Essays After Eighty (6 page)

Look at the sad parade of Poets Laureate.

 

Sometimes an audience is not three thousand. A friend of mine arrived at a hall to find that his listener was singular. They went out for a beer. I heard of another poet who showed up for a crowd of two. Gamely, she did a full reading from the podium, and afterward descended to shake the hands of her crowd. One was dead.

 

When I was young I could project, and now without a microphone I can't be heard in the tenth row. It's not only the debility of age. One's range is diminished by habitual use of microphones. (When stage actors spend twenty years making movies, they are inaudible when they return to Broadway or the West End.) But there are advantages to artificial enhancement. There's a poem in which I moo like a cow. Cows' lungs are bigger than ours. I approach the microphone intimately, and softly but audibly moo as long as a cow moos. Proximity to the microphone saves my wind as I croon, “
Mm-mmm-mmmmm-mmmmmmmm-uggh wanchhh
.” My friends say it's the best line I've ever written.

 

After the group-talk of the question period comes the poet-and-one. People line up for signatures. Sometimes the seeker dictates a dedication, “Say, ‘With love to Billy and his adorable wife Sheila who makes a great pound cake.'” The signer should demur, or at least edit. Everyone in line must spell a name, or “Felicia” turns out to be “Phylysha.” (Once at a prep school a boy asked me to write, “For Mom and Dad.” I said that my parents were dead. We worked things out.) If there are just a few in line, the poet can speak with them as if they were people. If the line is long, it becomes impossible to distinguish one petitioner from another. At the end stands the host—the man who invited the poet to the campus, who picked her up at the airport, with whom she had a lengthy conversation, who will give her the check, who hands her a book to sign—and she has no idea of his name.

 

Once I read at a college in Minnesota. As the dean led me up the platform, he told me something he had forgotten: I should read for only twenty-five minutes, instead of the contracted fifty, because after my presentation the students would elect this year's Homecoming Queen. The auditorium was packed. (At lunch afterward, English professors told me that they had entered the auditorium astonished: so many students for a poetry reading!) After I read, the applause was long. An audience applauds longest when it knows it has not been paying attention. A young woman wearing a ball gown and a gold crown ascended the platform and stood at the rostrum where I had stood. She was last year's Homecoming Queen, who would preside over this year's vote and coronation. Six girls in ball gowns hovered in the wings. “
Now
,” said the retiring Queen, “
now
comes the moment you've all been waiting for!”

The dean sitting beside me on the platform whispered in my ear, “She doesn't mean it the way it sounds!”

 

Once I flew half a day to be picked up in Oklahoma for a reading the next morning in a corner of Arkansas, to read at chapel—a compulsory gathering of all students—at a small Christian college. Sometimes at such places a self-satisfied piety hovers over faculty and students like smog in Los Angeles. Sometimes these places are lively and responsive. It's hard to plan what to read, but I would never choose a poem to
épater
my hosts. This time, three people picked me up—a woman who chaired English, shy, who spoke little; a man who ran Humanities, thrilled by poetry and ample in literary knowledge; and the older woman who had brought me there, I think a dean of Honors, who was ebullient and talkative, funny and smart and warm. Because we had a long way to drive, we stopped outside the airport for supper before continuing. I was returning from the men's room when I heard the dean address her companions: “Well, Ah'm going to
tell
him.”

As I sat, she turned to me and spoke sweetly—smiling broadly, saying what she needed to say, unashamed of her language: “Donald, if you say ‘fuck' in chapel tomorrow, Ah'll get
fahrd
.”

 

Some readings prove memorable for a single eccentricity. On an occasion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an orchestra was finishing rehearsal in the auditorium as the poetry reading was due to begin. Introducer and poet carried music stands into the wings. In London a reading was to begin at six p.m. in the ancient Church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Evensong prevailed. Another time, in the state of Chiapas in Mexico, eight writers sat onstage waiting hours for the governor to arrive. A large audience had departed by the time he walked in, surrounded by bodyguards with machine guns. In fatigue we each read to the governor for five minutes.

“
Gracias
,” we said. “
Gracias
.”

 

As I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did. Performance held up, but not body; I had to read sitting down. When an introduction slogged to its end, I lurched from backstage, hobbled, and carefully aimed my ass into a chair. For a while I began each reading with a short poem I was trying out, which spoke of being eleven and watching my grandfather milk his Holsteins. In the poem I asked, in effect, how my grandfather would respond if he saw me now. When I finished saying the poem, there was always a grave pause, long enough to drive a hayrack through, followed by a standing ovation. Earlier, I had never received a standing O after a first poem; now it happened again and again, from Pennsylvania to Minnesota to California, and I thought I had written something uncannily moving. When I mailed copies of the poem to friends for praise, they politely told me it was terrible. I was puzzled and distressed, until I figured it out. The audience had just seen me stagger, waver with a cane, and labor to sit down, wheezing. They imagined my grandfather horrified, watching a cadaver gifted with speech. They stood and applauded because they knew they would never see me again.

IN MY LIFE
I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, and during the Civil War beards were as common as sepsis. Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair, the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. By the time I was sentient, in the 1930s, only my eccentric cousin Freeman was bearded, and even he shaved once in summer. Every September he endured a fortnight of scratchiness. Many men, after trying a beard for five or six days, want to claw off their skin. They pick up their Gillettes.

Despite the itch, I persisted until I looked something like a Mathew Brady photograph, or at least not like a professor of English literature at the University of Michigan. The elderly chairman of the department was intelligent and crafty. When he spoke in well-constructed paragraphs, with inviolate syntax, he sounded like a member of Parliament—except for his midwestern accent. He always addressed me as “Hall,” and used last names for all his staff. The summer of the beard I dropped in at the department to pick up my mail. I wore plastic flip-flops, sagging striped shorts, a Detroit Tigers T-shirt, and a grubby stubble like today's male models in
Vanity Fair
. My chairman greeted me, noting my rank: “Good morning, Professor Hall.”

Dinner parties and cocktail parties dominated every Ann Arbor weekend. Women wore girdles; the jacket pockets of men's gray suits showed the fangs of handkerchiefs. Among the smooth-faced crowds of Chesterfield smokers, I enjoyed cigars, which added to the singularity of my beard and rendered living rooms uninhabitable. When I lectured to students I walked up and down with my cigar, dropping ashes in a tin wastebasket. The girls in the front row smoked cigarettes pulled from soft blue leather pouches stamped with golden fleurs-de-lis. As the sixties began, if I was sluggish beginning my lecture—maybe I had stayed up all night with a visiting poet—I paused by the front row and asked if anyone had some of those diet things. Immediately, female hands held forth little ceramic boxes full of spansules or round pink pills. After I ingested Dexedrine, my lecture speeded up and rose in pitch until only dogs could hear it.

When I was bearded and my mother visited me, she stared at the floor, addressing me without making eye contact. Why did she hate beards so intensely? She adored her hairy grandfathers and her cousin Freeman. Her father Wesley, of the next generation, shaved once or twice a week. On Saturday night before Sunday's church, Wesley perched on a set tub. Looking into the mirror of a twenty-five-hour clock, he scraped his chin with a straight razor.

 

In 1967 my marriage, which had faltered for years, splintered and fell apart. As Vietnam conquered American campuses, I hung out with students who weaned me from cigars to cigar joints. “Make love not war” brought chicks and dudes together, raising everyone's political consciousness. Middle-class boys from Bloomfield Hills proved they belonged to the Movement by begging on the streets for spare change.

 

I signed the last divorce papers while anesthetized for a biopsy of my left testicle. The tumor was benign, but divorces aren't. I shaved because the world had altered. Although my mother fretted about the divorce, she looked at my face again. My sudden singleness and my naked skin confused my friends. I was still invited to dinner parties, and therefore gave dinner parties back. I invited eight people for dinner. When I noticed that I had no placemats, I substituted used but laundered diapers, which I had bought for drying dishes. For dinner I served two entrées, Turkey Salad Amaryllis and Miracle Beans. I bought three turkey rolls, cooked them and chopped them up with onions and celery, then added basil and two jars of Hellmann's Real. It was delicious, and so were Miracle Beans. Warm ten cans of B&Ms, add garlic, add basil again, add dry mustard, stir, and serve. My friends enjoyed my dinner parties. I served eight bottles of chilled Chassagne-Montrachet Cailleret, Louis Latour.

 

Five years later I married Jane, then a poetry student, who by the time of her death in 1995 had published four books and earned a Guggenheim. It was exhilarating to live with her as her work became better and better. The more successful her poetry became, the more she permitted herself to be pretty. Late photographs of Jane reveal two sides, both beautiful. In one she is utterly spiritual, almost ready to turn bodiless; in another she is horny. Her poetry combined the two Janes, which is exactly what poems must do. When we married I was clean-shaven. She looked at old photographs and decided that I should grow a beard again. She observed my itchy agony. She wrote a poem called “The First Eight Days of the Beard.”

1. A page of exclamation points.
   
2. A class of cadets at attention.
   
3. A school of eels.
   
4. Standing commuters.
   
5. A bed of nails for the swami.
   
6. Flagpoles of unknown countries.
   
7. Centipedes resting on their laurels.
   
8. The toenails of the face.
   

After a few weeks my facial hair looked like a beard, not like carelessness, and after two months it flourished. I wished it would hang straight down and cover my belly, but it always grew tightly curled, as pubic as Santa Claus.

For three years we stayed in Ann Arbor. We loved the house we lived in, old-fashioned with many bedrooms, but it rose in a crowded part of town, and we did not like living among people. Once a year we visited the farmhouse in New Hampshire, where my grandmother Kate survived in her nineties, and where I had spent childhood summers. We could see from the porch a cottage down the road, built for a farmhand in the 1890s, and nothing else that resembled a house. Jane fell in love with this 1803 solitary clapboard structure with its 1865 barn and collapsing sugarhouse. It backed up to Ragged Mountain, which had provided pasturage for my grandfather's cattle. Mount Kearsarge was five miles south. Fields of grass filled the narrow valleys. She loved Thornley's Store down the street—wine and stovepipe, roast beef and souvenir ashtrays—where in the morning the neighborhood gathered to joke and gossip. We drove gawking on dirt roads around Eagle Pond, through a pig farm, and up New Canada Road past Freeman's collapsed shack. During one visit on a Sunday we attended the South Danbury Christian Church, where my grandmother played the organ for eighty years. My cousins called me “Donnie” and the preacher quoted “Rilke the German poet.”

After my grandmother entered the Peabody Home, we agreed with my mother and her sisters that we would buy the farmhouse when my grandmother died. In 1975 I quit my tenure and we moved to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing—but it worked and I loved doing it. Our move made for the best years of our existence. My poems improved, and I wrote magazine pieces about baseball and New Hampshire. Year after year Jane committed to the life of poetry and we thrived in double solitude. (The New Hampshire Constitution prohibits dinner parties.) One day followed another, a bliss of sameness—and I plotted a distraction.

After sporting my beard for thirteen years, I would shave it off in secret on Christmas Day. I bought a can of Barbasol shaving cream and a packet of disposable razors, which I hid in the bathroom with a sharp pair of scissors. That Christmas we had a houseful. My mother Lucy came, Jane's mother Polly, and my college-age children Andrew and Philippa. Christmas morning we had breakfast followed by the opening of presents. Then came the sleepy interlude while the turkey cooked. I waited until it seemed that everyone had used the bathroom. I sneaked in, closed the door, and unpacked my tools. I picked up the shears and looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. I hesitated. Did I really want to do this? My qualms disappeared when I thought of the family dozing in the living room. With scissors I cut great clumps of hair from my chin and cheeks, depositing handfuls in the wastebasket. Careful not to dig a hole in my face, I removed the bulk of my hair. The tufts left behind were like a hayfield ill cut, ragged clumps sprouting here and there. I lathered and applied the razor. Every inch I scraped, the razor filled up and clogged. I cleaned it under the faucet. My flesh appeared as it had before “The First Eight Days of the Beard”—with a new sag of chin.