- A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018
September 20 would have been Donald Hall’s 90th birthday, but he died three months earlier, on June 23, just weeks before the publication of his final book, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety.
Death is something Hall, the former United States Poet Laureate, has met head-on throughout his career, and in Carnival of Losses he continues to do so; but, as he did in his previous book, Essays After Eighty, he does it with sometimes wry humor.
“When I was young,” he writes, “my language wore coats and shirts and trousers, neckties, bespoke shoes. In my lifetime as a writer I have cast off layer after layer of clothing in pursuit of nudity. … As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin. … Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?”
If the book does hold anything back, it at least drops hints. There may have been a gentle rivalry between him and his wife, Jane Kenyon, a former student of his who quickly rose to a prominence that sometimes overshadowed his own. Yet any envy was dwarfed by his admiration of the “sensuous beauty” of her writing.
She certainly was his inspiration, both while they were together and in the decades since her death. For years after she died, his works were passionate with grief and rage, and she remains alive in his mind even as he pens his final words.
“The year Jane brought out her first book, I brought out my seventh,” he writes. “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.”
And he is honest: “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.”
Hall makes reference to brilliant poets of the past whom most people have forgotten and implies that he expects to be similarly forgotten, with many of his own books of poetry no longer in print.
Perhaps the most telling chapter is “Solitude Double Solitude,” in which he recalls Kenyon’s death. “Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.”
Along with the darkness, however, come moments of self-effacing humor, when Hall writes about false teeth that won’t stay in, pants that fall down, impaired driving skills that take down his garage door, and friends who forget who they are.
“In your eighties you are invisible,” he writes. “Nearing ninety you hope nobody sees you. At nineteen you were six feet two. At ninety-one you will be two foot six.”
In talking about the pitfalls of using dictation to write letters, where sound-alike words can be mistaken, he recalls that Stephen Jay Gould wrote to him at “Ego Pond Farm” rather than Eagle Pond Farm. Yet he admits that his penchant for listing the number of drafts it takes to complete a poem or a book of essays is something that satisfies his ego. (During our single visit together last year, he boasted that he had completed more than 80 drafts of A Carnival of Losses.)
Revelations
Hall provides the background to The New Yorker’s decision to publish his essay, “The Wild Heifers,” his first effort at prose (written in 18 drafts, he notes) while living in England. The New Yorker initially rejected it, but Hall later included it in his book, String Too Short To Be Saved, which caught the attention of E.B. White and, through him, Roger Angell, who had become a New Yorker editor. Angell contacted Hall about publishing “The Wild Heifers” and another essay from the book in The New Yorker.
“In delight and revenge,” Hall writes, “I told him that The New Yorker had rejected ‘The Wild Heifers.’ … He apologized with chagrin and asked me never, ever, to tell anyone this story.”
Hall offers candid views about his contemporaries, including Stephen Spender, with whom he co-edited The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry.
“Stephen talked well on any subject other than poetry,” Hall writes.
On James Dickey: “Often Jim Dickey, like John Berryman, was drunk when he read his poems.”
Allen Tate: “My recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy.”
Hall turns a similar spotlight on himself and the creative process, confessing “the worst thing I ever did” — “I recollect shameful moments in my first marriage, and in behavior with my small son,” he writes.
Living outside of Boston, he wrote his poems on a desk in the cellar. One day, when he was eager to get back to a poem, his son, Andrew was standing in the way, and Hall brushed past him. Andrew hung to Hall’s leg, calling, “Daddy, Daddy!”
“‘You’re a bad boy,’ I told him in rage,” Hall writes. “I hooked the door shut, climbed down to my desk, and picked up my pen.”
Coming to the end of his life in the farmhouse that been in his mother’s family for generations, Hall worried that no one would take over the property when he died.
“After Jane died and the grandchildren aged toward college, I realized that nobody would. None would be freelance writers. Only retired rich folks live deep in the countryside. After I died my offspring would empty the house,” he writes.
Then, after staying alive and staying alive, he said, his granddaughter, Allison, took him aside during one of his birthday parties, and said she and her husband, Will, would move into Eagle Pond Farm when he died.
“And those were the happiest words I ever heard,” he says.
