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  • Hello, Hayden!
  • Wendell Berry (bio)

Hayden Carruth was so vividly and so abidingly present to my thoughts until his final day in this world that I have to say deliberately to myself, "Hayden is dead." And even then I am scarcely convinced. By now I am too well acquainted among the dead—who are too numerous, too present to my mind—to be quite confident of the status of death. Those who have been completely alive to us never entirely die to us, or from us, though at exactly this point our language becomes impossibly numb and blunt.

To speak of the lives of the dead as they continue with us, in such language as we have, is like wearing leather gloves to remove a speck from your eye. I begin to want to add quotation marks to all the crucial words. Hayden, I want to say, "is dead" who "was alive," though he is yet "alive" in my mind in which he will never be "dead." And I know several dead white men—I mean long-dead white men—who are far more alive than any number of "living" red-to-violet financiers and politicians of the several sexes.

Damned if I am going to commemorate Hayden by pronouncing him dead.

I have known Hayden's work and have been indebted to it since 1964. Since 1971, when he stopped to see us on his way to visit his daughter, Martha, I have been his friend and he has been mine. As country people we have had much in common, including love for neighbors who have not read our poems. This is a friendship that I enjoy. It is a gift and an enormous benefit to me. Hayden's work and our long conversation are for me standard operating equipment, without which I would be different and would think differently.

Nobody's life is easy. Hayden's life, in some ways, may have been more than ordinarily difficult. In addition to the expectable hardships and griefs, he had mental problems, a problem with alcohol, and for many years he made a marginal and uncertain living as a literary handyman—editing, reviewing, and odd-jobbing. He wrote his share of complaints, but his complaints were about realities. In facing hardships, those that were generally human and those that were peculiarly his own, Hayden was unflinching.

But his complaints were not merely complaints. I think Yeats said (or if he didn't he should have) that we don't value literary works solely because of the pain in them. That may sound cruel, but it is true. It is a truth disregarded by the writers of our day who apparently think their realism is authenticated only by their fixation on misery, violence, ugliness, and despair. I keep coming upon books (and avoiding books, having been forewarned by reviews) whose authors follow the medical establishment in regarding death as a cosmic [End Page 644] error and a personal affront, at the same time finding life to be insupportably painful, at the same time ducking their logical obligation to shoot themselves. Why should one read a book that is programmatically more depressing than the news?

Hayden wrote no more painful poem—I know no more painful poem—than "Dearest M—," a poem on the first day after the death, from cancer, of his only daughter, Martha. This is a poem that should not be sampled, and so I won't quote parts of it. The poem describes Martha, tells her story, praises her, grieves over her, and struggles, sometimes violently, with its inevitable failure to deal adequately with the enormous facts of her suffering and her absence. Whatever we may think of the status of death, it does divide us; it puts an end to the intimate associations of this world; it makes us grieve; and in all that has been written about it there is no fitting language for it.

The poem is a protest against the death of Martha, but it is much more than a protest. Its sorrow is never the self-centered, self-indulging sorrow of our woe-wallowing realists. The poem is harrowing, and yet there is nothing...

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