A Carnival Of Losses

Notes Nearing Ninety

Donald Hall

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780358056140
• eBook ISBN: 9781328826312
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Former poet laureate of the United States Donald Hall’s final collection of essays, from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny.”*
*(New York Times)

“Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Donald Hall answers his own question in these self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both.

Nearing ninety at the time of writing, he intersperses memories of exuberant days in his youth, with uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades—with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries.

Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, this final work is as original and searing as anything Hall wrote during his extraordinary literary lifetime.

III

Necropoetics

every five years or so, a national magazine publishes an essay proclaiming or lamenting the death of poetry. All my life, on the other hand, I have explored the poetry of death. Now, as I read so much about dying and palliative care, my thoughts always slide back to my wife Jane Kenyon’s leukemia and premature death. Between us there was such a radical difference in age. We almost avoided marriage because her widowhood would be so long, and today it is twenty-two years since she died at forty-seven—while I approach ninety.

When I was a high school freshman and decided to write poems my whole life, Jane was minus five. She finished primary school in 1957, when I took a teaching job in her hometown of Ann Arbor. With me came my wife Kirby and my son Andrew, my daughter Philippa arriving two years later. The marriage crumbled and broke after a decade, and I endured wretched years of booze and promiscuity. To our endless good fortune, Jane and I found each other and, in 1972, entered the judge’s chambers. Three years later I quit teaching and we moved to New Hampshire. My children as they grew up came east for education and remained here as our neighbors. In my twenty New Hampshire years with Jane, everything in my poetic history happened again, this time to Jane: her first poem printed here, her first poem printed there, her first book, her second, an NEA fellowship, her third book, a Guggenheim, her fourth book. Multiple poetry readings followed her publications, as her reputation elevated and spread.

When we knew for certain that she was about to die, she told me the whereabouts of unpublished poems, and I read them for the first time. They were dazzling, and I faxed them to The New Yorker, which afforded her poems their biggest audience. When we heard back a few days later, Jane’s eyes were open but she couldn’t see. She had stopped speaking, but her oncologist said that she could still hear. I told her that Alice Quinn was taking seven poems for The New Yorker. If you are never going to see or speak again, what do you think when you hear such a thing? Not much.

Poetry begins with elegy, in extremity, as Gilgamesh laments the death of his companion Enkidu, watching worms crawl out of Enkidu’s neck. What horror we embody in reciting death’s progress. Homer sings of heroes as they die in battle, and Priam weeps to see his son Hector’s body dragged around the walls of Troy. Virgil follows Aeneas from the graveyard of Troy to the founding of Rome, Dido’s pyre flaming on the way. In the fifteenth century, poetry departed England after Chaucer and emigrated north to the Scots, where William Dunbar wrote his elegy for the makers—in Greek, a poet is a “maker”—and grieved over twenty-five dead and dying Scots poets. Not a line from these poets remains. In “Lament for the Makaris” Dunbar writes:

I that in heill wes and gladnes,

Am trublit now with gret seiknes,

And feblit with infermitie;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He hes done petuously devour

The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,

The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He hes Blind Hary and Sandy Traill

Slaine with his schour of mortall haill,

Quhilk Patrik Johnestoun might nocht fle;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The refrain translates as “The fear of death confounds me,” but “conturbat” is more violent than “confounds.” When I learn that Blind Harry and Sandy Traill are dead, the fear of death shakes me as a dog shakes a rat. A few years later, in Shakespeare’s English, not in Scots, Hamlet dies, Lear dies, Macbeth dies. In Milton’s “Lycidas,” the vowels of lament are golden, as erotic in sound as Paradise Lost, but the grief is formal not intimate, literary not literal. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. embodies grief before resolving it by theology. The profoundest or most mournful American lament is Whitman’s for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” A great elegy from the seventeenth century, rooted among the best poems of the English language, is Henry King’s “The Exequy”:

Accept thou Shrine of my dead Saint,

Insteed of Dirges this complaint;

And for sweet flowres to crown thy hearse,

Receive a strew of weeping verse . . .

His bride has died in her twenties: “Thou scarce had’st seen so many years / As Day tells houres . . .” In almost a hundred lines, tetrameter couplets hurtling with a passion of grief, King looks ahead to his own death and inevitable reunion with his bride. It is not compensatory.

Sleep on my Love in thy cold bed

Never to be disquieted!

My last good night! Thou wilt not wake

Till I thy fate shall overtake:

Till age, or grief, or sickness must

Marry my body to that dust

It so much loves; and fill the room

My heart keeps empty in thy Tomb.

When Jane and I lived here together, we suffered the deaths of dear friends and cousins. Edna Powers, granddaughter of my grandfather’s brother, was a parishioner of the South Danbury Christian Church. Large, affectionate, warm, outspoken, Edna died in her fifties on the operating table at the Franklin Hospital when the surgeon opened her body to find a universe of cancer. We wept, we wept, we wept. To Jane I read Henry King’s “Exequy” aloud.

When death, as public as a president or as private as a lover, overwhelms us, it speaks itself in elegy’s necropoetics, be the subject a twenty-five-year-old bride or Enkidu or Edna Powers or Blind Harry or Abraham Lincoln or Jane Kenyon. When Jane died, “The Exequy” kept me company again.

When I was nine or ten, generations of uncles and cousins went into the ground. At Great-Aunt Jenny’s funeral, Great-Uncle George felt a pain in his back. We buried him two months later. I woke in the night hearing myself declare, “Now death has become a reality.” At twelve my first poem was “The End of All.” As late as 1975, ecstatic as I returned to boyhood’s New Hampshire farm, I remembered its horses and finished a poem by burying them. At one point I decided that if we flattered death it might spare us, so I wrote “Praise for Death.” Of course death didn’t belong only to horses. Between my two years at Oxford, I returned to the United States to marry my first wife. My New Hampshire grandparents couldn’t attend the wedding—the year before, my grandfather suffered malfunction in a heart valve—and after the wedding, before sailing to England, we had only a day to drive to the farm. I had spent my childhood summers there, listening to my grandfather Wesley Wells’s stories, haying with him every afternoon, at dinner eating my grandmother’s chicken fricassee or red flannel hash. My grandfather was my life’s center, the measure of everything. My bride and I arrived the day after our wedding, she met Kate and Wesley, we ate a hen fresh from the henyard, we chatted, and when Kirby and I started upstairs for sleep, Wesley could not help but tell a funny story. The night he and Kate married, Kate’s cousin Freeman had wired a cowbell to their bedsprings.

Three days later we boarded the Queen Elizabeth for England and Oxford. In March came the airmail letter from my mother—transatlantic telephone calls had to be scheduled—which told me that my family was burying my grandfather. In our Banbury Road flat there was a room where I worked on poems. For a week, for a month, for a season, I sat at my desk writing “Elegy for Wesley Wells,” fiercely iambic, making him the high point of the dying world. “Soon I will leave, to cross the hilly sea / And walk again among the familiar hills / In dark New Hampshire where his widow wakes.”

Two and a half years after our wedding, our first child was born. When the baby turned out to be a boy, we named him after my father and me, Donald Andrew Hall. We would call him Andrew. When mother and son came home from the hospital, my wife’s breastfeeding was insufficient. Every night with pleasure I gave him his 2 a.m. bottle. Every day I worked on a poem called “My Son My Executioner.” The New Yorker published it, an anthologist put it in a college textbook, teachers assigned it, and for decades textbook anthologies reprinted it. I was the fellow whose son walked him to the gallows.

My son, my executioner,

I take you in my arms,

Quiet and small and just astir

And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument

Of immortality,

Your cries and hungers document

Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,

Who seemed to live forever,

Observe enduring life in you

And start to die together.

In Andrew’s first autumn, Kirby enrolled for her senior year of college. We had married after her junior year. For a year I fed Andrew breakfast in our flat while his mother took classes and studied or wrote papers at the library. I gave him his bath, played with him, changed his diaper, put him down for his morning nap, changed his diaper again, walked around with the baby on my shoulder, and gave him another bottle. At noon Kirby relieved me.

My father turned fifty-two on December 6, 1955. He died of lung cancer two weeks later, and we buried him on Christmas Eve in the Whitneyville Cemetery in Hamden, Connecticut, a block from the house he grew up in. During his seven months of dying, I lived two hours away and drove to see him once a week. He could not speak outright of his approaching death. In a low voice that cracked and shuddered, he murmured, “If anything . . . should happen . . . to me . . .” I turned twenty-seven as he was dying. Week after week I watched as his skin paled, he grew frail, he grew frailer, he sank silently down and down. My mother Lucy rubbed his head, rubbed his head, rubbed his balding head. He died a few hours before my weekly visit. The last time I sat with him alive, I thought that every breath might be his last. Not yet had I observed brain-stem breathing—three quick breaths, a pause, and a last long breath—which I would watch as my ninety-seven-year-old grandmother died, and twenty years later my wife.

Everyone was there for my father’s funeral. My grandmother took the train from New Hampshire, from the tiny depot of Gale, three-quarters of a mile south of the farm. She wore her Sunday black dress. Kirby brought Andrew, and I remember him playing with a plastic toy telephone. My mother Lucy, a widow at fifty-two, hadn’t had a night’s sleep for many months. She would live until almost ninety-one without dating another man. It was cold, Christmas Eve, as we buried him in early darkness on almost the shortest day of the year.

For many months afterward I worked on “Christmas Eve in Whitneyville.” I used Thomas Gray’s stanza if not the characteristic rhythms of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” It was the best poem I had written, and it lamented that my father never did what he wanted to do. “ ‘The things I had to miss,’ you said last week, / ‘Or thought I had to, take my breath away.’ ” I decided that for the rest of my life I would do what I wanted to do. I sent the poem to the Kenyon Review, the prestigious literary magazine of its day, and John Crowe Ransom accepted it, calling it “pious.”

Forty years later, my poems in Without resonated with Jane’s pain of dying and with my pain of witness. Jane’s own necropoems began earlier, when her father died. During his cancer she and I flew from New Hampshire to Michigan and with her mother took turns staying up all night beside him. Three years after her father died, Jane’s poems encountered my almost-death. I lost half of my liver to cancer. My surgeon said that after such an operation a man of my age had a thirty percent chance of living five years. We wept driving home from the hospital. Soon...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Notes Nearing Ninety
• You Are Old
• Solitude Double Solitude
• Dictaters
• In Praise of Paragraphs
• My New Hampshire Grandmother
• Seven Hundred Words
• Losing My Teeth
• Depravity
• Paris 1951
• Cutting a Figure
• “The Wild Heifers”
• Sycophants and Sisters
• Geography
• The Beard Generation
• The Vaper
• Generations of Politics
• The Return of David
• Wuk, Woik, Work
• The Dictated Pig
• Roads to Rome
• The Stapled World
• Open the Damned Door
• Civilization
• Your Latest Book
• Walking to Portsmouth
• Pharmacies and Treasuries
• The Last Poem
• Anonymous
• Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
• Who I Am
• The Selected Poets of Donald Hall
• Theodore Roethke
• Robert Creeley
• Louis M ac Neice
• W. C. W.
• John Holmes
• Stephen Spender
• Geoffrey Hill
• James Dickey
• Allen Tate
• Edwin and Willa Muir
• Kenneth Rexroth
• Seamus Heaney
• Joseph Brodsky
• Prosaic Laureates
• Richard Wilbur
• E. E. Cummings
• Tom Clark and the Lower East Side
• James Wright
• Necropoetics
• A Carnival of Losses
• Milltowns
• My Connecticut Grandfather
• Mudfish Pissing
• Richard at Oxford
• From Andrew All the Way to Lucy
• The World of Meats
• The Triple Thinker
• The Worst Thing
• Five of Them
• The Boys March Home
• Down Cellar
• Reviewing My Life
• An Old Hermit Named Garrison
• Fucking
• The Widow’s House
• War Cards
• Abstract Expressionism
• Amo Amas Amat
• Frying Pulp
• There’s One, There’s One
• Romance
• Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Frankenstein, and T. S. Eliot
• Way Way Down, Way Way Up
• Tree Day
• Acknowledgments
• Read More from Donald Hall
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH