A Carnival of Losses

by Donald Hall

  As the grandchildren aged, from grammar school into junior high, every year they were taller and spoke in longer sentences, even in paragraphs. The attraction of the gumball machine endured, and it awaits the great-grandchildren. In the meantime, there was a private school on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, there were demanding public schools in Bow, New Hampshire—and then the University of Chicago for Emily, Vassar for Allison, Bryn Mawr for Ariana, Carleton for Peter, and George Washington for Abigail. After decades of family Thanksgivings and Christmases, five children grew into adults. Emily crossed town to medical school at Northwestern, and Dr. Hall does a residence in Wisconsin. Allison becomes a business consultant headhunted by a major corporation. Ariana finishes a PhD in chemistry at the University of Michigan. Abigail works in Manhattan advertising and flies to Los Angeles for a photo shoot. Peter evaluates objets d’art at a New York auction house.

  As a grandfather approaches his ninetieth birthday, he remembers his mother’s in 1993. Although he lacks great-grandchildren, he chugs on, he chugs on, he chugs on, understanding that eventually each locomotive reaches its roundhouse. My mother was ready to get off the train when it stopped one month shy of her ninety-first birthday.

  The Boys March Home

  My New Hampshire grandmother’s father, Ben Keneston (born 1826), was too old for the war, but my grandfather’s father wasn’t. John Wells was nineteen in 1862 when he enlisted for nine months in the Union army. Although he was a Copperhead, devoted to states’ rights, he fought the rebels to belong to his New Hampshire generation. He died in 1927, the year before I was born. One of my great-grandfathers emigrated from Germany to Connecticut (after Appomattox) to avoid conscription into the Prussian army. Not the other: Charlie Hall was helping to dig the New Haven reservoir when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. At lunch one day he left his job to walk down to the green and enlist for three months. After three months he came home to stay. Late in the war he was drafted—I keep the draft notice in a foldout desk upstairs—and although he made only a workingman’s wages, he borrowed the cash to hire a substitute. Later he made sure that everyone knew he was a patriot. Every Fourth of July he marched in New Haven’s parade, leading Charlie Hall’s Fife and Drum Marching Band.

  Ben Keneston’s youngest child was my grandmother Kate (born 1878). Her elder brother, my uncle Luther (born 1856), sat on the porch with me when he was eighty-six during World War II. He remembered being nine in 1865 and watching the boys march home.

  Down Cellar

  Under the kitchen and living room is the root cellar, dark and damp and crowded with engines of the past. A row of barrels stands against one wall, where apple juice became cider became hard cider became vinegar. My grandfather was teetotal. When his father-in-law took friends to the cellar midwinter—atop one barrel was a metal cup—my grandfather walked back and forth upstairs, face turning red. The final product, a cruet of vinegar, took its place on the dining room table and no one suffered from scurvy.

  Down cellar, you can still find jugs that held molasses. There are wide-topped empty crocks where my grandmother Kate stored pullets’ eggs by the dozen. She filled the crocks with water glass to keep the eggs from spoiling. You did not fry these eggs for breakfast, but you could cook with them all winter. On rows of wooden shelves—the shelves are still there—my grandmother lined up a thousand Ball jars of canned vegetables—peas, pole beans, string beans, corn niblets, beets, lima beans, Brussels sprouts—and tumblers of jellies and jams. I remember in hot summer how the wood-fired Glenwood range boiled vegetables and my grandmother filled the jars, her face as red as the beets she canned.

  When Jane and I moved in, we inventoried the root cellar, finding a few pallid pints of tomatoes. The vinegar barrels were empty. The only life in the cellar was a skunk. My daughter Philippa had come east to a Massachusetts prep school, and sometimes we drove two hours to pick her up on a Friday afternoon and drove her back on Sunday. While she visited we explored the old house with its things from 1865 on. It would have been unseemly to throw anything away. One Sunday morning with Philippa we found something in the root cellar we hadn’t seen before: a jar of maple syrup that my grandfather last made in 1950, three years before he died. We took it upstairs to the kitchen and opened it, scratching out the dried rubber gasket, and I dipped my finger in—twenty-five years ago, sap had dripped from our maples—and it tasted as sweet as if it had just been boiled down. Each of us licked a finger. Jane made pancakes. An hour later the three of us climbed into the Plymouth Six and headed south to Philippa’s school. Somebody rumbled, somebody else rumbled, somebody rumbled all the way to Southborough, Massachusetts. We called it Fart Sunday.

  Reviewing My Life

  Writing books from youth to old age, you learn one or two things. In my twenties and thirties I did a lot of reviewing for papers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the old Saturday Review of Literature, the Los Angeles Times, the expiring New York Herald Tribune. The Trib’s book editor was Irita Van Doren, who asked me to review Marya Zaturenska, wife of Horace Gregory—two more famous poets you’ve never heard of. The Trib wanted a hundred words and would pay twenty-five bucks. I wrote a disdainful review, and the editor replied that, actually, Marya was a good friend and they wouldn’t be able to print my paragraph. Was there anyone else I would like to write about? I praised W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle instead of trashing Marya Zaturenska. It took me a year to admit to myself the corruption I’d been party to.

  An Old Hermit Named Garrison

  Saturday nights Jane and I used to listen to Garrison Keillor doing A Prairie Home Companion. With pleasure we read Keillor’s stories in The New Yorker. We heard him speak a daily poem on his public broadcast Writer’s Almanac. We did not know him. When Jane was diagnosed with leukemia, she received from his Minnesota office a package containing four cassettes of his monologues. How did Keillor know that Jane was sick? He has always known everything about poets.

  He’s also stubborn. Once I was doing a textbook and asked his permission to reprint an essay. He refused because my publisher belonged to a conglomerate, one branch of which had published an unauthorized book about him. I prettypleased him, addressing him as “Garrison.” He wrote back briefly repeating his decision and addressing me as “Mr. Hall.” Later a friend of mine wrote Keillor offering him a prestigious American poetry award, explaining that the honor was for his service to the art. In a handwritten letter he expressed his gratitude, included an inscribed copy of his latest book, and refused the honor. He pointed out that he wasn’t a poet.

  These days the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry Daily display a different poem online every twenty-four hours. Whatever the appetite for a daily poem publicly displayed, clearly it is satisfied. Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac repeats itself digitally as well as audibly—but before the digital universe, for decades, only his radio Almanac delivered a poem coast to coast, 365 days a year. No one has ever promoted poetry so widely as Garrison Keillor.

  Keillor also promoted poetry by drafting poets as guests for Prairie Home Companion, until he retired in 2016. Billy Collins performed seven times that I know of. My total was three. My first appearance celebrated the 100th birthday of Keillor’s St. Paul homeboy F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the show’s St. Paul theater. I came equipped without a script but with a schedule—when to arrive, when to eat, when to rehearse—and backstage I found an improvised cafeteria where I assembled my supper.

  I awaited rehearsal. There was no rehearsal. No one told me what was I supposed to do. Then I discovered: every Saturday night Keillor appeared to make up the show as he went along. For actors performing skits, and for the soundman’s genius, during the week Keillor must have given a hint. Daily, when he drove from his house to his workplace, he daydreamed his monologues. When he performed them, he watched minutes elapse on a clock, adding or subtracting to fit the time remaining. For his Fitzgerald birthday party he invited a bunch of writers, mostly novelists, and sa
t us in the theater’s front row, before a ramp that led up to the stage. I heard Keillor speak about Fitzgerald’s great novel, then announce, “I’m casting Donald Hall as Jay Gatsby.”

  It was the first I had heard of it. He handed me a script, gave me directions out loud, and everything turned out all right. With Garrison Keillor, everything always turns out all right. On my second visit, I was his main guest, and before the show he asked me to come watch him shave. Yes, he shaves for his radio show. As he plied a straight razor he told me that during the program we two should say limericks to each other. Did I know any? I said I knew one that wouldn’t do on public radio:

  There was an old hermit named Dave

  Who kept a dead whore in his cave.

  He said, “I’ll admit

  I’m a bit of a shit,

  But think of the money I save.”

  He said it was fine and dictated another for me to say after I had finished with Dave. We would perform our limericks after a musical interlude, first me and then him. During the show, as the band slowed down just before our limericks, Keillor changed his mind. “Let’s go back and forth,” he told me. “We’ll one-up each other.” It came out all right.

  The last time I did it, the show was at Tanglewood in 2008, the year I turned eighty, and Linda drove us to a motel in Lenox. Midafternoon we climbed onto a rattling bus to take us to the Tanglewood auditorium. It was eight times the size of the St. Paul theater, and every seat would be occupied by a western Massachusetts summer bottom. Another two thousand fans sat on the grass outside, listening to the show through speakers. Half an hour before things got started, Keillor approached Linda and me. Linda had never observed his actual face. It bulges here, it bulges there, possibly assembled from spare parts. Any sense of menace vanishes as soon as he speaks. He caresses whom he addresses. He spoke of books I had published since our last meeting, then warmed up the audience for twenty minutes. He didn’t need to warm anybody up, but he liked warming people up.

  Half an hour into the show, staffers lugged me across the stage, set me on a chair, and Keillor kneeled down beside me to chat. I said my poems, staff carried me back to Linda, actors did a skit. Then Inga Swearingen, a pretty young singer, did three songs. A cappella, she sang “Summer Kitchen,” a twelve-line poem of mine about Jane. She made up the tune and I loved every note. After the intermission I said more poems. Garrison asked me if I kept livestock at the farm. I told him no and then corrected myself. I had a cat. Garrison noted that it was difficult to milk a cat, and my handlers carried me back to Linda. When the radio show stopped at seven, Garrison didn’t stop. He walked around the auditorium saying goodbye. The inside crowd straggled out, and the outside crowd filed in. He had talked for two and a half hours, from warm-up to show to first farewell, and now he extended himself another thirty minutes, singing variations on “I’m tired and I want to go home.” Then everybody went home.

  Fucking

  If you pick up somebody in a bar or at a party or on the street, it’s exciting to take her/him home and rip his/her clothes off. If you fuck a stranger, or your best friend’s husband or wife, or both of them, it’s immoral, treacherous, forbidden, nasty, and therefore thrilling. Sex is getting away with something. Or it’s numbers. I asked a dear old friend how many women there had been. We were friends from college, and I knew that his Asperger’s would give me a figure. “Including whores? Six hundred and eighty-seven.”

  Really, sex is best-best, not because of secrecy or shock or crime or numbers. Indeed, the best-best fucking requires no adventure, no variety, no betrayal, no vanity. It is the invariable ecstasy of habitual double orgasm. A couple who’ve been together for years, as familiar as laundry soap, don’t think about love or wickedness or how many does this make? but about rubbing, licking, sticking something into something, or being stuck with something—until the KA-BOOM and the magnificent respondent KA-BOOM. Afterward, happily the fuckers chat about Tuesday and the grandkids and oatmeal and contract bridge.

  The Widow’s House

  Often I’ve written about becoming invisible in old age. Did I say that when I was young I was as eyeless as anyone? When I was twenty-four, on a California fellowship that paid $2,000 a year, my wife and I rented a nondescript apartment in a widow’s house—$35 a month for a tiny porch with natural light outside a sitting room with no windows next to a dim bedroom. We shared a bathroom and a kitchen with a divorced mother and her son, who occupied two rooms upstairs. Although we tried to use the kitchen at different times, inevitably we bumped into each other. I made sure we didn’t bump into the widow. Rarely she knocked on our door and poked her head into our hole. Maybe her granddaughter was visiting and she needed me to move my car. She smiled, bending toward me, teetering in decrepitude, her face misshapen and her hair thin and scraggly. She gazed at me, smiling and soft, as if with entreaty. We did not chat. I call her invisible because I wouldn’t look at her. We lived in her house for a year and I wrote her twelve checks and I do not remember her name.

  War Cards

  Walking home from fourth or fifth grade, my classmates and I stopped at a drugstore to spend a nickel for a wad of gum. It came in a pink slice, dented so that you could break it into five oblongs, and it completed itself with a baseball card or a G-man card (FBI agents shooting Dillinger at a Chicago movie theater) or by the sixth grade a war card. The same flavorless gum by this time featured mass slaughter. A Japanese warplane bombed a Chinese bus and Chinese corpses flew through the air. When the Spanish Civil War started, a war card showed us a firing squad at work. At eleven or twelve I began to read the New Haven Register—General Franco reviewing the troops, Nazi warplanes bombing refugees in a mountain pass—and threw away my war cards.

  From December 7, 1941, for three and a half years every American headline of every newspaper was America at war. What would newspapers manage to talk about if peace ever happened?

  My father and mother, both born in 1903, had lived through an earlier war. I connected to their old war, attending to my ancient farmhouse, when my carpenter removed worn-out linoleum from the parlor floor and discovered the front page of a newspaper dated July 3, 1916: ALLIES CONTINUE THEIR GREAT DRIVE IN SOMME SECTOR. At the time, my mother Lucy lived here at thirteen. I tack the old front page with its headline on the wall of my workroom.

  The first day of September, 1939, I saw Connecticut newsboys shouting and waving newspapers at intersections. I remember the Pacific of early 1942—Japanese soldiers invading the islands, our destroyers sunk, MacArthur escaping from Corregidor on a submarine. I remember Operation Torch, November 1942, when we landed in North Africa to fight Rommel, later to invade Europe by way of Sicily. At home near my family dairy, a factory turned out Winchester rifles. Senior boys in high school earned 35 cents an hour assembling guns after school. A student from my high school was killed in the third wave at Tarawa. I was sixteen for V-J Day. As a college teacher I watched Vietnam explode in the streets of a college town. I marched on Washington with my son. In 2001 and 2003 our volunteer armies, poverty’s mercenaries, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. This time there were no marches on Washington. Nixon had canceled the draft.

  Abstract Expressionism

  In 1959 I visited the Cedar Street Tavern in the West Village and drank a beer, hoping to bump into Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Marisol, Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, Jasper Johns, or Phidias. No luck. I stood at the bar with a cigarette and a Heineken. Against the wall behind me stood four or five silent young men. A man at the bar beside me asked one of them if he’d like a drink. “I don’t play games,” the young man said.

  Amo Amas Amat

  Back in the day, you had to have Latin in order to get into college. On top of my four years of Latin I added a year of Greek in prep school and received a classical diploma. It was the only way I could avoid taking science or math. Both my Greek and my Latin have abandoned me, but they have left derivatives behind, by which I understand new words. When I first
went to an ophthalmologist—the telephone book had become inscrutable—he examined me, then gravely announced in accents of doom, “You have presbyopia.”

  “Old eyes,” I told him. It was my Exeter Greek. Presbyterians are elders; eyes are often optic.

  Nobody studies Greek anymore, but all of us speak Latin every day: ad nauseam, seriatim, ergo, non sequitur, ad hoc, rigor mortis, persona non grata, alibi, carpe diem, ars gratia artis, ad infinitum, magna cum laude, ne plus ultra, quid pro quo, postpartum, mutatis mutandis, ego, ex cathedra, terra incognita, Homo sapiens, ex nihilo, in vitro, casus belli, habeas corpus, in medias res, ex libris, id, errata, postmortem, ave atque vale, in vino veritas, magnum opus, mens sana in corpore sano, passim, sine qua non, ibid., placebo, compos mentis, data, Magna Carta, deus ex machina, vox populi, pax vobiscum, ecce homo, mea culpa, tabula rasa, ex parte, ad hominem, semper fidelis, bona fide, quasi, stet, quorum, paterfamilias, tempus fugit, ipso facto, verso, terra firma, ex post facto, incognito, sub rosa,

  Etc.

  Frying Pulp

  My dental adventures in childhood began with a New Haven practitioner who forbade using a toothbrush. Brushing wears off enamel, he explained. Whoever my dentist was, even after I was permitted to clean my teeth, every visit revealed a multitude of cavities, twenty-seven on one occasion. After college I went to Oxford, and dared not entrust my mouth to an English dentist. You needed only regard an English mouth. When I flew from London to Paris at Christmas, I had developed a persistent toothache. I sought a French dentist, and found one who had done his degree at NYU in the nineteenth century. He told me that my tooth required reaming out. He offered options: he could freeze me up and use his modern tools, or he could burn the rot out by sticking a hot wire inside the tooth. The modern procedure would cost more than the old-fashioned one. I sat in the chair while the dentist heated the wire and showed me the white-hot tip. As it entered my tooth I listened to the sizzling and sniffed the aroma of frying pulp.