A Carnival of Losses

by Donald Hall

  From Andrew All the Way to Lucy

  Usually it’s someone else who gives me an idea for a children’s book. It seems I’ve written a dozen. I wrote my first when my four-year-old son Andrew commissioned it. In Ann Arbor we occupied an old farmhouse in a crowded suburban neighborhood. In the morning Andrew with his shock of red hair opened the door of our white house to fetch the newspaper. Because he was also wearing blue Dr. Denton’s, our neighbors said that he looked like the Fourth of July. Inside our house, at the end of our living room, a big window faced the street. At its bottom was a recessed shelf with flowerpots resting on gravel, where my wife grew flowers all year. One afternoon Andrew told me he had a great idea, but it was scary. “I’m going to the Lion Store,” he told me, “to buy a lion seed and grow a lion in the window!”

  It took two years for Andrew the Lion Farmer to be published. Andrew was proud that he had given me the idea for a book. (At sixty-two he’s still proud.) Back then, we never visited the Lion Store, but I went to pad and paper, and in a week or two I had a story. I sent it to my agent, who tried it here and there, and finally found an enthusiastic small publisher called Franklin Watts. They liked Andrew’s plot and hired the illustrator Jane Miller to draw the redhead buying a seed at a Lyon’s establishment. Andrew’s imaginary pet blossomed to play with him every morning before the grown-ups woke. In September the lion began to feel sleepy. “I think I’m going to seed.” Was Andrew’s lion perennial or annual? If he was annual, I might try a sequel.

  The book was wordy. My editor asked me to cut it. I cut it here, I cut it there, but I never cut it enough. My editor gave up—and when I look at it now, it’s the wordiest picture book in history. Jane Miller drew a wonderful sloppy orange lion with a sloppy orange-headed Andrew, but no one bought it. No one bought it in England either when somebody printed it with different illustrations. The new pictures were terrible—Andrew resembled a kewpie doll—but still it didn’t sell.

  For quite a while the lion farmer remained my only children’s book. The next one might as well never have existed. In Boston an old student of mine worked for a small publisher. She wrote me to commission a children’s book of riddles. Because our survival in New Hampshire depended on my freelancing, I accepted every suggestion a publisher made. I made up riddles, I stole riddles, I invented a protagonist named Riddle Rat. A New Yorker cartoonist drew pictures and no one read it. Then Paul Fenton told me about the farmer who walked beside his ox cart all the way to Portsmouth. By then, many years after Andrew’s lion, I knew enough not to make the book wordy.

  A year after Ox-Cart Man’s indecent success, I went peculiar with another story. One of the joys of my childhood was my New Hampshire cousin Freeman Morrison, the one with George Washington the ox. No one else in the 1930s and ’40s wore a beard. Freeman shaved it every summer but grew it back when the leaves turned. Once a year Freeman washed his clothes and himself. He walked fully clothed into Eagle Pond with a bar of soap, applying it to his body and his overalls at the same time. Otherwise he lived alone with his pet ox in a shack halfway up Ragged Mountain. I wrote a children’s book about him, a story called The Man Who Lived Alone, for kids who knew nothing about solitary old bachelors living in huts with pet oxen. No publisher would touch it except for David Godine, who designs and prints good books that nobody else will take. David keeps them in print. He published The Man Who Lived Alone thirty-five years ago with black-and-white expressionist woodcuts by Mary Azarian and sends me an infinitesimal royalty from time to time.

  Next I made up a story about a kid who missed his father, who was drafted into the army in 1942. His father enraptured him by coming home on leave. That was my plot for The Farm Summer 1942. My literary agent wanted to sell two children’s books at once. I gave him another manuscript together with Farm Summer. For years I had taken notes on a cat book, I Am the Cat, and then Jane and I adopted Gus the dog. It wasn’t long before I finished I Am the Dog I Am the Cat. Two monologists faced each other page after page. One of my characters claimed that the people who fed him were the most adorable people in the world, even though he ate the cat’s doodoo, but his housemate didn’t give a fuck about anything except mushy canned fish. The illustrator for both books was Barry Moser, who in his long life has illustrated everything. (I once posed as Ecclesiastes for his Bible.) My only complaint about Barry: I wrote about my dog and cat; he painted his.

  So I had two books to offer around. Again and again publishers offered to buy The Farm Summer but didn’t want the dialogue of household pets. My agent was relentless. The forty-third publisher he approached, or maybe the fourth, agreed to do the dog-cat in order to print 1942. As you have already suspected, no one ever read The Farm Summer 1942—I keep a virginal pile upstairs—and I Am the Dog I Am the Cat continues to sell today.

  Three or four others were published that nobody read and nobody needs to read about, but another two derived from my mother’s memories. Lucy died at ninety in an old people’s place in our market town. She was born in 1903 in the farmhouse that Jane and I took over, and at twenty-five she married my Connecticut father, their wedding in the sitting room where I write these words. Although she emigrated from New Hampshire to my father’s suburban Hamden in Connecticut, she remained attached to the farm and took me here on visits when I was little. Often she told me girlhood memories, which I turned into two children’s books. Lucy’s Christmas came from her tales of old children’s Christmas parties, in the white clapboard church that Jane and I went to. People actually read the book, at least at Christmas. I followed it with Lucy’s Summer. To my old mother in her bed among the dying, I brought proofs, galleys, and finished books. I never saw her more excited. She was making books!

  They were published after Lucy died and sold well. Lucy’s Summer trailed behind her Christmas. If I had had the brains, I could have switched her birthday from its real April to an invented July or August and called it Lucy’s Birthday, a title that would have sold the book all year. I did think of a sequel. In real life, Lucy and her sister Caroline didn’t notice, at seven and six, that their mother’s waist gradually extended. They visited an old lady cousin for three days, and when they came home they found their baby sister Nan. I didn’t get to write Lucy’s Baby because the picture book industry slid into a depression and my Lucy books went out of print. David Godine resurrected them much later, and twenty-five years after Lucy died, her Christmas erupts in bookstores every December while she edges toward 120.

  The World of Meats

  Jane and I drove to my mother’s house in Connecticut once a month. We cruised over New Hampshire’s Route 11 past George’s Mills, past Sunapee, through the old milltown of Newport, where we stopped at a massive butcher’s establishment rising on the right side of the road—not a butcher’s, really, but a butchers’. Squads of burly men with cleavers in their hands wore white aprons stained with blood. This business wore its name on its roof in stout capital letters: THE WORLD OF MEATS.

  We stopped there because my mother Lucy loved tripe. Growing up on the family farm, my mother and her family ate everything they raised, not only cows but the linings of their stomachs. Once I ate a bite, which was enough for me but not for Lucy. She simmered a frying pan of tripe in her Connecticut kitchen and ate it with gusto and vinegar. None of the supermarkets near us in New Hampshire stocked tripe, and no one in Connecticut had ever heard of it. Thus, on the way to Connecticut for a visit, we stopped at The World of Meats, where the gleaming gristle pocked with squares lay out on trays. Otherwise the whole establishment was nothing but blood dripping on aprons, on the tiled floor behind the counter, toward a drain in the sloping floor, or on the hands of the butcher who worked the cash register.

  My cousin Freeman Morrison lived alone in a shack, always called a camp, on Ragged Mountain. I keep telling stories about Freeman. When I think of The World of Meats, I think of him. In middle age, 1920 or so, he had another toothache. He had pulled out most of his teeth with pliers, but the remainder were r
otten and his pliers slipped on the stumps. He heard tell of a man in Franklin called a dentist, and somebody gave him a Model T ride to town. After half an hour, toothless Freeman walked from the office holding a towel over his mouth, which didn’t keep blood from drizzling over his beard and his shirt as he talked all the way back to his camp. Freeman himself was another World of Meats.

  The Triple Thinker

  At Harvard, the Society of Fellows did a formal dinner every Monday night. Sometimes the senior fellows brought guests to entertain us juniors. One night I ate dinner with Vladimir Nabokov. T. S. Eliot came once a year. Edmund Wilson came twice, but I never happened to talk with him at one of our dinners. Then Wilson invited the junior fellows to a party at an apartment he was renting in Cambridge. I hadn’t especially enjoyed his 1931 essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” but I grew up reading To the Finland Station and admired his frequent New Yorker pieces. At his house I chatted with other guests as Wilson moved among us. When he came to me he asked, “What do you do?” He looked snappish. (I too get irritated when people fawn over me after a poetry reading. Maybe I called him “sir.”) I didn’t want to say that I was trying to resuscitate his moribund art. I told him that I looked into the prosody of modernist poetry.

  “Never use that disgusting word!” he bellowed, his face turning red. “It’s disgusting! It’s revolting! It’s obscene!”

  I knew which word he meant. At that moment my old college tutor Harry Levin approached, who at twenty-five wrote his book about James Joyce and was now an aging and agreeable professor. He heard Wilson say, “It’s obscene! It’s obscene! It’s obscene!”

  “He means the word ‘modernist,’ ” I mumbled.

  “Why Edmund,” said my old tutor, “I believe I’ve used that expression. Why Edmund, I believe you’ve used it yourself!”

  It was too much for Wilson. His face turned a deeper crimson. He repeated “Obscene!” and fell full length to the floor.

  The Worst Thing

  When I first arrived at Harvard in 1947, I lived in a freshman dorm beside two African American roommates, called Negroes at the time. There were eleven Negroes in the class of 1951. I took to Matthew Botney, who intrigued me because in addition to his skin color he was a member of the Communist Party. In 1947 it was comfortable enough to be a communist at Harvard. A tall commie from Beacon Hill stood outside Harvard Yard at lunchtime, calling in a Groton accent, “Get your Daily Worker! Get your Daily Worker here!” Myself, I never joined the party, but I had thoughts about it. When Matthew returned for sophomore year, he had left the party. He said he preferred stretching out on a beach listening to a portable radio. I liked him anyway. He became my roommate in Eliot House, where we lived with two other students on the fifth floor, with a common bath and living room, a big bedroom for two, single rooms for Matthew and me. At first all four of us enjoyed one another, but in the spring of our junior year Matthew began to separate himself from his roommates. He rented cheap, bright, non-institutional furniture for his single room. He started staying out all night. We teased him about his girlfriend.

  Harvard when we matriculated was not only politically tolerant but otherwise loose and easygoing. Three years later, the country and the college altered as the House Un-American Activities Committee took over. Even homosexuality had been open and commonplace from 1947 to 1949. John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were our best poets. The university officially proscribed homosexuality, but paid no attention when people appeared to be gay. Guys walked around holding hands. By 1950 we were aware of HUAC and general tolerance receded. One day Matthew vanished entirely and his furniture was repossessed. It took a month before we discovered that Matthew had been expelled for being gay, his frequent overnight companion an elderly Brahmin on Brattle Street. The white-haired lover was not the only one. Eliot House had an elegant library with many nooks and crannies, books shelved in cubicles for quiet study. The university hired Irish women from Boston to clean our dorm rooms, women we cleverly called biddies. One day a biddy dusting the library saw a black man kissing a white man. There were many Caucasians in Eliot House; there was one Negro. Harvard expelled Matthew, doubtless to forestall a Boston Herald story. I never saw him again. I spoke just now of Harvard’s “general tolerance.” Seventy years later it is remarkable to understand that no one in Harvard’s administration would have considered anything but expulsion.

  Two years later, I was at Oxford on a fellowship and lived in Christ Church College. One day I received a note from the city police, asking me to drop by. I was more curious than alarmed. My only crime at Oxford had been to climb into college after hours. At the police station a constable directed me to a room where I found a middle-aged American smoking a cigarette. He wore a generic brown suit and an anonymous tie, and told me he was from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He said that Matthew Botney had applied for a job in a defense plant. “Was he ever a communist?”

  That’s when I did the worst thing. “Yes,” I said.

  Five of Them

  My mother Lucy knew all her great-grandchildren, because in the old days people married young. My mother and father married at twenty-four, and their only child was born a year later. Myself, I married at twenty-three, and my son Andrew came along in two years. He sired three children and my daughter bore two. My mother’s five great-grandchildren attended her ninetieth birthday party.

  Jane and I drove once a month from New Hampshire to Lucy in Connecticut, throughout her eighties, and arrived as scheduled on April 22, 1993. We had arranged in secret for her grandchildren to bring her great-grandchildren for a visit the next day, a surprise on her birthday. Andrew and his wife Natalie arrived first with two daughters and a son, closely followed by Philippa with two daughters. I preserve the gathering in a huge photograph stuck to my refrigerator. Jane posed us squeezed onto a sofa around my mother in her perpetual caftan, babies and children and grown-ups, everyone smiling, my mouth wide-wide open. We had brought a birthday cake. After a joyous hour, I noticed that Lucy was exhausted, sagging into her seldom-used sofa. At my urging the visitors packed up and departed while I steered the ninety-year-old to take a nap on the reclining mechanical chair—where she lived out the late track of her life, where she wrote many letters, where she listened to the radio Red Sox, where she read the same Agatha Christies over and over.

  My daughter Philippa, younger than my son, was first of my children to marry, she and Jerry in 1984. Andrew and Natalie got together three years afterward and bore my first grandchild, Emily, nine months later. It was an extraordinary summer, as Philippa’s daughter Allison emerged from a New Hampshire cesarean section only four days after Emily in New York. Two years later, Manhattan with a baby was too much for Andrew and Natalie, so he allowed a headhunter to recruit him for a Boston firm. They moved north with Emily not long before her sister Ariana arrived in 1990, and then came Peter in 1992, just after Philippa’s Abigail. Philippa and Jerry with the girls lived only forty minutes away from Jane and me, and frequently dropped in. Five Halls from Massachusetts regularly drove up to visit.

  Three things in particular engaged the young visitors. I kept a box in my study and spread its contents on the living room floor when the grandchildren arrived. Bizarre plastic constructions embodied or parodied my writerly profession in an outlandish assemblage of ballpoint pens: a football player pen, a yellow plastic banana with a blue nib sticking out, a fire truck pen, a luxurious Brigitte Bardot Bic, cat pens and dog pens, a Holstein pen, and one that when persuaded urged “Go! Go! Go!”

  One Christmas gift brought another order of joy. Jane’s brother and sister-in-law sent annual boxes from Michigan, and their presents tended to be imaginative or witty. A large wooden crate arrived, three feet long, which Jane and I opened to discover a gumball machine, replete with gumballs and a slot that accepted pennies, with a chute that granted gumballs in return for pennies. For at least a decade, five grandchildren opened car doors and zapped into the house bearing coins outstretched.


  And when they had grown a bit bigger there was a third attraction. Late in my eighties I live entirely on one floor of my house, but above me are a second floor and a third, where you can find a spinning wheel for wool and another that twisted flax into linen. We call our major junkroom the Back Chamber—dark, cluttered, assembling everything one family had used and broken since 1865. When Emily and Ariana and Peter visited us, or Allison and Abigail, after equipping themselves with gumballs they scrambled upstairs to investigate the Back Chamber. There were chests like pirates’ chests crammed with the nightshirts and underwear of great-great-grandparents born in the first half of the nineteenth century. There were broken china heads from the dolls that my mother and her sisters cherished, one for each girl as her annual Christmas present. There were ancient colloquial chairs painted farmhouse green, each with a broken strut. There were two crumbling Singer sewing machines with foot pedals that once powered needles into Sears-boughten cloth. There were huge slick catalogs from Montgomery Ward and twelve beds broken down and stacked against the wall. There were piles of Farmer’s Journals. There were even toothpick sculptures executed by young Andrew and Philippa, my son’s towering and precarious beside my daughter’s scrupulous and symmetrical.

  Five grandchildren would linger upstairs, Columbuses who cherished a dusty and broken old world—and when they drifted downstairs they were tired, they wanted one more gumball, they were ready to nap in the back seat driving home.