Donald
Hall’s new collection of essays, Essays
After Eighty, came out a couple weeks ago. “Oh frabjous day!” Let’s be
honest, we had given the man up for dead more than twenty years past when his
colon cancer metastasized to his liver. He survived that to endure the
horrendous loss of Jane Kenyon. Then, in his words, poetry abandoned him (Poetry is sex, according to the Donald Hall Lost Muse
Theorem; sex requires testosterone; testosterone decreases with age). So he was
left to write prose in his celebrated blue chair by the window; then, with one
of his stupid cigarettes, he accidentally set fire to the blue chair, which was
hauled outside and put to death by axe-wielding firemen. Old age, as he writes,
is “a ceremony of losses.”
I admit
to a weakness for Hall’s prose, partly because of what he did to mine years
ago. He pared and whittled my essays and helped me understand the delights of
revision. But he turned me into such a slavish disciple that he finally said, “Don’t
let me turn your prose into a telegram.” I think most writers write — whether
anything from essay to e-mail — with a couple people looking over their
shoulders. I’m no exception, and Don Hall is almost always there. (And I
suspect as I get more prolix with age, he gets unhappier with me.) (And he
doesn’t like all these parentheses either).
Mostly,
my admiration for his work begins in the voice, hence my pleasure at
hearing/reading that voice again. I can yoke “hearing” and “reading” because
some of the same qualities come through both. These are undefinable, but
unmistakable, qualities that define the essence of the man. They emerge from
the round tones of the podium — as he likes to say, “We rise to assonance.”
They riff off the ground rhythm of the language — he once told me that he and
Donald Justice would carry on conversations in iambs. They grow directly from
his tone — the Harvard bite of clever, the sly New Hampshire wit, the genuine
and naked laugh.
But I
should get out of the way and let the words speak for themselves. Here’s a
paragraph that talks about the lost muse.
“Poems are image-bursts from
brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels. As I grew older — collapsing
into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into
eighty-five — poetry abandoned me. How could I complain after seventy years of
diphthongs? The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual. The shadow mind pours
out metaphors — at first poets may not understand what they say — that lead to emotional
revelation. For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of
hormones. When testosterone diminishes . . .” [Hall’s ellipsis]
I read
this paragraph slowly and carefully, and I think it’s maybe only the line break,
not the poetry, that has abandoned him. But the metaphors don’t “pour out”
anymore; now he writes what he sees, and he tells stories. And if you’re 86 and
still writing, the truth is never far away.
“Old age
sits in a chair, writing a little and diminishing. Exhaustion limits energy.
Yesterday my first nap was at nine-thirty a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.”
“[A]mbition
no longer has plans for the future—except these essays. My goal in life is
making it to the bathroom. In the past I was often advised to live in the
moment. Now what else can I do?”
“In the
morning [my companion] stirs quantities of sweet onion and five-year-old
cheddar into a four-egg omelet, which is outstanding. She leaves to teach
French 4. I pick up my pen.”
Pick it
up, again.
But then
the guy watching over my shoulder tells me, “Essays, like poems and stories and
novels, marry heaven and hell . . . . [I]f the essay doesn’t include
contraries, however small they may be, the essay fails.” Okay.
At
eighty, Hall surrendered his license after two minor accidents, giving up what
was left of his physical independence. Soon after, he dreamed he was in a
frightening house, wanting to escape, searching for a door he couldn’t find. He
was in a house without doors. Then, in real life, he unwittingly left a
cigarette ember in his blue chair. During the night, he was startled awake by a
smoke alarm and saw smoke pouring into his bedroom through the door. The Life Alert
he wore around his neck saved him.
Imagine
a smoldering and shredded blue chair standing alone in the snow, a chair that
hosted decades of writing. Or just imagine being 86 years old. Is that contrary
enough?
********
All quotations are from Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).
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