A Carnival of Losses

by Donald Hall

  The year when Jane published her first book, I brought out my seventh. That’s what she had to put up with. Kicking the Leaves was a breakthrough for me, deriving its force from the ecstasy of marrying Jane and the life-changing departure from university teaching to freelancing in New Hampshire. My bland first collection in 1955 had been overpraised. When the second book followed, and the third, the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth, no one paid much attention. (Just before Kicking, I published a prose reminiscence of older poets. Reviewers who praised that book found it ironic that the author of Remembering Poets had once been a promising poet.) Kicking the Leaves remained around for decades, reprinted many times, selling in the end many more copies than my first six titles together. With my marriage to Jane and my return to old sources I had found myself as a poet, and my next books carried me forward through The One Day.

  Meantime, Jane’s reputation bloomed in high color in poetry’s garden, poem after poem and book after book. Three or four times a year she workshopped with Joyce Peseroff and another young woman, Alice Mattison, a novelist who also published short stories in The New Yorker. Jane’s parents and brother had always avoided artistic ambition for fear of failure. She escaped the family fate by collaborating with vigorous friends, avid for excellence and eminence, who permitted themselves to compete. Each time Jane returned from her three-woman workshop, she was triumphant in her energy. I watched her excitement and progress with joy and envy.

  For decades she and I had written what could loosely be described as the same sort of poem. It was free verse, mostly short poems in lines of largely similar length, delicate rhythms with forceful enjambments and an assonance of diphthongs. My earliest poems, long before Jane and I knew each other, were rhymed and metrical. Ten years after Jane’s death, out of love for Thomas Hardy and the seventeenth century, I wrote metrical poems again, many of them about Jane, but in the long middle of my life I improvised, like Jane, a sensuous rhythm without meter. Our work had been different enough—people knew us apart—but we belonged together to a stylistic consensus.

  As Jane moved from glory to glory, the language of my poems began to diverge from hers. In one lengthy collection my poems became more ironic and more ingenious in structure, but less dark and less sensuous. A subsequent, still weaker book assembled brief plain poems of anecdotal reminiscence. It appeared just after Jane died, and compassionate reviewers attributed its mediocrity to my anguish. Over the years I have understood how or why my poems altered and deteriorated. Working beside her, I felt overwhelmed as I read “Let Evening Come” and “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks.” Extravagantly I admired the embodiment of her struggle with depression in “Having It Out with Melancholy.” One summer after a neighbor farmer finished cutting our fields, she handed me “Twilight: After Haying.”

  Yes, long shadows go out

  from the bales; and yes, the soul

  must part from the body:

  what else could it do?

  The men sprawl near the baler,

  too tired to leave the field.

  They talk and smoke,

  and the tips of their cigarettes

  blaze like small roses

  in the night air. (It arrived

  and settled among them

  before they were aware.)

  The moon comes

  to count the bales,

  and the dispossessed—

  Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will

  —sings from the dusty stubble.

  These things happen . . . the soul’s bliss

  and suffering are bound together

  like the grasses. . . .

  The last, sweet exhalations

  of timothy and vetch

  go out with the song of the bird;

  the ravaged field

  grows wet with dew.

  Such sensuous beauty. As the dew falls the soul eases into bodily receptiveness. These devastating enactments of Jane’s art became daily events. The emotional abundance of her language climbed to the summit of literary achievement, the pupil exceeding her teacher, and I began to make my poems as unlike Jane’s as I could manage.

  When jane was diagnosed and put to bed in Dartmouth-Hitchcock, an hour north of our house, I rented a motel room next door and spent every day with her. I took notes in brief lines of verse—observations, anecdotes, humors, terrors. I found and used a few of these lines later when I assembled my poems about her death. Only six months into leukemia, I drafted the poem “Without” in the present tense. Her first remission was failing in the New Hampshire hospital as we waited for a stranger’s bone marrow match and a flight to Seattle. She had been diagnosed in January and out the window late in August I saw the trees begin to turn yellow. Out the same window I had not noticed the white of winter nor the melt of March nor green leaves when they arrived in April. We inhabited not the natural world but the landscape of leukemia. I read a draft of “Without” to Jane, the unpunctuated universe an unchanging relentless blank. From her bed Jane said, “You’ve got it, Perkins. You’ve got it!” A year later I revised the poem, put it into the past tense, and used it as the title for my book of poems about Jane’s death.

  In the weeks after her funeral I drove four times a day to her grave. I read only novels that exercised rage and misery: Blood Meridian not The Ambassadors. I took pleasure only in disaster: the Oklahoma City bombing, an airplane crash in New York with everyone killed. My days were misery except for an hour in the morning when I revised the wailing and whining I had drafted beside her hospital bed. I had begun “The Porcelain Couple” and “The Ship Pounding” while she lived, and now I revised them together with “Without.” Today I understand that these poems of Jane’s death already began to bring my language back to life. I remember the first poem I started after the funeral. One morning I looked out the window at her garden. Her peonies, the basketball-sized white triumphs of her garden, stood tall and still unopened late in May, with weeds starting from black earth around them. I began a poem that by autumn became “Weeds and Peonies.”

  Your peonies burst out, white as snow squalls,

  with red flecks at their shaggy centers

  in your border of prodigies by the porch.

  I carry one magnanimous blossom indoors

  and float it in a glass bowl, as you used to do.

  Ordinary pleasures, contentment recollected,

  blow like snow into the abandoned garden,

  overcoming the daisies. Your blue coat

  vanishes down Pond Road into imagined snowflakes

  with Gus at your side, his great tail swinging,

  but you will not reappear, tired and satisfied,

  and grief’s repeated particles suffuse the air—

  like the dog yipping through the entire night,

  or the cat stretching awake, then curling

  as if to dream of her mother’s milky nipples.

  A raccoon dislodged a geranium from its pot.

  Flowers, roots, and dirt lay upended

  in the back garden where lilies begin

  their daily excursions above stone walls

  in the season of old roses. I pace beside weeds

  and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge

  where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots.

  “Hurry back. Be careful, climbing down.”

  Your peonies lean their vast heads westward

  as if they might topple. Some topple.

  It was Jane’s “prodigies,” it was Jane’s “magnanimous” blossoms, it was Jane who noted the “repeated particles” of snow. After her death I was able again to assume a diction as potent as Jane’s. I finished “Without” and “The Porcelain Couple” and “The Ship Pounding.” I wrote “Letter with No Address” in our common language, and continued my posthumous one-way correspondence through “Letter after a Year.” After I published Without I continued to write Jane poems in The Painted Bed, sometimes returning to metrical forms. In the months and years after her deat
h Jane’s voice and mine rose as one, spiraling together images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the unforgivable absence of flesh.

  IV

  A Carnival of Losses

  Milltowns

  Every four years during the New Hampshire primary, television networks conduct interviews in front of Manchester’s old mills. Long brick buildings extend on the eastern shore of the Merrimack River, where for a century farmers’ daughters turned cotton into yard goods that clothed the United States. Generations worked at adjacent machines, wool instead of cotton from 1861 to ’65, until after Reconstruction southern mills replaced New Hampshire’s. Manchester and Franklin became neglected milltowns, as did Newport and Claremont and dozens of other places. Old storefronts emptied on poverty’s main streets as jobless millworkers went hungry. Their children applied for food stamps. Their great-grandchildren are routinely diagnosed with ADHD in return for disability checks.

  Every old town in New Hampshire grew up beside water. Some mills manufactured one farm implement, in towns so small that they escaped impoverishment when the mill closed. I live near Elkins, a village on a small river that flows out of Pleasant Lake. It was called Scytheville before Dr. Elkins died. Its tiny dam channeled water to grind and sharpen scythes. How many people worked at the mill? Not many, but for the few millworkers and their families the village before automobiles required a grocery store, a post office, a butcher, a fishmonger, and Dr. Elkins. The mill created a tiny town.

  Sometimes there were one-man mills. My great-grandfather John Wells was a blacksmith. Like everyone in the countryside—lawyer, preacher, milkfarmer, carpenter, doctor—he had to be a subsistence farmer as well. He had one horse, one cow, a big garden for canning, chickens and sheep and pigs—and shoed his neighbors’ horses for his taxes, for his salt and pepper, for strips of flypaper to hang over the range. Once a year he became a miller. Behind his blacksmith shop a stream trickled all summer, but in spring’s melt the Blackwater River briefly roared, to power a saw by which he cut wood and built a buggy every April.

  Wherever there’s a town, there’s water. Five miles away from me is the village of Andover, site of a prep school called Proctor Academy, across the road from the Proctor graveyard where Jane Kenyon lies. Half a mile west of Main Street, if you know where to look, a barely visible stream flows beside barely visible ruins. Bricks and crumbled cement mark the site of Proctor’s Mill, where workers made hames, the wooden frames that underlie a horsecollar’s leather. Every spring, my grandfather remembered, farmers came to the mill with cartloads of ash, the best wood for making hames. My grandfather worked there a month when he was young, and quit when the sawdust made him sneeze all night. Millworkers labored twelve hours a day, Monday to Friday, six hours on Saturday. Five years earlier, when the Proctors shortened the hours of labor from six full days to five and a half, old-timers snorted that it wasn’t a week’s wuk.

  My Connecticut Grandfather

  H.F. cut quite a figure when he was in his twenties. He grew a mustache, labored with his father all day, and courted all night. He visited a girlfriend with his horse and carriage, and conducted his amours in the wobbly front seat. After he terminated one romance, he picked up his new date and one thing led to another. His mare kept moseying along—the horse knows the way—and came to a stop at the old girlfriend’s house.

  Mudfish Pissing

  Jill Hoffman, a painter, poet, and fiction writer, edits a thick and handsome literary magazine called Mudfish. In the autumn of 2016 she sent my agent Wendy Strothman a letter asking if Wendy could get me to judge the poems in a forthcoming issue. For #19, Edward Hirsch had been the judge, and #20 would be my turn. She was a fan of mine, she told Wendy, and she had given a speech at my sixtieth birthday party. “I wrote about it,” Jill Hoffman said, “in a novel (Stoned) and meant to send the scene to him many years later but I never did.”

  Late in my eighties, I have so far avoided dementia. I have problems with memory, sure, but it’s short-term memory. Jill Hoffman did not give a speech at my sixtieth birthday party. I vividly recollect my sixtieth. Jane threw me a bash on the seldom-used second floor of our favorite restaurant, Piero Canuto’s La Meridiana. My friends gathered from all over and had a choice of sirloin strip or rack of lamb. Jeff White recorded the whole party on camera. My granddaughter Allison attended, six weeks old, and swung back and forth in a mechanical device that kept her asleep. (Her first cousin Emily, four days older, was detained in New York with a sore throat.) For Jane and me, it would turn out to be our last such celebration. Not long after, a surgeon extracted half of my cancerous liver. When I recovered, Jane died of leukemia. Yup, I remembered my sixtieth birthday party.

  And who’s Jill Hoffman? When she answered my bewilderment, Ms. Hoffman told me that several of her decades had vanished—something to do with her being Stoned? She thought maybe it was Richard Wilbur’s sixtieth birthday at which she gave a speech. (At ninety-six my old friend Dick didn’t remember.) I told Ms. Hoffman that anyway I was too old to judge a contest. When I told her my age she understood, and she remembered something else. In Mudfish #17 she had published a poem by a guy named Steve Benson.

  Pissing Beside Donald Hall

  It was before a reading at Drake

  downstairs in the Men’s Room

  not long after his young wife,

  the praised great poet Jane Kenyon,

  died with depression and leukemia

  slowly we stood there pissing

  side by side at shiny urinals

  if you’re a man you know how

  intimately private yet exposed

  this public pissing is and I was

  tempted to tell him how much I love

  his poetry the Ox Cart Man still

  one of my favorites and how sorry

  I was about his wife dying bravely

  talented so young and would he mind

  signing his newest book of poems

  I’d tucked wing-like under my elbow

  while I stood there quietly aiming

  my own pale yellow stream into

  the universal porcelain bowl

  but for once I told my ego NO

  just let The Famous American Poet

  pee in peace shaking off his golden

  drops until we zipped up about the same

  time and washed our hands before

  a wide mirror where we nodded at

  each other’s reserved reflections

  drying our hands on ripped paper

  and then he led the way upstairs

  to spontaneous applause where

  I returned to my seat proud of him

  and my secret self content for once

  to permit what’s loved to peacefully go.

  I didn’t know Steve Benson. I didn’t remember a man pissing beside me at a urinal. I didn’t remember reading my poems at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. On the Internet my assistant Kendel found a Language poet with the same name, but Language poems don’t make a noise when read aloud and this one did—nice line breaks—and I liked the part about the Famous American Poet. It had to be another Steve Benson. Jill Hoffman gave me Mudfish Steve Benson’s email address, and now he and I write back and forth, our urinal companionship gone electronic and verbal. We talk about having a beer sometime, in order to take another piss together.

  Steve didn’t remember when I read at Drake, and I never remember the dates of poetry readings. Steve’s poem said it was after Jane died in 1995. Then Kendel discovered a list of Drake’s 2017 English professors. Professor Jody Swilky was listed as director of the writing workshop at Drake, so I asked her about my reading. She “conducted some research,” she answered, “and discovered that in 1991 you participated . . . in the Des Moines National Poetry Festival.” For Steve Benson, as for most of us, everything is longer ago than we think it was.

  Anyway, Jill Hoffman—editor, poet, novelist, painter—and I have become ep
istolary buddies too. I have never met either of them, nor most of the people I correspond with, which is how my archive has accumulated so many acres of letters. Promiscuous in legible acquaintance, I praise solitude in essays and dictate fifteen letters a day. Jill Hoffman asked me to contribute to Mudfish and wished to paint my portrait. I sent her photographs of Jane and me. She emailed me a digital photograph of my portrait, in which one of my eyes is lower than the other, her friend Jack tells her, and another of Jane in which the mouth is not quite right. (John Singer Sargent said that in portraits the mouth is never quite right.) A future issue of Mudfish will run Jill’s painting of me on the front cover and Jane’s portrait on the back. In pages between the covers Jill will print this bulletin, and also my meditation on “Fucking.”

  Richard at Oxford

  At Oxford early in the 1950s, I knew an American who wanted to be a writer. Nobody liked him. Between Yale College and Oxford he talked himself into a Communist Youth International conference in Paris, and in an article for Look revealed its Stalinist ideology. What a surprise. After Oxford he wrote a popular book about how to get rich. He knew nothing about getting rich, but he knew how to write a book about getting rich. Then he died. It was a while ago.

  My wife and I had a flat about two miles from the town center, and Richard knocked on our door every Sunday midday. Always we asked him to stay for dinner, until at last we’d had enough. On a dreary November Sunday he arrived and I said that we wouldn’t ask him to stay for dinner today—because I had a headache, or because we didn’t have enough food, or because of anything. Richard stared out our window at rainy Banbury Road and said, “It’s so unpopular outside.”