His roast beef tasted like mummified mule. As for her veggies, they were almost edible. In spring she served fresh parsnips, planted the summer before and harvested when snow melted. She cooked peas and beans fresh all summer. Ball jars preserved vegetables for winter. These pickings from the garden, fresh or canned, came to the table overcooked into mush.

  Some things were better. Apples from the root cellar lasted through frost almost until the next crop. Berries became jellies and jams, as cider became vinegar. (A cruet on the dining room table protected us from scurvy.) Three meals a day, at least one pie with an undercooked crust sat on the table. Breakfast was two eggs fried sunny-side up—perfectly fine—and a slice of elderly mince. Henry, the grocer and postmaster down to West Andover, half a mile away, lacked refrigeration, which is why Spam and sardines lined pantry shelves. We had an icebox, which my grandfather daily refreshed with a glassy block from the icehouse. Sometimes I walked down to Henry’s to trade a dozen fresh eggs for a roll of toilet paper and a package of salt, or for a can of Spam or sardines. In colder winters of the past, I was told that my ancestors hung a slaughtered hog in the toolshed, removing and melting the lard, cutting pork from the carcass all winter.

  We didn’t go to restaurants, if there were any, because a horse and buggy limited our range. Sometimes a neighborly Model A drove us to Franklin for shopping. At a counter in Newberry’s we could buy a plate of beans and franks for twenty-five cents. For lunch at home I made a raw onion sandwich between slices of Wonder Bread. My grandmother found this new product the miracle of the century. For decades she had made bread—Monday washing, Tuesday ironing, Wednesday baking—and a week later the last loaf resisted the knife and the dentures. Wonder Bread, ten cents a loaf, came to Henry’s already sliced. Even softer than new-baked bread, it was just as soft a week later, or two weeks. More innovations were yet to appear—Velveeta, Hostess Twinkies, Miracle Whip—but nothing altered the universe so much as Wonder Bread.

  When I went home to Connecticut for the school year, our menu was more sophisticated. Breakfast was Corn Flakes, varied by Wheaties, Cheerios, and Rice Krispies. Milk arrived every morning from the horse cart of my family’s Brock-Hall Dairy, delivered to back doors by milkmen who later became route salesmen. I walked home from Spring Glen Grammar School at noon for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. At night there was something like a lamb chop with canned vegetables and a potato. (When Clarence Birdseye froze peas, his invention required freezers in supermarkets as enormous as tennis courts.) A favorite dish in Hamden was American chop suey, which my mother continued to fabricate when she was ninety. Melt a quarter pound of butter in a frying pan. Chop an onion and sizzle it. Add half a pound of crumbled hamburger. Add a whole can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and serve. Butter, onions, and hamburger stirred together with depraved pseudo-Italian spaghetti had nothing to do with chop suey. (Chop suey had nothing to do with China.) It was American haute cuisine.

  On September twentieth every year I got to choose my menu—meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream. Some kind of dessert followed every meal, often tapioca pudding (“fish eyes and glue”) or Jell-O chilled into molds with tasty canned fruit. It sounds like a lot of work for my mother, but cooking was almost all she did. In suburban Connecticut, middle-class women were required to stay at home and do nothing but cook and iron. Housecleaning was for immigrants. My mother played bridge, belonged to women’s clubs, and shopped. She washed and ironed fourteen white shirts a week; dress clothes were required for father and son.

  Sunday nights we ate sandwiches at a small rolling table next to the radio while we listened to Jack Benny at six p.m. The program was half an hour long, followed by Phil Harris and then Fred Allen. (Sometimes an hour later I heard Bing Crosby on a forbidden portable radio under my bedroom blanket.) The sandwiches were processed cheese spread on Wonder Bread with the crusts cut off and each sandwich split in half. The cheese came in little Kraft glasses—pineapple and cream cheese, pimento and orange cheese spread. When they were empty, the little glasses, smaller at the bottom and wider at the top, could hold our canned orange juice. In New Hampshire my grandmother used cheese glasses from Hamden for her bedtime tipple of warm Moxie.

  In Connecticut on special occasions we went out to eat at a restaurant on Long Island Sound called the Sea Shell. My dinner began with shrimp cocktail—three shrimp in ketchup and horseradish—then tenderloin steak with potato and a vegetable. For dessert I picked from displays in a cart—chocolate cake, sugared strawberries—and the three courses cost ninety-nine cents. (Grampa recites prices in order to shock the young. “Gas cost a dollar for five gallons, with a set of dishes if you filled the tank.”) Mostly we ate at home—the Betty Crocker diet, which, like New Hampshire’s 1975 Italian restaurant, did not include garlic.

  Going to Hamden High School I discovered garlic. Spring Glen Grammar School was suburban middle class and pale. At Hamden High I first heard “Paisan!” shouted from one friend to another. In the decades between the wars, immigrants by the thousands arrived from Calabria and Sicily. Our basketball team was composed of set-shooters who averaged five foot two. As I joined the society of Hamden High, I rejected Spring Glen’s culture because it sniffed at people with accents. I hung out with friends who were second-generation Italians, and they altered my diet. In pizza joints I began my romance with garlic. It’s hard to believe, but at that time pizza was exotic. In most American cities there were no places that served pizza, much less chains of Pizza Huts, Domino’s, Papa Gino’s, Pizza Chefs, and Little Caesars. Except in southern-Italian neighborhoods, pizza was unknown coast to coast. Even in northern Italy people didn’t know pizza. In 1951 I asked for pizza in a Florentine restaurant. The waiter was puzzled. He disappeared into the kitchen, and when he came back he told me I could have it tomorrow. Did the chef find it in a cookbook? The next day he brought me the worst pizza I have ever eaten—pasty, doughy, tasteless except for garlic. I am told that Florence has pizza parlors now.

  In Hamden we ate Italian whenever the boys and I spent a night on the town. (Some pizza places didn’t ask a fifteen-year-old to show a license when he ordered a Pabst.) I remember Nate Mann’s. The eponymous owner once fought two or three rounds with Joe Louis. Joe had a habit of crushing rope-a-dopes. When my classmates and I spoke of pizza, we didn’t call it pizza. The south of Italy had its own pronunciation. We ate “ah-beats,” “apizza” with b for p and the last vowel omitted. I never called it pizza until I went to college.

  Already I had gulped down the undistinguished food of boarding
school. Each boy sat at a table of seven, and each waited on the others one day a week. At college we ate cafeteria style, so at least we had a choice, and at midnight after the beer halls closed, fuzzled, we ate at Hayes-Bickford’s. Once a professor took me to the Harvard Faculty Club for lunch, where the special was horse steak, at two dollars as fulfilling as American chop suey. I’ve written elsewhere about my next experience in food, which was life-altering. A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century London’s best restaurants were as good as Paris’s, but not in the 1950s. An English fast-food specialty was baked beans spread on a slice of toast. “Beans on toast! Beans on toast!” we chanted as we drank warm bitter at the King’s Arms. From Oxford I flew to Paris for the six-week break between terms. Food! It took an hour to fly between capitals on a propeller plane, and the airlines served lunch. I first flew to Paris on BOAC. When I flew back, I ate a garlicky snack on Air France and never considered another airline.

  After Oxford, and marriage to Kirby, we spent a year at Stanford, on a fellowship of two thousand dollars a year. I remember reading ads for supermarket specials and driving all over Palo Alto to buy one item at each store, half a dollar’s worth of gas to save eight cents on a package of bologna. When I heard that I had won a three-year fellowship elsewhere—to write all day—my wife and I celebrated by eating supper in Menlo Park, at a place known for its seventy-five-cent garlicky cheeseburgers.

  To begin teaching at the University of Michigan I did summer school, two sections of American lit at eleven and two. I had put on weight, maybe because I ate Arby’s roast beef sandwiches between meals. I dieted by taking to my office a jar for my lunch—sauerkraut, a dill pickle, and a boiled hot dog. I lost twenty pounds and gained it right back, returning to three peanut butter sandwiches midday followed by Arby’s. Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad. Otherwise we specialized in casseroles. One time Robert and Carol Bly were visiting, and Bob got mad at me for being a professor and living in a house. He and Carol lived in western Minnesota without electricity or water, with oil lamps and an outhouse. He pouted, and poured his beer on my supper. Calmly I picked up my plate, scraped it clean in the kitchen, and served myself more Spanish rice from the pot on the stove. When I sat back down I threw my beer in his face.