Essays After Eighty (2 page)

People's response to our separateness can be callous, can be goodhearted, and is always condescending. When a woman writes to the newspaper, approving of something I have done, she calls me “a nice old gentleman.” She intends to praise me, with “nice” and “gentleman.” “Old” is true enough, and she lets us know that I am not a grumpy old fart, but “nice” and “gentleman” put me in a box where she can rub my head and hear me purr. Or maybe she would prefer me to wag my tail, lick her hand, and make ingratiating dog noises. At a family dinner, my children and grandchildren pay fond attention to me; I may be peripheral, but I am not invisible. A grandchild's college roommate, encountered for the first time, pulls a chair to sit with her back directly in front of me, cutting me off from the family circle: I don't exist.

When kindness to the old is condescending, it is aware of itself as benignity while it asserts its power. Sometimes the reaction to antiquity becomes farce. I go to Washington to receive the National Medal of Arts and arrive two days early to look at paintings. At the National Gallery of Art, Linda pushes me in a wheelchair from painting to painting. We stop by a Henry Moore carving. A museum guard, a man in his sixties with a small pepper-and-salt mustache, approaches us and helpfully tells us the name of the sculptor. I wrote a book about Moore and knew him well. Linda and I separately think of mentioning my connection but instantly suppress the notion—egotistic, and maybe embarrassing to the guard. A couple of hours later, we emerge from the cafeteria and see the same man, who asks Linda if she enjoyed her lunch. Then he bends over to address me, wags his finger, smiles a grotesque smile, and raises his voice to ask, “Did we have a nice din-din?”

 

In spring when the feeder is down, stowed away in the toolshed until October, I watch the fat robins come back, blue jays that harass them, warblers, red-winged blackbirds, thrushes, orioles. Mourning doves crouch in the grass, nibbling seeds. A robin returns every year to refurbish her nest after the wintry ravage. She adds new straw, twigs, and lint. Soon enough she lays eggs, sets on them with short excursions for food, then tends to three or four small beaks that open for her scavenging. Before long, the infants stand, spread and clench their wings, peer at their surroundings, and fly away. I cherish them, and look for farther nests, small clots in branches of oak or Norway maple visible from my window. The blackest crows peck through my grass. Most strange and wonderful are the hummingbirds that helicopter by the porch, wings blurred with incessant whirring. They jab into the horns of hollyhocks, gobble some sweet, and zig off to zag back again for another taste.

Late March or April onward, depending on the year, I watch the flowers erupt and subside. Snowdrops crack the wintry earth, crocuses, and dazzling daffodils. Tulips rise in extravagant crimsons and golds, metallic fleshy shapes that ask to be filled. In June, peonies bloom at the edge of my porch, a column of them, as their buds swell green until they burst into white and feathery soccer balls—and then a thunderstorm shatters the blossoms. There are lilies of the valley and, across the yard, a patch of old single roses that some years are few and some years put forth a hundred blossoms—first white ones, then pink, then red, lofting beside the road's gutter as two centuries ago they rose beside a trail for oxen.

One day, I look out the window to see great machines at work. A farmer neighbor comes to harvest the grass that has grown dark and thick in my fields. The first contraption cuts the hay. Another rakes it, and another shapes it into huge circular bales, which a last machine lifts with great clamps onto a truck that replaces the old hayrack. My neighbor collects for his cows in winter, and returns a second time and a third as new grass rises. I watch out the window. These are the fields where my grandfather and I, seventy years ago, cut hay with a horse-drawn mower, trimmed the shaggy edges by hand with scythes, pitched it onto a horse-drawn hayrack, and stacked it in high lofts of the barn. Cow manure, spread on the fields in April, fed the grass for a century and a half. Decades after my grandfather died, the goodness wore out, exposing New Hampshire's sandy soil. My neighbor spreads lime late in spring.

Flowers by turn rise and fall all summer—foxglove, sweet alyssum, bee balm. I watch two wild turkeys gobble as they strut stiffly up the slope toward the barn. Behind them four small offspring hurry to keep up. Daylilies ascend the hill beyond them, the same bright orange wildflowers that grow in ditches and in clearings beside cellar holes. Indian paintbrush raise late flags. Cornflowers bloom, and leaves of swamp maples flare the first reds of autumn.

 

Whatever the season, I watch the barn. I see it through this snow in January, and in August I will gaze at trailing vines of roses on a trellis against the vertical boards. I watch at the height of summer and when darkness comes early in November. From my chair I look at the west side, a gorgeous amber laved by the setting sun, as rich to the eyes as the darkening sweet of bees' honey. The unpainted boards are dark at the bottom, and rise toward the top in a brownish yellow that holds light the longest. At barn's end is the horse's window, where Riley stuck out his head to count the pickups and Fords on Route 4. I study the angles of roof, a geometry of tilting, symmetrical and importantly asymmetrical, endlessly losing and recapturing itself. Over eighty years, it has changed from a working barn to a barn for looking at. Down the road, I see the ghosts of elm trees, which lined the road when Route 4 led to the Grafton Turnpike. A hundred and fifty years transformed them from green shoots to blighted bark. Out the window, I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.

STARTING IN THE
seventh grade I wrote lines of poetry, poetry, poetry. After two books of poems, I wrote
String Too Short to Be Saved
, about childhood summers on my grandparents' New Hampshire farm. I wrote in paragraphs, not in lines, in order to tell family stories.

Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels. As I grew older—collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five—poetry abandoned me. How could I complain after seventy years of diphthongs? The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual. The shadow mind pours out metaphors—at first poets may not understand what they say—that lead to emotional revelation. For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones. When testosterone diminishes . . .

My last book of poems came out. Writing paragraphs, I looked out the window and wrote about what I saw. Snow was falling, later daffodils were bursting. I luxuriated in the paragraph, the sentence, varieties of fast and slow, rise and fall—improvising toward a final fullness.

 

The greatest pleasure in writing is rewriting. My early drafts are always wretched. At first a general verb like “move” is qualified by the adverb “quickly.” After sixty tries I come up with a particular, possibly witty verb and drop the adverb. Originally I wrote “poetry suddenly left me,” which after twelve drafts became “poetry abandoned me”—with another sentence to avoid self-pity. When my doctor told me I had diabetes, I was incredulous. I said, “You mean I am pre-diabetic.” Writing in this book, I changed a verb to mock my silly presumption. “‘You mean I am pre-diabetic,' I explained.”

 

Revision takes time, a pleasing long process. Some of these essays took more than eighty drafts, some as few as thirty. Writing prose, I used to be a bit quicker. Maybe I discovered more things to be persnickety about. More likely age has slowed down my access to the right word. Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.

Once I worked with William Shawn, editor of the
New Yorker
from 1952 to 1987, who is well remembered for his fastidious scrutiny of sentences, his polite and fierce insistence on repair. First from the magazine I would receive galleys of text with suggestions or requests for changes, maybe a hundred each galley. When the pages of the corrected version arrived, there were thirty more queries on each. A week before publication, my telephone rang at six p.m. “Do you have time, Mr. Hall, to go over your essay? It might take a few hours.” “Go ahead, Mr. Shawn.” “In the first sentence we have found a serial comma we think we might with profit remove.”

 

As I work over clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little connection to import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey. Sentences can be long, three or more complete clauses dancing together, or two clauses with one leaning on the other, or an added phrase of only a few syllables. Sentences and paragraphs are as various as human beings. I like the effect—see John McPhee—of a paragraph three pages long, glued together by transitions that never sound like transitions.

After a three-page paragraph, maybe a one-line blurt.

 

There are problems in writing one can learn to avoid. Almost always, in my poems or essays, the end goes on too long. “In case you don't get it, this is what I just said.” Cut it out. Let the words flash a conclusion, then get out of the way. Sometimes the writer intrudes—me, myself, and I—between the reader and the page. Don't begin paragraphs with “I.” For that matter, try not to begin sentences with the personal pronoun. Avoid “me” and “my” when you can. Writing memoir, don't say, “I remember that in my childhood nothing happened to me.” Say, “In childhood nothing happened.”

Nevertheless, for seventy-odd years I have been writing about myself, which has led to a familiar scene: I meet someone, we chat, something stirs my memory, I begin to tell an anecdote—and the head in front of me nods up and down and smiles. She knows this story because I have put it in print, possibly three times.

Avoid the personal pronoun when you can—but not the personal. My first book of poems said “I,” but the word was distant, a stiff and poetic “I.” In my best poems and prose I've become steadily more naked, with a nakedness that disguises itself by wearing clothes. A scrupulous passion of style—word choice, syntax, punctuation, order, rhythm, specificity—sets forth not only the writer's rendering of barns and hollyhocks, but the writer's feelings and counterfeelings.

Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn't include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails. When I looked out the window taking joy in sparrows, snow, Mount Kearsarge, lilacs, and wild turkeys, my essay was incomplete. It required contrast, required something nasty or ridiculous. Happily I found it. When “Out the Window” appeared in print a hundred letters arrived. Terry Gross interviewed me for
Fresh Air
. Almost everyone paid as much attention to a goon's baby talk as to the landscape. I thank a museum guard at the National Gallery.

 

VISITS TO WASHINGTON
have punctuated my life. I watched a victory parade in 1945. My last trip was the most memorable, early in March 2011, when I received the National Medal of Arts. Linda and I went down two days early to look at paintings and sculpture—mostly the National Gallery, the Hirshhorn, and the Phillips. I can't stand long, so Linda has pushed me in a wheelchair through the thousand museums. On the day of the medal, she wheeled me from the Willard InterContinental Hotel to the White House. Waiting at the entrance to go through security, I looked up to see Philip Roth, whom I recognized from long ago. I loved his novels. He saw me in the hotel's wheelchair—my enormous beard and erupting hair, my body wracked with antiquity—and said, “I haven't seen you for fifty years!” How did he remember me? We had met in George Plimpton's living room in the 1950s. I praised what he wrote about George in
Exit Ghost
. He seemed pleased, and glanced down at me in the chair. “How are
you
doing?” I told him fine, “I'm still writing.”

He said, “What else is there?”

 

In 1945, when I was sixteen, I took the train to the old Union Station, District of Columbia, where my Exeter friend Ted Lewis picked me up. The railroad station was a lofty cement cathedral, like city depots everywhere before airplanes took over. Ted drove us to the family flat in Alexandria, where I met his parents and his younger brother Jay. Ted Lewis Sr. wrote a Washington column for the
New York Daily News
, an old liberal serving up conservative opinions for his bosses. He was cynical, sharp, and funny. For a week my friend and I talked and drove around. He brought me to a Saturday-night YMCA dance, where I flirted with a pretty girl not quite sixteen. She told me she was a Methodist. Cocky and a year older, I condescended to tell her about Dr. Method and Mr. Ist, of whom she had not heard. Ted showed me the District, taking me to the Lincoln and the Jefferson memorials, and to Washington's penis on the Mall. We never looked into the National Gallery or the Library of Congress or the White House. One thing we did no one would ever do again. Ted and Jay and I stood at the edge of Pennsylvania Avenue for Eisenhower's homecoming parade. Not long after V-E Day (not long before V-J Day) the general rode past us standing upright in the back of a convertible with his arms arced over his head in the victory sign. We cheered him, celebrating the end of a long and murderous war. None of us voted for Ike when he ran for President. None of us forgot the parade.

 

My next trip to the District of Columbia was twenty-four years later, November 15, 1969, in the company of my teenage son Andrew. From Ann Arbor, where I taught, we rode all night on a bus to march against the Vietnam War and President Nixon—before Watergate, before the resignation. I don't remember much of our demonstration except for the hordes alighting from buses, mostly from college campuses, to parade with honorable, noisy enthusiasm. In those days we wore long hair whether we were fifteen or forty-one. I remember passing the Justice Department, delighting in the notion that John and Martha Mitchell were quaking above us. On the telephone I had told Ted Lewis what Andrew and I were doing; he and his father asked us to the National Press Club for lunch. Privileged, at midday we edged from the multitude and entered the dining room where our friends were waiting. Just inside the door we saw two men at a table, and I was surprised to recognize one of them. It was Charles Waldo Bailey II, whom I had known at Exeter, a bright and supercilious boy who had become the Washington correspondent for the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
. Chuck Bailey wore a suit, as his tablemate did, as did the rest of the room. Andrew and I dangled pigtails, wearing T-shirts that attested to our politics—like our beads, like our rude buttons. When Bailey looked up from his table in response to my greeting, he was as cold as his Manhattan on the rocks. His companion glared at a glass of ginger ale. I was annoyed at Bailey, and when we joined the Lewises I spoke of his rudeness. Ted's father squinted across the room. “He's having lunch,” he told us, “with Ron Ziegler.” We knew the name of Nixon's press secretary.