Donald Hall was a poet laureate of the United States for one year. This was a recognition and sadly, a culmination of decades of prodigious poetry writing. (He frankly admits to not being a productive poet during his tenure, and resigned a year later.) He wrote more than 20 books, many (but not all) of poetry. He also wrote for children, on baseball, and on art.
Essays After Eighty is just that: a book of fourteen essays spanning a brief 134 pages. These are memories of a life well-lived and well-enjoyed. From his pre-war youth in Wilmot, NH to his years in France with his first wife, Kirby. From his appointment as a teacher at the University of Michigan to the breakdown of his first marriage and a rather late period of sexual liberation in his 40s (if my math is right). From his meeting his second wife, the poet Jane Keynon (almost a generation younger than him) to moving back to his native New Hampshire. From fighting a battle with cancer and winning -- to finding out that Jane had leukemia and seeing her die of it only 15 months later. From the first signs of fear of old age:
"Earlier, if I was 51 and the [recently departed] cadaver was 53, for a moment I felt anxious. If the dead man was 51 and I was 53, I felt relief."to the inevitable comicality of later old age for those of us who (may) reach it:
"As I escorted my date to New London's Millstone one night, the hostess asked if my companion was my granddaughter. We both shrieked "No!" and never saw the hostess again. Most of my dates were mistaken for daughters, not granddaughters."Hall pokes humor at his increasing physical frailty, at the ever-approaching bugaboo (he's much too jovial to justify specter) of death, and at the tragi-comedy of otherwise banal life. His memories are fresh and refreshing despite having taken 85 years to ferment in a 150 year old house built by his great grandfather. There is death everywhere in this book: his parents, grandparents, an aunt, both wives, his dog Gus, a casually killed garter snake -- "I stepped on its head and threw it outside", woodchucks, an almost-pet chipmunk, and almost-vermin mice. There's even time to genially mourn the destruction of a comfortable blue armchair by exuberant firemen. Yet this is a book about mortality, not morbidity. Hall does rue that one day, there will be no one left to remember what he remembers -- which is a lot: from the New England Hurricane of 1939, Pearl Harbor, VE Day, VJ day, JFK, Vietnam to 9-11 and Usain Bolt. However, he never lets the book sink into self-loathing or even self-pity. Even as he contemplates his present life -- living only on the first floor of his ancient house, microwaving Stouffer's TV dinners while inching towards his kitchen with his walker in a knee-brace, and eating these dinners alone with his dentures and a Red Sox game on TV -- he is ebullient:
"My problem isn't death but old age."Or even more magnanimously:
"Not everything in old age is grim."It may have taken him the better part of 9 decades, but Donald Hall sure has a poignant insight about the relevance of it all:
"At 16, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs."That's a lesson which we can be thankful to Donald Hall for sharing.
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