Donald Hall: Remember what matters

As I race to finish the new novel, here is an excerpt from my book of essays, “But Still They Sing"

A few weeks ago I received a printed postcard in the mail, beginning “Dear Friend of Donald Hall”. In a few brief lines it announced that Don had been diagnosed with cancer, and would no longer be able to read or answer any letters.

I never met Donald Hall. But our lives crossed paths in ways that influenced my life.

My piano teacher was a kindly man named Reuel Kenyon. I remember him telling my mother one day that his daughter, Jane, then an unknown student, was getting married to a university professor. At that same time, my older brother was one of Donald Hall’s students at University of Michigan.

I was a very little girl, but my brother came home and read to me the poetry he was studying in Hall’s classes. He taught me about his teacher’s passion for the ancient stopped rhythms in “Baa, Baa Black Sheep” and “Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark.” At Hall’s suggestion, my brother bought a Caedmon recording of Theodore Roethke reading his works, and we would listen to it again and again until we both knew all the poems by heart. To this day those words are embedded in my heart and brain, and I feel that they belong particularly to me, because of Donald Hall’s passion for them.

Many years later, String too Short to be Saved was the first book of Hall’s that I bought—or perhaps, was given—back when I was in college. It’s still here on my shelves, along with all his other books. Over the years, I read and enjoyed all of them, including his poetry, and also that of his late wife, the sorrowful and acerbic poet, Jane Kenyon (my piano teacher’s daughter). His account of her death, The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon is a haunting statement of loss.

While I was in college, I cut out and saved Polonius’ Advice to Poets. Its dry wit still resonates. I have read that essay so many times over the years that I have come to use some of its lines as stock phrases that recur in my daily conversations. “My sister’s funeral was boring, but I got a poem out of it”; the mockery of (badly) translated poetry “the bamboo under the mountain-color mountain”; and most important: “Remember what matters.” I did not remember Polonius’ advice to “write to poets and critics you admire, and some will write you back,” but apparently I internalized it.

One day recently, perhaps by coincidence, after tucking one of Hall’s books onto a shelf in my office, I went online and happened upon the essay, “Between Solitude and Loneliness.” I had read the first few paragraphs before I suddenly saw his byline. Perhaps I felt I already knew Hall, but something at that moment compelled me to write to him.

“I don’t know whether it will mean anything to you” I wrote, “but I wanted to tell you that even though you were never actually my teacher, your passion for words profoundly influenced me and my life, and for that I am genuinely grateful.”

The letter sat on the kitchen table for some time before my husband—who is valuable in this way—asked when I was going to send it. I had no address, but I knew the name of Hall’s farm, and that he lived in New Hampshire, so I spent a leisurely morning stalking him online, using Google Earth to locate the farm, and trying to read the address on the mailbox. I could not, but it was too late to stop now, so I went to the UPS office anyway. “We don’t have this address on file,” they said. “Just send it”, I told them. “They’ll know.”

And then, in a gesture that all writers will recognize, I threw my fate into the winds, and got on with my life.

About ten days later, I opened the mailbox, and felt a jolt and a thrill to see an envelope with a return address in New Hampshire. It was from Donald Hall.

We began what became, sadly, a correspondence of only a few months. He told me about the first publication of String too Short to be Saved, crediting Roger Angell for publishing the first few chapters in the New Yorker. We wrote about our drinking habits—he permitted himself two Manhattans a week. And he consoled me about the frustrations of being an unknown writer, saying “I suppose being called a regional writer is as bad as being called ‘a Robert Frost imitator.’”

He wrote about the death of my old piano teacher, Jane’s father. “Jane had flown from New Hampshire to Michigan to visit her mother, and they were sorting through old things in the house, and late in the day her mother Polly said, ‘Let evening come.’ ”

Those three words started one of Jane Kenyon’s most powerful poems.

“Twilight: After Haying,” also about the death of her father, was, Hall said, one of his favorite of her works. “But,” he said, “I have many favorites.”

Knowing poetry by heart built the music and rhythms that have become the roots of my own writing, and offer a deeply personal library that is always accessible. Poetry is best spoken. Hall was a gifted reader, and his sonorous lines echo on numerous recordings.

His letters must have been dictated; they had a chatty quality, but he clearly read them before they were sent, and added corrections and additions with a pen. “I don’t like much of the poetry that gets published these days either, to begin with because the poems do not make a noise when read aloud! Sound is the way in!”

He admired the way “Ted Roethke and Dylan” read their poems. “I adored reading aloud,” he wrote, “and I miss it a lot. I think Seamus read aloud well. I heard him three or four times, and knew him a bit. Horrid that he died at a mere seventy-three.”

He chastised me about my bad handwriting, “I have to tell you that your address on the envelope is unreadable,” and talked about writing String too Short to be Saved, offering a glimpse of his work ethic.

“That year in the village of Thaxted . . . it was the third bit of writing I did in the day. Every morning I made coffee and worked on poems in the kitchen first thing in the day. Mid-day I looked at letters and wrote book reviews for the New Statesman and Encounter, and then at around tea time I took a pad of paper up to the Music Room. (There was a gorgeous late fourteenth century house we lived in that year! It was a wonderful year. Kirby fed the baby Philippa straight to the cup. At the end of the year we rented a car and drove to Rome and I interviewed Ezra Pound.) But every afternoon I wrote String. My first prose book. I learned how to write prose by writing it.”

He was looking forward to a new great grandchild and the publication this fall of his new book of essays, A Carnival of Losses, Notes Nearing Ninety. “In my eighties,” he wrote me, “I had to give up writing poems, but I was lucky to be able still to write prose. Nobody in his or her mid-eighties has ever written a good poem, alas. Poetry is too erotic.”

Our correspondence was starting to build a rhythm when the postcard arrived. It was hard to know the right thing to do in the face of its message, but it seemed wrong not to respond at all.

“Even if this is just a statement to the universe,” I wrote, “I need to say that you are in my thoughts, that I pray for you, and that your work has great meaning to me and to the world of letters. I hope that you are still fighting, because struggling is life. In this eternal and sometimes merciless universe, our lives still matter. Our struggles matter. Our work matters. And all of those things that have mattered to you have touched my life through your writing. Thank you for that.”

I shall always be grateful.

***

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