by Donald Hall
Who I Am
My uncle Dick Smart, married to my mother’s sister Nan, was the most agreeable man I have ever known. It was in his nature, not by design, that he always smiled no matter what happened. He liked to tell stories. He was a registered Republican his whole life, because he wanted his vote to count in the New Hampshire primary. When Democrats crept into state politics, he switched parties. Never before, he exulted, had he been offered a glass of wine at a political rally.
When Jane and I settled in New Hampshire, we double-dated with Nan and Dick—one of us in her twenties, one of us in his forties, two of us in their seventies. We chatted, we laughed, we gossiped. When Jane or I published a book, Dick became our local salesman and publicist. He had no problem asking people for money, for his poets or his charities. He was cheerful, he was powerful, and he never let people feel bad if they said no. As Dick and Nan moved into their eighties, Nan had little strokes and fell down stairs. Dick fixed it so that they could live on one floor. He carried Nan from bed to bathroom, dressed her and installed her on the sofa, undressed her and lugged her to bed. Jane and I visited and talked with Dick while Nan lay on the sofa, unable to speak but apparently delighted to listen. Jane did Nan’s nails. Nan spread her fingernails up to the light in a silent rapture of gratitude.
After Jane died so young, Dick drove Nan to the viewing, but Nan couldn’t leave the car. Dick stood in line and afterward took me outside to Nan so that we could weep together. Two months later Dick woke on a cool June morning. “It’s cold,” he said as he reached over to touch Nan. Nan was colder.
We widowers attended to each other. Dick introduced me to Stouffer’s widower food, and together we went to a restaurant for Thanksgiving turkey. Slowly Dick began to fail. At first his brain was fine, but he couldn’t live alone. He moved into the Peabody Home in Franklin, a three-story old folks’ place, which happily never resembled a retirement community. The Peabody people let Dick keep his cat Pete beside him, cat box and cat dishes, so that Dick could talk to Pete all day. Everybody from Franklin came to his eighty-ninth birthday party before his mind started to leave him. A year later I saw him for the last time. He broke into a huge grin and squeezed my shoulder. “You know what,” Dick said with good humor, “I don’t have the slightest idea who I am!”
II
The Selected Poets of Donald Hall
Theodore Roethke
All my life I’ve written about poetry. As I enter the last phase of it, I change my subject from poetry to poets.
At college, I came across Theodore Roethke’s work when I picked up a copy of The Lost Son at Mandrake Books. I was swept away by the greenhouse poems, small dense lyrics luxurious in sound, and by the title poem with its nursery-rhyme cadences. He never did better. (His last book, The Far Field, would become the best among his books, but it was not Roethke’s; it was Whitman’s.) When I was at Oxford in 1953, I published in London an article called “American Poets Since the War.” Nobody English had read a transatlantic poet younger than Karl Shapiro, so I concentrated on a newer bunch: Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke. After Oxford I spent a year in California, and was astonished when Roethke telephoned from Seattle. It was December and I was out Christmas shopping, so he talked for an hour with my wife. He praised a poem I’d published in a quarterly, and said that he wanted to fly me to the University of Washington to read my poems. It was absurd. I had not yet done a book, and had published only a few things in magazines. In my World Review essay, I praised Roethke’s poems, and Roethke wanted to praise my poems back. A month later he wrote that the university had filled its annual quota of poetry readings, and that he himself couldn’t afford me. “The Aga Khan phase is over for this year.” My wife had told me, when he first telephoned, that he called from a hospital. I suspected a blood chemistry of enthusiasm.
Three months later, I heard that Roethke would read his poems in San Francisco, and drove from Stanford to hear him. He strode vigorously onto the stage, tall with a huge torso and skinny legs. Mr. Potato Head. He was exuberant, loud, and funny. With an extravagant gesture, he told us, “I just married a Powers model,” and affected erotic fatigue. In a strong, high-pitched voice he read from The Lost Son and newer poems. After his performance someone announced that there would be a reception the next afternoon. I drove home, slept, and returned. I did not know that the room was dense with poets. When Gary Snyder and I later became friends—in 1954 I hadn’t heard his name—I learned that he had been in the audience, along with Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, and sundry poets called Beats when they appeared in Donald Allen’s anthology. Would my aesthetic have altered if I had met these poets then? No. It took me years to jettison my old tastes and habits.
I introduced myself to Roethke. He spoke of my essay, the poem he had seen, and his invitation to come to Seattle. When I had gobbled my share of him, I drove back home.
The last time I saw him, in April of 1963, I flew from Michigan to Seattle to read my poems. By that time I had published two books. Did he suggest that the university invite me? Probably. He had stayed in touch, sending me little notes with Botteghe Oscure offprints. He was under the impression that he was promoting himself. Because his self-serving was so obvious, it was neither effective nor offensive. (Robert Lowell was shrewder with his strategic postcards.) Trying to sound like a Mafia don, he asked his publisher to “put in the fix for the Noble.” The innovative spelling was Roethke’s. Robert Frost, of all people, complained to me that Roethke was too competitive. If Roethke, Frost, and Lowell—not to mention Pope, not to mention Yeats, not to mention Homer—were all operators, operating does not suggest inferior genius.
When I was introduced at the rostrum in Seattle, I noticed that Roethke wasn’t out front. I was pissed. Then he bulked into the auditorium with his handsome wife Beatrice, and my annoyance turned to terror. I was young; he wasn’t. Every time I finished a poem, Roethke made a noise. Sometimes his grunts sounded derisory, sometimes approving; they were always disconcerting. When I read a brief poem about a Henry Moore sculpture, I heard Roethke’s favorite movie-gangster accent curl from the corner of his mouth. “Read that one again. Read it slower this time.” I did, and at a thousand later poetry readings I spoke the poem, told the story, and then recited it again more slowly. It became “the Theodore Roethke Memorial Slower Rereading.”
After I finished, Roethke came up to the podium and showed me the graffito chalked on the blackboard behind me: “The teach blows horses.”
At the postreading party Roethke and I arrived early. He dragged me into a corner and pulled from his pocket yards of galley. “I’ve got a new book coming out,” he told me. “It’s going to drive Wilbur and Lowell into the shadows.” He handed me galleys of The Far Field, published a few months later, which was fine but didn’t drive anybody into the shadows. Roethke and I sat beside each other, drinking beer and mimicking W. C. Fields, to flirt with a young woman named Wendy. Across the room Beatrice looked sullen, and I thought she was crabby. I did not understand that only manics growl at poetry readings. Soon Beatrice would sit all night beside him, feeding him bottles of Heineken, listening to his ceaseless rant. That summer, Roethke swam innumerable lengths in a swimming pool, in his mania planning to compete in the 1964 Summer Olympics. He was fifty-five years old when he suffered a stroke in the pool, which killed him. In September of that year, at a London memorial for recently dead American poets, Jonathan Williams read E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams; I read Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke.
Robert Creeley
I met Robert Creeley at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge when I was an undergraduate. He had dropped out of Harvard the term before I matriculated. We chatted happily, and I liked him until I checked out his poems, which at the time sounded like E. E. Cummings. Later, when I was at Oxford, I wrote an essay for the World Review in which I derided poems by the chicken farmer from northern New Hampshire whom I met at the Grolier. Creeley wrote a fierce letter from Majorca t
o its editor. Twenty years later, I found his For Love and read it with astonishment and joy. A poetry exact in its images and line breaks, sublime and sensual in the sounds it made. We met, we talked, we made up. Bob Creeley read his poems in Ann Arbor.
When Jane and I moved to New Hampshire, we discovered that Creeley had graduated from Holderness, a prep school not far from our house. Holderness didn’t know. When I told them about their celebrated alumnus, they invited him to speak at graduation. Jane and I picked him up at the Concord Airport. On our sofa he wrote a poem, not half bad, as fast as his hand could move. We drove him in jeans and T-shirt to his old school, where the faculty disguised him under cap and gown. His graduation speech was witty, eccentric, smart, and delivered without notes. When I read my poems at his University of Buffalo years later, we went on the town together. He flew to New Hampshire for a surprise seventieth birthday party that my children contrived for me. He had just done a reading in Denver and flew past Buffalo to rent a car at the Manchester Airport in New Hampshire and drive to the party in Concord. It was a happy time. I loved him and his poems. I never saw him again. He died on the road in 2005.
Louis MacNeice
When I was at Oxford I met Louis MacNeice. For a while I ran Oxford’s Poetry Society, OUPS, and got to choose the poets who read to us. (We paid only railroad fare. Poets charged us for first-class tickets, traveled second class, and kept the change.) Dylan Thomas said his poems; so did Vernon Watkins, Kathleen Raine, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lynette Roberts, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice. When I was fifteen or sixteen I had found MacNeice’s “Sunlight on the Garden” and never stopped reading him. After his early death in 1963, he was neglected, like all poets after they die. Only the critic Edna Longley attended to him. When I was in Galway a few years ago I saw the MacNeice monument, his lines inscribed in stone, and lately I’ve noticed expanding response and enthusiasm for his work. “MacSpaunday,” the composite name Roy Campbell invented for England’s 1930s poets—C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden—was not only Auden. Often one poet of a generation is posthumously celebrated, others ignored. MacNeice climbs out of his grave.
He came to Oxford, he read his poems, we talked, and I saw him again. My Oxford college was Christ Church, where MacNeice was friend to a German don named Stahl. Whenever MacNeice visited the House to see his friend, he took time to walk over to my rooms. In my early twenties, it was extraordinary to open the door and find Louis MacNeice standing there. Talking with him was not easy, as he often sat in silence, warm and present yet far away. Maybe he was garrulous only in a pub? He was inward; he was friendly. I cannot remember a word we said.
W. C. W.
When we were both trying to hail a cab in Manhattan, after the 1956 Eisenhower People-to-People meeting, I met William Carlos Williams. I began reading his poems when I was sixteen and a teacher loaned me The Wedge. At college I praised him in a long Harvard Advocate review of the first Paterson. Eight or ten years later we both looked for a taxi and I told him how I felt about his work. He grunted in response and stared at the gutter. Although I had grown up admiring modern vers libre poets—Eliot, Pound, Moore, Stevens, H.D., certainly Williams—I had recently published a poetry book that bulged with tidy metrical ditties, as modernist as pink lace borders on white linen handkerchiefs. I embodied reactionary youth. Mud from a passing bus splashed on my trousers.
John Holmes
In 1955 Richard Eberhart taught one year at Wheaton College, in southeastern Massachusetts. At the end of spring term he sponsored a daylong poetry celebration inviting Boston poets. Every moment was crowded with readings and talks, students and teachers. I stood inside a classroom, looking out at the crowd, when suddenly I saw the poet John Holmes collapsing. His right leg jerked up uncontrollably and his torso writhed as he fell. An ambulance took him away. In two hours he was back, his old self, because an accommodating doctor had given him a drink. He told his story. He taught his classes a few hours a week. At home almost all the time, he remained in the cellar of his Medford house, working at poems, writing letters, and drinking sherry by the case. Today was the first time in years he had gone all morning without alcohol.
John stopped drinking and continued teaching at Tufts. I remember him well—soft-spoken, kind, prolific. He existed at the periphery of that era’s Poetry Boston—Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, Richard Eberhart, Ruth Stone, Philip Booth, Robert Frost in spring and fall. We had the Poets’ Theater; we had Harvard’s Morris Gray poetry readings. Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin were John Holmes’s night school students. Boston’s nascent PBS station recruited John, Philip Booth, and me for a television series, talking about poetry at a table in a studio. We were listless, we were boring, we were sincere. So were our poems.
Will any of the Boston poets survive? We will hear of Robert Lowell again. Richard Wilbur in 2011 published a superb lyric in The New Yorker. No more. He died at ninety-six, in 2017. My literary agent could find no publisher to take on a Wilbur biography. Wilbur never killed himself or shot his wife. As far as I can tell, practically no one besides me adores his ecstatic and delicate metrical inventions. In his work he ought to survive, but probably, like most of us, he won’t.
Sober John’s poems continued to plod into print, patiently wrought, decorous, and dim. A final book came out. The last time I saw him before he died, we sat together in a bookstore speaking of a Boston poet recently dead. We agreed that he wasn’t good enough. John went silent and then told me—shyly, with upwelling joy—that in his heart he knew that his poems would last forever.
Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender was the “Sp” in “MacSpaunday.” When in the early 1960s I lived with my family in an English village, I made a few pounds by writing book reviews for Spender’s Encounter. He edited the magazine together with a conservative American named Melvin Lasky. (When it was revealed that the magazine was a Cold War device funded by the CIA, Encounter vanished like Malaysia Flight 370.) On the side Spender accepted the editorship of a reference book, The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, to be brought out by the publisher of The Concise Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians. As Stephen told me later, he worried about his knowledge of poetic technique. What did he know about meter? He felt overwhelmed and asked me to be his coeditor and to split the fee. I agreed. I remember nothing of making the book.
Both of us were contributors. Entries about Stephen Spender and Donald Hall were both signed “D.H.” A few items were attributed to “S.S.” The book was enormous, as you would expect from anything called Concise. It required multiple contributors, and somehow we enlisted eminent figures—Geoffrey Hill, Hugh Kenner, Thom Gunn, Kathleen Raine, John Crowe Ransom, Victoria Sackville-West, Louis Simpson, Richard Wilbur, and another fifty eminent at the time. We paid little. Though brief, the entries are remarkably thorough, impressive with impressive initials. Who approached the thousand and one eminent contributors? Who chose the thousand and one subjects and categories? I remember nothing.
Something I do remember: when Stephen invited me to join him, he told me that the book would appear as “Edited by Stephen Spender and Donald Hall.” A few weeks later, he told me that the publisher had a problem. Because Donald Hall was American and the publisher English, my name on the cover would inflate the US import duty. Our collaboration must appear as edited by Stephen alone, the publisher said, and Stephen in his introduction would gratefully acknowledge my assistance.
I said no.
The publisher wrote me directly. Stephen’s encomium would bestow unprecedented praise. The publisher said it would be fulsome, apparently thinking that the word meant “very full” rather than “disgusting.”
I said no.
The publisher arranged to meet me in London. I asked my English literary agent if she knew what the import duty would be. When we three met, Stephen was mum while the publisher continued to enlarge upon his praise-to-be.
I said no.
The pu
blisher made a final point. “If you are listed as coauthor, the duty will double!”
“Yes,” I answered. “Four percent, not two percent.”
Stephen and I publicly coedited The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry.
Stephen talked well on any subject other than poetry. I liked to listen when he spoke about paintings and sculpture—about Matisse and the School of Paris, about Vermeer, about England’s Francis Bacon and Henry Moore. One afternoon we walked together to the Leicester Galleries, where Stephen would pick up a Picasso print, the artist’s proof of an etching for a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was Picasso in a moment of airy lines, fragile and monumental together. I admired it. Stephen said, “I believe they have another.” I gaze at my Picasso now, almost sixty years later, on a wall next to my kitchen window.
We saw each other again. Frequently Stephen lectured on American campuses, coast to coast, about “Poets of the Thirties.” When he flew to Ann Arbor to read his familiar talk, one of our new English professors picked him up at the airport, drove him to the Union, and carried his suitcase to his room. Stephen thoughtfully asked if perhaps the young man was tired. “Would you like to lie down?”
