A Life of Letters

Donald Hall’s latest book of prose is Essays after Eighty (2014), which follows his Unpacking the Boxes (2008). In the latter he mentions his first book to derive from his life at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire—String Too Short to Be Saved. Hall is as good a maker of reminiscence as he is of poetry. His prose is clean and clear and unvarnished: it shows his care in not only writing but in rewriting, as do his textbooks. He is a master of narration, characterization, anecdote, and revision; and when he occasionally repeats himself, the repetition (delightedly succinct and brief) is effectively economical, whether it involves a human being (often a poet—especially his second wife, Jane Kenyon) or even their faithful dog, Gus.

Hall has written children’s books and biographies, three memoirs in addition to those mentioned here, a long profile of the sculptor Henry Moore, a protracted but unfinished biography of the actor Charles Laughton, and countless poems. Most of this material, prose and poetry, is worth rereading. One reason that Hall remains a popular writer with great appeal to audiences, whether at colleges and universities or the Library of Congress, is that he is a good reader with a strong sense of those who are raptly listening, though of late he reads from a wheelchair.

Hall’s account of his two years at Oxford is laced with lively anecdotes and asides. He describes his “first dinner in Hall” as a “desperate meal of rabbit, diced overcooked vegetables, and soggy potatoes” and observes that King Henry viii finished Christ Church after “he finished Cardinal Woolsey.” Hall is a masterly humorist. He can—and does—often make fun of himself: “Behind my neck roosts a rookery of bad manuscript. To write as much as I have done, I have needed often to fail. There is another book-length poem behind my neck. . . . Rooting around, I recently found another long collection. . . . It is what Robert Bly has called light-verse surrealism, and nothing fit to print.”

Robert Bly has been Hall’s best friend since their days at Oxford, which included a comical and neardisastrous hitchhiking trip together. His many other friends include a great number of poets, just as one would expect: the late Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Gary Snyder, Robert Lowell, William Styron, and Peter Matthiessen among them.

Donald Hall’s many amusing anecdotes about poetry include references to the founding of the Paris Review under George Plimpton and the writers just mentioned. Hall himself was this famous magazine’s poetry editor for a decade, largely as a result of his earning the Newdigate Prize for his long poem “Exile,” which began at 100 lines and was finally reduced by him to only eight lines!

By then it was 1953, with the Korean War continuing. Donald Hall’s father, in a fit of practical inspiration, took this poem and a copy of Time with his son on the cover to the Selective Service appeal board in New Haven to save his son from “the Inchon Peninsula,” perhaps saving his life as well. Mr. and Mrs. Hall were remarkable parents who supported their only child through thick and thin—from Exeter through Harvard and Oxford. Mr. Hall’s family seat was Hamden, Connecticut, where his family operated a dairy; Mrs. Hall’s family lived at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire, so Don Hall in his early life had the good fortune to be both a country lad and a city boy before he attended Exeter. This difference in place runs through his life, right up to the present time, as his superb essay in the New Yorker for January 2012 demonstrates.

Aside from losing his second wife, Jane Kenyon, to leukemia, Donald Hall has been a very lucky man—lucky in his life and in his writing; and we, the reading public, are lucky to have such...