by Donald Hall
After supper my family always sat reading. My father read Time or a Kenneth Roberts historical novel while he smoked his pipe. With her Chesterfields my mother looked at Reader’s Digest or Thoreau or Agatha Christie or Robert Frost. Often I glanced at a copy of Collier’s. In the thirties, forties, and fifties—before television, when radio programs offered us only Jack Benny and Fred Allen—everyone inhabited the stapled world of magazines. Life printed Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph of World War II’s conclusion, the sailor kissing the nurse on V-J Day. If I didn’t pick up Life, maybe I picked up the Saturday Evening Post, with its immortal covers by Norman Rockwell. When Collier’s and the Post published fiction, it was mostly maudlin and adorable, but sometimes slick magazines helped out a future Nobel laureate. William Faulkner published “A Rose for Emily” in the Saturday Evening Post.
Television ended the static entertainment of magazines. Collier’s died in 1957, the weekly Saturday Evening Post in 1963, and the weekly Life in 1972. When I quit teaching and went freelance in 1975, fewer stapled sources were available to support a writer, but some magazines endured for a while, and I made a living by writing for them. In the eighties and nineties, a New England monthly named Yankee paid me $4,000 four times a year, each time for an essay of a thousand words. Playboy paid an enormous sum in 1975 for my essay “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,” and Reader’s Digest reprinted it. In the new century, fees have considerably lessened. A few years ago, a diminished Playboy printed three new essays of mine, and the three stipends together amounted to less than 1975’s single check.
Open the Damned Door
In 2005 I put a new roof on this house. Or rather, Steve Colburn did, overseeing a gang that kneeled precariously to remove old shingles and nail on new ones. There was always something. The next winter, snow piled three feet thick on the shingles of the barn, which dated from 1865. The old roof sagged and groaned from the snow’s weight, and my helpers groaned and sagged as they swept snow to the ground. In June Steve installed metal over the spongy shingles, so that now the snows of winter slide off without being pushed.
When my great-grandfather moved here in 1865, he extended this 1803 cape by adding four new bedrooms upstairs for his kids, with a kitchen and a toolshed on the ground floor beneath them. Past the toolshed, under the same roof, a small door led to the woodshed, and beyond it to the outhouse, which had collapsed by the time Jane and I arrived in 1975. I loved the skinny maple latch that fastened the door from toolshed to woodshed, its surface shiny from a century of ancestral hands. My great-grandfather was five foot three, so I bent over when I went for wood. At first our only heat came from firewood. All winter I carried armfuls to the woodstoves, twelve loads a day, seven cords a winter.
After ten years we put in central heat, and decades later Steve took down the woodshed, replacing it with a garage. He planned to heighten my great-grandfather’s low door, but I wanted to stoop for my great-grandfather’s sake. (In time I stooped anyway.) It was three steps down from the toolshed to the garage floor, so Steve put in a cement incline that eased me down. Without subjecting myself to snow or rain, I could walk from my living room through the kitchen and toolshed down to the Honda. The last thing Steve added was an electric garage door. As I bent into my new garage, I pressed a button on the wall to roll up the door, then drove to the bookstore in New London or to Cricenti’s Supermarket for a jar of mustard. When you work all day doing one thing, like writing books, you need to take breaks.
Years earlier when I lived in a city, I parallel parked, but after three decades of Route 4 I had forgotten how to aim a car backward. Leaving my house for a doctor’s appointment, I snapped a side mirror off. (My dealer charged $150 to replace it.) That wasn’t the worst thing. One Sunday morning I felt like going to church, and it was almost 11. I hurried to the car and backed out, neglecting to open the door. The collision was minimal, but the door bulged and stuck. No car, no church. I telephoned Steve. He pulled into the driveway and lifted the door up—“brute strength,” said Carole, who accompanied him—but the door would no longer close by pressing a button. Steve would come back tomorrow with tools. I missed church, but I drove to Cricenti’s for a jar of pickled onions.
Two weeks later I backed into it again. Steve had to buy me a new door. My assistant Kendel—typing, bookkeeping, everything—painted OPEN DOOR above the proper button. Steve installed a pad underfoot that opened the door when I stepped on it. I forgot to step on it and three weeks later backed into the door again. Winter came, and when it snowed I remembered to open the door, but in a February thaw I knocked it into the front yard. While Steve ordered yet another door, Kendel painted large letters on the garage’s back wall in front of me as I climbed behind the wheel: OPEN THE DAMNED DOOR. Later still, she put reminders on the steering wheel and dashboard, and Carole installed a bell that tinkled as I clambered down the ramp, except that I ducked.
Then I totaled my car on Route 4 and lost my license. No more car, no more driving into the garage door! It was a relief, but I never bought pickled onions or mustard again.
Civilization
When I worked on my profile of Henry Moore, I spent long afternoons talking with the sculptor while he sat in his studio poking at waxes or stood outdoors watching assistants alter huge reclining figures before they went to the foundry. I also interviewed several of Moore’s friends and supporters, including Kenneth Clark. Civilization was half a decade ahead, Clark’s thirteen-part BBC television series that PBS rebroadcast in the United States. When I interviewed Clark he was not yet a peer—Civilization made him Baron Clark of Saltwood—but he was already eminent and powerful as an art historian and museum director. At thirty he had been appointed director of the National Gallery, then during World War II he protected paintings from Nazi bombs, hiding them in Wales in the remains of Roman salt mines. Clark had been early to praise Henry Moore. The philistine English press ridiculed all modern art, and every Moore exhibition was the occasion for mockery. It helped Henry Moore that the National Gallery’s director praised him in public. Clark promoted Moore’s outdoor sculpture in the 1951 Festival of Britain.
In 1955 Clark bought Saltwood Castle in Kent, a stone fortress originally constructed by the Normans in the twelfth century. It was here that Thomas Becket’s 1170 murder was plotted. I arrived at a nearby depot on a spring morning, and Clark himself drove me to his castle. I looked out the window at swaths of grass drifting uphill toward stately houses with acres of garden. “In England,” said Kenneth Clark, “the rich are still very rich.” The Clarks lived in the one remaining tower of Saltwood. As we talked in the living room, drinking tea, around us hung pieces of the Renaissance, of the School of Paris, of Ben Nicholson, John Piper, and Henry Moore. Mrs. Clark spoke nervously of a son in New York, and appeared to want me to look after him, which embarrassed her husband. I absorbed the luxury of old French furniture as well as the splendid display of great art in a twelfth-century castle. What abundance they lived in, what centuries of stone.
As I left, I congratulated the Clarks on their castle and mentioned how fortunate it was that Saltwater had survived the Nazis’ Baedeker raids. Clark told me that after the war England learned why the Luftwaffe spared the castle: Hermann Göring expected to live there.
Your Latest Book
When a writer has published a number of books, there is a phrase he or she frequently hears when introduced to a stranger in the literature business. Someone busy with books—a frequent reviewer, the CEO of a publishing house, an agent, an archivist eager for manuscript—meets the writer and forgets the title of a book the writer just published, which the stranger hasn’t read. Always he says the same thing: “Your latest book, I think, is the best thing you’ve done.” One literary stranger forgot not only a title but a genre. He praised my latest novel.
Walking to Portsmouth
My cousin Paul Fenton—his mother was my grandfather’s sister—was a dairy farmer, tall and lean, a Democrat who sometimes taught agricultur
e at the state college and who loved to tell stories. Back in the thirties and forties, on Sundays people with cars visited people who didn’t have cars. (My grandparents had Riley, the lame horse.) The older callers had grown up before radio, when living room tales or recitations had been everybody’s entertainment. The middle-aged and the young paid silent attention to stories, and when the old ones died I thought the countryside would lose its stories along with its storytellers. But when Jane and I moved to the New Hampshire farm in 1975, neighbors and family still came calling in the afternoon—no work on Sunday, no church after the noontime dinner—as they had done thirty years earlier, when I spent childhood summers here with my grandparents. The mute middle-agers of my childhood had become the old storytellers.
One Sunday afternoon that first year, Paul Fenton and his wife Bertha came calling. Paul sat on the sofa across from Jane and me while Bertha spoke of their farmer son. Looking at Paul, I saw his mouth curl up at the corners. He had thought of a story. When Bertha finished speaking, Paul said, “Did you ever hear the one about the fellow, lived around here, every year in October he loaded his cart with everything the farm and family’d made all year—homespun, maple syrup, linen, maybe mittens, vinegar—and walked by his ox all the way to Portsmouth? He sold everything from the cart. Then he sold the cart.” He paused. “Then he sold the ox.”
When the ox-cart man sold his ox, my spine went electric. Paul kept on and told how the ox-cart man brought presents home for his family, walking with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder. The next morning I started a short poem called “Ox-Cart Man.” After six months I thought I’d finished it. The farmer walked home from Portsmouth in October, and in May began putting things together for next fall’s journey. I sold the poem to The New Yorker and sent carbon copies to friends. The response was good, but my poet friend Louis Simpson saw something wrong. He told me to cut the last stanza of the poem, where the ox-cart man, back home, started to undertake the next autumn’s repetitive shape. As soon as the farmer returned from market to his young ox in the barn, the cycle was obvious. I cut the repetitive tasks and tried the revision on The New Yorker. They liked it. They thought maybe there was something wrong at the end. Here’s the finished poem:
In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar’s portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart’s floor.
He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hooped by hand at the forge’s fire.
He walks by his ox’s head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.
When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,
and at home by fire’s light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year’s ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again.
Not long after the magazine printed the poem, my daughter Philippa visited us from college, nineteen years old. She was resting on the sofa as I walked toward my workroom—and a thought burst into my head: Paul Fenton’s story could make a children’s book! Did I think of it because I remembered reading picture books to Philippa? In forty-five minutes at my desk I wrote a draft. The next afternoon I took it up again. I needed to imagine the ox-cart man’s world, and decided he lived in 1800. There would be no trains—the railroad came through here in 1848—and I knew about dirt roads. What did Portsmouth look like? If the farmer brought things home for his wife and children, what would he bring? (My picture book would need a wife and children.) Beside me at my desk was A Treasury of New England Folklore. I found a drawing of old Portsmouth, brick houses with no electric lines or telephones. Its harbor, bigger back then than Boston’s, was crowded with sailing ships. The ox-cart man brought home convenient objects manufactured not in the infant United States but in England.
When someone asks me about how I write, I brag about my numerous drafts and the months it takes to revise, but writing this picture book took me about three hours. I broke the prose sentences into lines so that it looked like a poem, which it wasn’t. By visibly separating phrases of my sentences, I slowed the story down.
and for his daughter he bought an embroidery needle
that came from a boat in the harbor
that had sailed all the way from England,
and for his son he bought a Barlow knife,
for carving birch brooms with
and for the whole family he bought two pounds
of wintergreen peppermint candies.
Early in the book I listed one by one the items that the ox-cart man put in his cart, and in Portsmouth I had him remove them for sale, in the opposite order. I made a mistake in my listing. The ox-cart man put linen in the cart but he never took it out. Schoolchildren wrote to ask me what happened to the linen. I told them it was a long walk to Portsmouth and the ox got hungry.
For the picture book I added to the story something that never would have happened. Modern kids would be shocked when the man sold his ox—as if he peddled his pet spaniel—yet selling the ox was the climax to the story. So I had the ox-cart man kiss his ox goodbye. My illustrator seized the opportunity. Years later, the children’s television show Reading Rainbow showed its viewers the slobbering muzzle of a real ox.
When I finished the manuscript, I sent it to my literary agent, who tried the book on my regular publisher. Immediately Harper and Row turned it down. My agent tried the Viking Press and immediately they took it. Viking wrote to ask me if Barbara Cooney would do as an illustrator. Thank goodness she took it on. She visited Portsmouth, almost intact from 1800, and painted it without electric wires. In old photographs she looked at, a brace of oxen pulled a cart. She couldn’t find a picture of a cart with only one ox and asked me if I could describe a one-ox arrangement. I helped her out. My cousin Freeman Morrison, long dead, had lived in a shack on Ragged Mountain and kept a beloved ox named George Washington. Freeman liked to pose for a picture with George pulling his ox cart. I mailed Barbara Cooney my 1939 Kodak Brownie snapshot of Freeman standing beside his single-ox ox cart.
The book was published one November in an edition of 20,000 copies. In January it became known that it would receive the Caldecott—the major prize for picture books—and Viking printed another 80,000 copies, a representation of the Caldecott Medal imprinted on each jacket. Sales were astonishing. I have no notion of how many copies have sold over the years. First the hardback paid not only for our groceries but for our mortgage. It also bought something even more important. Jane and I had loved living in this old family house together from the moment we moved in, but its old bathroom was deplorable. In 1938, with the help of Sears, Roebuck, my grandparents had replaced the outhouse with a cold, spidery, dusty bathroom, its bathtub the size of its toilet bowl, accessible only from the dining room. Jane and I decided that we could make a splendid bathroom where our old bedroom was, and add a new bedroom to the back of the house—if ever we had enough money. Nailed above the entrance to the new bathroom is a plaque: THE CALDECOTT ROOM.
The book came out in paperback. The text was much translated. To my surprise, a Japanese edition went into printing after printing. During the Cold War, the State Department sent Jane and me to Japan to read our poems and talk about American poetry. Therefore I was introduced not only as a poet but as the author of a children’s book. In Sapporo for a poetry reading, my host had me read the book in English, then he read aloud the Japanese translation. Later it wa
s a bestseller in South Korea, still later a continual smash hit in China. In my late eighties I pay for a new rollator and my Lean Cuisines with South Asian royalties.
Thanks to Paul Fenton, who smiled as he remembered a story. I should have kissed him on the muzzle.
Pharmacies and Treasuries
Drugstores in America used to be small, with one pharmacist. Today a CVS or a Rite Aid flourishes with an army of clerks under an acre of roof, selling canned soup, wheelchairs, sneakers, nurse practitioners, extension cords, ATMs, powdered milk, bicycles, pancake mix, canned hams, UPS, and aspirin. These mega-emporia lack a soda fountain, which old drugstores favored, where you could sit on a stool to sip a cherry Coke assembled by the pharmacist. The same chap in the old days could manufacture a chocolate sundae with a maraschino cherry on top, or under duress combine powders for your grandmother’s arthritis. There was one other item that you’ll never find in a Rite Aid. Books!