Conversations with Donald Hall

I finally got to meet Donald Hall on July 1 of last year. He was waiting for my arrival at his Wilmot farmhouse, and I saw him in the window, waving me inside. He was sitting in his favorite blue chair, his Rollator in front of him, his long hair in disarray and his beard just as wild.

There was no preliminary greeting, as if we had been friends for years and I was just making a casual visit. I reached out my hand to shake his, and he obliged, but in a perfunctory manner, his mind clearly elsewhere. He was anxious to talk.

Perhaps the familiarity was a result of the months we had spent exchanging emails in order to set up that meeting. Exchanging emails was a lengthy process because the former U.S. Poet Laureate did not own a computer. In fact, he did not type. He dictated his messages to his “amanuensis” Kendel, a neighbor who would type them into an email and then print out the replies to bring back to him.

She also was typing his manuscripts from his handwritten versions, including his latest, “A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety,” which he said he had revised more than 80 times and which was due for publication in July 2018. A couple of months after its publication, he noted, he would be 90.

That was not to be. Donald Hall died on June 23, too early to see the reviews for his latest work.

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During the first of our emails, when I was hoping to get him to speak at an event at the New Hampshire Mountain Inn (he declined, saying, “I live on one floor here, and walk only by pushing a rollator. I’m 88, and not the kind of 88-year-old who climbs Mt. Kearsarge.”) he surprised me by asking, “Do you have a draft of my obituary?”

After I responded, “Good heavens, I wouldn’t look forward to publishing your obituary!” he wrote, “I didn’t mean that you would be exactly looking forward to it! At 88, when one encounters an obituary writer, I think such topics are bound to occur.”

He continued by saying, “I feel well these days … but I get very tired talking with friends and family — or interviewers, for that matter. I would be pretty solid for one hour, maybe lively for half an hour! I can write longer than that, I can dictate letters longer than that — but real people tire me out.”

 •••

Four months later, I sat down opposite him to hold our first conversation — not an interview, for he’d had enough of those through the years — and, of course, it had to begin with the day that changed his life.

In his autobiography, “String Too Short To Be Saved”, he recounts the experience when he was about 10, accompanying his grandfather to an auction on New Canada Road at the site of the present-day New Hampshire Mountain Inn.

“That was the day I learned that things do not last forever,” he told me.

It made a profound impression on young Donny Hall to realize that the two old farmers who owned the property were losing it, and would have to move to a shack on property his grandfather gave to them. He recalled seeing a box of letters being auctioned off — someone’s memories being sold to the highest bidder.

“My grandfather bought a scythe for 25 cents,” he recalled.

Speaking now with an old man’s voice, he nevertheless became animated and spoke with greater clarity as he recalled life with his grandfather, whom he adored. He would sit beside his grandfather on a milking stool while the old farmer would recite poetry he had learned in school and tell stories about his life and that of the neighbors around them.

Donald Hall would draw from that past and that ground and those people in much of his later poetry and prose works. He recalled a farming community that, a quarter of a century later, when he returned to the Wilmot farm, had been transformed into a different world, where farms were rare; but the close-knit nature of the community remained.

He acknowledged the different classes of people there: Although no one was rich, the farm owners were much wealthier than those they hired for $2 per week. Yet they all went to church together and they all were equal. When he and Jane Kenyon moved back to Wilmot, he was greeted by, “Welcome back, Donny!”

I asked him how the farmers, as busy as they were, had been able to find time to read and memorize poetry. He said the poems his grandfather recited were those he had learned in school, and the books he read were that day’s equivalent to romance novels, which his grandfather read over and over. He noted that his grandmother, although she had learned Greek and Latin at Franklin High School, never made use of that knowledge, and she certainly did not share her husband’s sense of humor. She had one joke she would always tell when called upon, and to her it was hilarious. It had to do with a cousin, I think, who went to gather the eggs, and the punchline was along the lines of “I laid an egg in your bed.”

His interest in poetry came early, and he was submitting his poems to national publications at age 14. He kept getting rejection slips, but one of them, from The New Yorker, said, “If you’re really only 14, you’ve got talent, so keep it up,” or words to that effect, he told me.

He did keep it up, and finally got accepted.

Once he had his foot in the door, he got accepted more widely, appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

Much of what he wrote was published in what he termed “school publications” — college literary magazines. However, the poems themselves could not sustain him; he ended up teaching literature as his paying career. It was not until he had married Jane Kenyon and decided to move to Wilmot that his career as a poet really took off.

He spoke of how frightening it was to quit his teaching job to make a career of poetry. He said it was Jane who convinced him. Her parents had been entertainers, and she was familiar with making a go of it as a freelancer, and convinced him it would be possible. He had set aside enough money to sustain them for a year, and they took the plunge.

Interestingly, it was a children's book, “The Ox Cart Man,” that brought him the most fame and success. It has been translated into French, Italian, and even Chinese, he said.

By the time we got to discussing his return to the farm, he was beginning to tire, and abruptly bid me good-bye.

I intended to return this summer and take up the conversation again, and perhaps learn more about his new book. I guess I’ll have to pick it up when it hits the bookstores.

26 June 2018