A Carnival of Losses

by Donald Hall

  Geoffrey Hill

  In Thaxted, a huge late-medieval church—sometimes called the Cathedral of Essex—rose from a hill at the edge of the village. The vicar was Father Jack, a High Church communist, fond of bell-ringing, processions, the Soviet Union, and Greek in the prayer service. Geoffrey Hill, who had been my best friend at Oxford years before, came to visit us in 1960 at our fifteenth-century house. He and I had stayed in touch by letter, but for years we hadn’t seen each other, and now the old friendship flared up. Our house had a narrow balcony that looked over Market Street. On Midsummer Eve we perched there during an annual celebration. The Thaxted morris men entertained morris teams from all over England, dancing together where the street widened to become the market. Hundreds of men pranced wearing colorful, bell-covered, theoretically medieval clothing.

  Geoffrey knew about our morris team and had heard of Father Jack. Inside the church, ancient stone columns were topped with carved stone angelic faces, contrasting with distorted hellish human heads screaming at the end of wooden beams. Not that Geoffrey would enter the church at that time, or any church. If he did, he knew that a lightning bolt would destroy the building and him inside it. Like Cowper’s castaway, he knew that his damnation was predestined.

  When I spoke with Geoffrey about Father Jack, I mentioned that, along with his communist homilies, in his sermons he occasionally approached the Old Religion. As we watched the dancers, night darkened and the moon rose above us. Music from the market quieted as the morris men stopped dancing. From the church on the hill ran a cobbled path called Stony Lane—masons had lived there for two centuries of church-building—which ended across from our house. We heard faint music start from the church’s hill as the midsummer night’s sun dropped down. From shadowy Stony Lane down into the black of Market Street marched in single file six men, led by the vicar in green tights, playing an eerie violin. After him followed two green men with flutes, a green drummer, another green man walking with a horse’s head protruding from his stomach and a horse’s rump from his rear, then a last green man carrying a crossbow. Not only the vicar looked eerie. I reminded my gasping friend about ritual murder. “William Rufus told Walter Tyrell to shoot straight . . .”

  We were calm the next morning over oatmeal when I suggested to Geoffrey that we walk around the fields of the village. Above Stony Lane the land rose slowly toward a disused windmill, and we climbed a narrow path among beetroot. A black cat rushed across in front of us. Geoffrey made a noise. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s just the vicar.”

  James Dickey

  Samuel Johnson never got around to writing The Lies of the Poets. James Dickey was the best liar I ever knew. He was driving me around in Oregon and telling me about being a fighter pilot in World War II. “One day I saw two Japanese troop planes lazing along, no guns, no armor. I shot the first one down, let the other wait. They knew what would happen.” Eventually he dispatched the second plane. “Killed a lot of men that day.” Jim chuckled. Almost everything he said was a lie. At first I was dim enough to believe him. When he told me a story about playing college football before the war, he said that an opposing lineman addressed him with disrespect. “The next play,” Jim said, “I ruptured his spleen.”

  When he didn’t lie, he praised his wife Maxine. She’s fat, he said, but—he banged his fist on the mahogany of the bar—“she’s hard, like a table!” After Jim did a reading at Western Michigan University, the Kalamazoo poet John Woods drove him to Ann Arbor for another gig. The two men spent the night at my house, in a bedroom with two cots. As they undressed, Dickey asked Woods, “Are you homosexual?”

  John said, “No.”

  Jim answered, “Too bad.”

  Jim was one of those people who cannot forgive you if you do them a favor. I heard of his work from my friend Robert Bly, who praised Dickey’s poems and with his own press published a book collecting Jim’s reviews of contemporary poetry. When I first met Jim, I praised Bly’s poems. I struck oil—a gusher of disdain, nastiness, and contempt. Anyone who ever did Jim a favor, and promoted his work, was subject to reprisal.

  We knew each other because he submitted a poem to the Paris Review, where I was poetry editor. I accepted the poem with enthusiasm. Maybe “submitted” implies masochism, therefore subsequent sadism? Dickey and I wrote back and forth. He was working for an advertising agency in Atlanta, and mailed me a copy of a one-page celebration of Coca-Cola as his “latest work.” Somewhere I read his poem “The Heaven of Animals,” and wrote him in praise. From time to time he granted me generous words about my own stuff.

  Jim himself had not yet published a book of poems. I was on a committee that picked four poetry volumes a year for the Wesleyan University Press. We had done James Wright, Robert Bly, Louis Simpson, and Donald Justice. We had published my college classmate John Ashbery. At one editorial meeting, I recommended a manuscript from Dickey. All the editors liked it. Although I praised and admired and promoted it, I preferred a new book by James Wright. We chose five poets for four slots, and Dickey was fifth. I wrote him that I was sorry. He took it well, or so I imagined.

  Months later, James Wright withdrew his manuscript because he found it antiquated—metrical, crafty, reasonable—and he had begun to zap into wild, almost surreal free verse under the influence of Robert Bly. (His eventual new book was The Branch Will Not Break.) When Wright withdrew his collection from publication, Wesleyan cackled like a stricken hen, unable to produce an obligatory egg. To fulfill expectations, the press required a fourth book, and Dickey had been the last poet rejected. It was I who called Dickey to give him the good news. I telephoned him at his office, and he was careful not to sound too grateful.

  He never forgave me. Years later Dickey taught briefly at Reed College when its English Department flew me to the campus to talk about contemporary poets. He took me aside when I arrived and told me that these people—he didn’t know why—wanted me not to read my poems but to lecture.

  Often Jim Dickey, like John Berryman, was drunk when he read his poems. Sometimes he wasn’t. He brought a guitar with him when he traveled, to strum at the party afterward as he chatted with the girls. Often at the after-reading party a visiting poet is surrounded by three coeds, starfuckers who expect him to choose a winner, and once Jim left the usual gathering with the usual student. Later she reported that Jim, back in the hotel room, picked up his guitar and crooned a song complaining that he warn’t what he used to be.

  Dickey took time away from poetry to write Deliverance, his best-selling novel, and to play a part in the popular movie that followed. He took the brief role of a burly country sheriff. He glared at citified menfolk who had survived a lethal assault in the woods, grunting, “Don’t never come back here again.”

  Jim’s sheriff punched out his line as if he were rupturing a spleen.

  Allen Tate

  My recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy.

  Edwin and Willa Muir

  Edwin Muir grew old. His last book was called One Foot in Eden, which annoyed his wife Willa because Edwin shouldn’t even think about leaving her. They loved each other fiercely, opposite as they were. Willa told me with pride that in their lifetimes they had avoided regular employment. “We have lived by our wits.” Edwin and Willa translated Kafka together. (Willa had better German.) She was assertive, bold, worldly, tempestuous. Edwin’s poems looked into another universe, hovering with a luminous tender spirit above the earth. He was confrontational only to cant. I was young and full of myself when I told him that poetry was an embodiment of the duality of . . . He snapped, “I do not listen to ‘embodiments of dualities’!”

  Kenneth Rexroth

  New Directions published Kenneth Rexroth’s poems, and I read Rexroth with pleasure and excitement beginning in my twenties and thirties. Long poems and short, I admired him and learned from him, his diction and his three beats a line. His radio talks on California NPR made his opinions public. A dedicated anti-academic, he br
agged, “I write like I talk.” Whatever his taste or careful grammar, I kept on admiring his poems as he kept on being nasty about me and my eastern gang. I thought of a happy revenge. Frequently I wrote essays for the New York Times Book Review, so I asked its editor if he’d like an appreciation of Rexroth. Sincerely and passionately and with a devious motive, I wrote an essay to celebrate the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth. I imagined the consternation in California after my piece came out in the New York Times—the shock, the shame, possibly the reluctant pleasure. Mind you, he would not thank me. His publisher James Laughlin, mumbling out of the corner of his mouth, brought me a meager but appreciative word.

  Seamus Heaney

  Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate 1995, was my friend in Ann Arbor, Dublin, London, and New Hampshire. A farmer’s son from Northern Ireland, Seamus attended the University of Belfast with Michael Longley, the magnificent Northern Irish poet who won’t get a Nobel because Seamus did. In 1972 Heaney moved south to Dublin out of disgust for sectarian violence. Was Seamus really my friend? How many Americans thought of Seamus as a friend? People wrote cherishing essays after he died—who met him only for an hour after a poetry reading, overwhelmed by a man who was being himself. Seamus was friendly by nature, funny, kind, witty, grossly intelligent, and a great poet. That is, he had the luck to be Irish. I’ve been to Ireland six or seven times, always delighted by the nation’s good humor and gregariousness, not to mention its exuberant joy in poetry. The welcoming benignancy of Ireland’s people—there must be exceptions, like the Cyclops in Ulysses—exceeds even Italy’s or India’s. That Seamus died at only seventy-four was the horror of 2013.

  He had visited the University of Michigan to read his poems in 1970 and 1974, brought by Bert Hornback, an English professor devoted to Seamus and his work. (Bert knew Seamus well from visits to Ireland. Bert went to Stockholm with Seamus. A devastated Bert attended his funeral.) In Ann Arbor I was stunned by Seamus’s work and by Seamus. Much later, Bert had four of us read our poems together—Seamus, Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, and me. Saturday morning after Friday night’s reading, Bert entertained us at his house with a three-hour breakfast. After eating omelets we talked about poetry. Seamus defended Yeats against Galway’s misgivings. I said some Thomas Hardy poems I knew by heart. Seamus, Wendell, and Galway each added favorite Hardys.

  In 1979 Seamus, with his wife Marie and their children, visited Jane and me in New Hampshire. The two older boys were shy and quiet, but the little girl Catherine, only seven or eight, sat beside her mother on the sofa, their feet not touching the floor, the two of them singing Irish airs a cappella that filled the room with a delicate sweetness. That afternoon Seamus took a walk along the abandoned railway across Route 4. He came back holding in his hand a railway spike, which he took home to Dublin and kept in his study. When I was recovering from a cancer, Seamus sent me a broadside of his poem “The Spike.” It hangs by my bed, inscribed inside an orange wooden frame.

  The first day of my last Dublin visit, Seamus arranged for me to read my poems at the Winding Stair, a bookstore that took its name from a collection by Yeats. Afterward the audience and I crossed the Liffey on the Ha’penny Bridge to fill the large second floor of Madigan’s pub. The crowd included every young poet in Ireland. I sat against a wall while the poets of Eire took turns sitting beside me. Across the room Seamus and Marie stood quietly, no one drooling to stand alongside the famous poet and his wife. When the Heaneys left the pub, I went off with Theo Dorgan and Paula Meehan to talk poetry and drink until dawn. The next day Seamus and Marie had me to dinner and told about driving home the night before. When they reached their car—they had parked illegally—policemen had attached to their rear wheels something resembling a Denver boot. Marie approached the constables, who were disabling further cars, and revealed her husband’s identity. The impediment was removed. Seamus said, “It was the best thing that prize ever did for me.”

  The next morning I saw him for the last time. He walked me through the Glasnevin graveyard, past the remains of Michael Collins and other heroes of Ireland’s liberation, past Gerard Manley Hopkins’s bones in the collective Jesuit plot, past the tomb of Yeats’s Maud Gonne. At the pub beside the graveyard we drank our last Guinness together.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Another Nobel laureate was Joseph Brodsky. I met him at lunch in an undergraduate beer hall in Ann Arbor, just after he was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. The night before, I stood humiliated beside him on a platform. He said his poems in Russian with a furious intensity, a cavalry charge of poetry, to an audience of a thousand students who understood nothing except that they heard a great poet. My chore was to follow him on the platform, to say the inept translations of an Englishman, doodles of rhyme and meter that traduced Brodsky into Hallmark. Next day the professors who smuggled him out of Russia took me to lunch with Brodsky because I was the local poet. Someone must have told him that I wrote mostly vers libre, which he loathed, because he never addressed me. Undergraduates jerked their heads around as he bellowed the names of Soviet poets: “Voznesensky is shi-i-it! Yevtushenko is shi-i-it!” Someone at the table mentioned W. S. Merwin, who wrote free verse. He shouted, “Merwin is shi-i-i-it!”

  But if Akhmatova loved Brodsky, I must love him too.

  Prosaic Laureates

  Among my selected Nobel laureates, two wrote prose. In September of 1956, when I turned twenty-eight, I received a letter from William Faulkner. Over the next few months, several more letters arrived, each signed with the novelist’s name, each in a different handwriting. (One letter began with an unusual Faulkner sentence: “Thank you very much for your prompt reply.”) In the first envelope was a photostat of a message from President Eisenhower, who asked Faulkner to organize American writers into a committee—as part of his People-to-People program, which brought together Americans of various professions “to interact with foreign counterparts to promote understanding, peace and progress.” Of course it was the Cold War as ever. The accompanying first letter, written in Faulkner’s own voice and signed with what may have been his actual signature, proposed to “anesthetize, for one year, American vocal cords,” and to “abolish, for one year, American passports.” Later, “Faulkner” announced a meeting in New York to come up with suggestions for the president. We gathered at the apartment of Harvey Breit, an editor at the New York Times Book Review.

  His eminence William Faulkner sat in an elevated chair with a glass of brown liquid, from which he frequently sipped. I looked around the room and saw faces familiar from book jackets. There were John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow, a laureate and a laureate-to-be, and other faces that were never to become laureates’ faces. There was Edna Ferber. There was Robert Hillyer, recently the author of Saturday Review of Literature polemics against modern poetry. He sat between Louise Bogan and the enemy, William Carlos Williams. What was I doing there? Across the room I saw a figure who gave me the answer. It was Harold Brodkey, my classmate at college, who had begun to publish notable short stories in The New Yorker. A year earlier I had done my first book of poems. We were the Younger Writers.

  Not only Faulkner drank. Bourbon was general. Faulkner began the session with a proposal to bring people from Iron Curtain countries to the United States. Let them buy a used car on the installment plan; let them go home after a year. Saul Bellow objected: on their return, they would be sent to Siberia. (Bellow was pissed off and left early. Over four decades, every time I saw Bellow he was pissed off.) Other writers recommended the distribution of books abroad and cultural exchanges—both already commonplace—and demanded that Congress approve the immigration of refugees from the recent Hungarian uprising. Unleashed by alcohol, liberated from silence, I spoke up on several issues, especially when William Carlos Williams suggested freeing Ezra Pound.

  Early in the twentieth century Ezra Pound left the United States to live in London, beginning his work in poetry—because London was where the poets were. Briefly he was secretary to W. B. Yeats. From a small trian
gular London flat Pound wrote and published the poetry by which he educated himself, following different styles and eras, learning from Provençal poets and Chinese. He was vast in his generosity to all good new writers, to modernists like T. S. Eliot and H.D. and James Joyce—and even to Robert Frost, who was nobody’s modernist. Pound knew who was good and who wasn’t. He reviewed them, he praised them, he got them published. His own poems moved past “The Return,” with its dazzling sound, through the Mauberley poems, to undertake The Cantos. A decade or fifteen years later, Pound lurched past paranoia and mania into a political fanaticism that ended in adherence to Mussolini’s fascism. During World War II, he broadcast from Rome to American soldiers his pro-Axis and anti-Semitic rants. After the war, the United States committed him to St. Elizabeth’s penal asylum in order not to commit him to a firing squad.

  Loving Pound’s poetry in spite of his madness and his fascism, I agreed with Williams’s proposal. Goodness knows what else we said—tape recorders were not yet commonplace—but the meeting was generous with sincerity, silliness, booze, and posturing. After listening to hours of accumulating dreck, Harvey Breit praised us all and suggested that we turn things over to a subcommittee: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Donald Hall.

  We met the next morning in the office of Faulkner’s editor at Random House. The male subcommittee arrived before the female amanuensis, so that there was time for chitchat. Faulkner and Steinbeck talked only about rifles, and agreed that the Springfield was the best. Then we listed suggestions for the president: change US immigration laws, invite Soviet citizens to come for two years to our country, and promote greater foreign distribution of American literature. When I proposed that we free Ezra Pound, Steinbeck shook his head. “No, no. It would only make them mad.” Sudden enthusiasm illuminated Faulkner’s eyes. He said yes, we should free Ezra Pound, and addressing the note taker, remarked that the chairman of this committee, appointed by the president, had been awarded a prize by the government of Sweden, but America locked its best poet in jail.