A note about Donald Hall in Conversation with Ian Hamilton

A 112 page volume, containing a 27,000 word interview, with a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, and a representative selection of quotations from Hall's critics and reviewers. Also included is Hall's recent poem, Tidying.

'Hall comes across [In this volume] as a professional poet who has made the most of the institutional opportunities available in post-war America to build a career as writer and teacher. Twenty-two pages of closely printed bibliography attest to the scale and range of his work as an editor and anthologist … Even-tempered and meticulous, he exemplifies a contented subservience to the work ethic. Poetry, for Hall, is a craft which can be laboured at in the expectation of success proportionate to investment of effort.
    He is as practical and dispassionate in his attitude to subject matter as to poetic form: both are to be extended in the interests of furthering the reach of his poetry, and if private experience is to be drawn on, it does not deserve any more excitable treatment than other topics. He, none the less, speaks at length about his personbal life in the interview, bringing a stoic grace to his account of the circumstances and aftermath of the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. 'Tidying', the revealingly titled sample lyric, offers a characteristically exact meditation on that aftermath.' – Patrick Crotty, Times Literary Supplement, October 27, 2000

A note on Donald Hall

Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928, the only child of Donald Andrew Hall (a businessman) and his wife Lucy (née Wells). He was educated at Phillips Exeter, New Hampshire, and at the Universities of Harvard, Oxford and Stanford.
    Hall began writing even before reaching his teens, beginning with poems and short stories, and then moving on to novels and dramatic verse. He recalls the powerful influence on his youthful imagination of Edgar Allan Poe: ‘I wanted to be mad, addicted, obsessed, haunted and cursed. I wanted to have deep eyes that burned like coals – profoundly melancholic, profoundly attractive.’
Hall continued to write throughout his prep school years at Exeter Phillips, and, while still only sixteen years old, attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he made his first acquaintance with the poet Robert Frost. That same year, he published his first work.
    While an undergraduate at Harvard, Hall served on the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, and got to know a number of people who, like him, were poised for significant things in the literary world, amongst them John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Adrienne Rich.
    After leaving Harvard, Hall went to Oxford for two years, to study for the B.Litt. While there, he found time not only to edit The Fantasy Poets – in which capacity, he published first volumes by two more people who were set to make their mark on the literary world, Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill – but also to maintain four other valuable positions, as editor of the Oxford Poetry Society’s journal, as literary editor of Isis, as editor of New Poems, and as poetry editor of the Paris Review. At the end of his first Oxford year, Hall also won the university’s prestigious Newdigate Prize, awarded for his long poem, ‘Exile’.
    On returning to the United States, Hall went to Stanford, where he spent one year as a Creative Writing Fellow, studying under the poet-critic, Yvor Winters. In Their Ancient Glittering Eyes – a book which merits comparison with Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ – he recalls Winters greeting him with the words, ‘You come from Harvard, where they think I’m lower than the carpet,’ adding, after a pause, ‘Do you realize that you will be ridiculed, the rest of your life, for having studied a year with me?’
    Following his year at Stanford, Hall went back to Harvard, where he spent three years in the Society of Fellows. During that time, he put together his first book, Exiles and Marriages, and with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson also edited an anthology which was to make a significant impression on both sides of the Atlantic, The New Poets of England and America.
    Hall was appointed to the faculty in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1957, and apart from two one-year breaks in England continued to teach there until 1975, when, after three years of marriage to his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, he abandoned the security of his academic career, and went with her to live in rural New Hampshire, on the farm settled by his maternal great-grandfather over one hundred years earlier.
    Ever since that time, Hall has supported himself by writing. When not working on poems, he has turned his hand to reviews, criticism, textbooks, sports journalism, memoirs, biographies, children’s stories, and plays. He has also devoted a lot of time to editing: between 1983 and 1996 he oversaw publication of more than sixty titles for the University of Michigan Press alone. At one time, Hall estimated that he was publishing a minimum of one item per week, and four books a year.
    In 1989, when Hall was sixty-one, it was discovered that he had colon cancer. Surgery followed, but by 1992 the cancer had metastasized to his liver. After another operation, and chemotherapy, he went into remission, though he was told that he only had a one-in-three chance of surviving the next five years. Then, early in 1994, when the thought uppermost in his and his wife’s minds was that his own cancer might re-appear, it was discovered that she had leukaemia. Her illness, her death fifteen months later, and Hall’s struggle to come to terms with these things, were the subject of his most recent book, Without.
    Winters’s prediction that Hall would never live down the year he spent studying in California could hardly have been more wrong. Forty-five years after leaving Stanford, Hall is one of America’s leading men of letters, the author of no less than fourteen books of poetry and twenty-two books of prose. He was for five years Poet Laureate of his home state, New Hampshire (1984-89), and can list among the many other honours and awards to have come his way: the Lamont Poetry Prize (1955), the Edna St Vincent Millay Award (1956), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1963-64, 1972-73), inclusion on the Horn Book Honour List (1986), the Sarah Josepha Hale Award (1983), the Lenore Marshall Award (1987), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1988), the NBCC Award (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry (1989), and the Frost Medal (1990). He has been nominated for the National Book Award on three separate occasions (1956, 1979 and 1993).

– Philip Hoy, 2000

A note on Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton was born in 1938, and educated at Darlington Grammar School and Keble College, Oxford. He co-founded and edited The Review (1962-1972), and the New Review (1974-1979), and was for several years poetry and fiction editor for the Times Literary Supplement (1965-1973).
    His verse publications include: The Visit (Faber, London,1970), Fifty Poems (Faber, London, 1988), Steps (Cargo Press, 1997), and Sixty Poems (Faber, London, 1999). His prose publications include: A Poetry Chronicle: Essays and Reviews (Faber, London 1973/Barnes and Noble, NY, 1973), The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors (Weidenfeld, London, 1976), Robert Lowell: A Biography (Random House, NY, 1982/Faber, London, 1983), In Search of J.D. Salinger (Heinemann, London, 1988/Random House, NY, 1988), Writers in Hollywood, 1915-1951 (Heinemann, London, 1990/Harper, NY, 1990), Keepers of the Flame (Hutchinson, London, 1992), The Faber Book of Soccer (Faber, London, 1992), Gazza Agonistes (Granta/Penguin, London, 1994), Walking Possession (Bloomsbury, London, 1994), A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (Bloomsbury, London, 1998), The Trouble with Money and Other Essays (Bloomsbury, London, 1998), and Anthony Thwaite in Conversation with Peter Dale and Ian Hamilton (BTL, London, 1999).
    Hamilton has also edited a large number of books, amongst them: The Poetry of War, 1939-45 (Alan Ross, London,1965), Alun Lewis: Selected Poetry and Prose (Allen and Unwin, London, 1966), The Modern Poet: Essays from ‘The Review’ (Macdonald, London,1968/Horizon, NY, 1969), Eight Poets (Poetry Book Society, London, 1968), Robert Frost: Selected Poems (Penguin, London, 1973), Poems Since 1900: an Anthology of British and American Verse in the Twentieth Century (with Colin Falck) (Macdonald and Jane’s, London, 1975), Yorkshire and Verse (Secker and Warburg, London, 1984), The ‘New Review’ Anthology (Heinemann, London, 1985), Soho Square (2) (Bloomsbury, London, 1989), the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry (OUP, Oxford, 1996), and the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays (Penguin, London, 1999).
    Between 1984 and 1987 Hamilton presented BBC TV’s Bookmark programme. He now serves on the editorial board of The London Review of Books.

2000

Ian Hamilton, one of the founding editors of Between The Lines, died on December 27, 2001.

An extract from the interview

The Dark Houses, your second collection, appeared in 1958, and was reviewed very favourably by a number of people, including Anthony Hecht, who wrote: ‘Donald Hall’s first book was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1955, and was generously praised everywhere. It was a book of great charm and wit, its assurance and amusement always apparent. The present volume in comparison might be thought solemn. It is, rather, a superbly brave attempt not to repeat the triumph of the first book but to try for something even more difficult: a steady and appraising vision which is earned in art as in life only at great cost.’ Were you consciously making it new in your second book, not wanting to be caught resting on your laurels?

I’m happy to be reminded of Hecht’s review. Certainly I was trying to make it new in the second book. In particular, I reacted to the stringencies of Kunitz and Arrowsmith. Exiles and Marriages was ingratiating, and I wanted to stop that stuff. The Dark Houses is darker.
    By 1956 I began to feel uncomfortable in the iambic. All I could think about was writing in iambics, making a witty metre. I had painted myself into a corner. My problems had nothing to do with the nature of traditional English verse but the nature of my associations with it. I started to try writing syllabics. The first I wrote was a poem called ‘Je suis une table’ – a language error – really about feeling as inarticulate as a table. Syllabics was a way of holding on to number while avoiding iambic. I rhymed on the off-stress, pretending that English was French. From syllabics I took the leap to various types of free verse. I felt this necessity to break out of the cage I had made for myself, even before Howl.
    The day that Allen Ginsberg died, there was a tribute to Jane [Kenyon] in Washington, several of us on the platform. I was the last to speak. The younger people all told what a liberation it had been for them when Howl came out, showing them another way. When my turn came, I said, ‘Well, when Howl came out I thought that it was the worst thing that had ever been written! I had tenure in iambic pentameter.’ I had grown up with the New Critical orthodoxy that didn’t know what to do with things like Howl. Or with Hardy. So I saved them for later.

How much of an influence on your new work was Bly?

I think that what I was doing was quite different from Bly’s work. But he and I would meet and criticize each other’s work, or do it by mail. We’ve done it for fifty years. It’s a friendship of opposites. Bly always tells – if we’re on a programme together – that he would send me a poem that disclosed the secrets of the universe and that I would write back to him and say: that period should be a semi-colon and you should not break the line there, you should break it here. And your grammar’s wrong. He says I would send him a draft of a poem and he would write back: you ought to have a dragon in the second stanza. He’s Jungian and I’m Freudian; he’s Plato and I’m Aristotle; he’s Don Quixote and I’m Sancho Panza. When we are together, we exaggerate these differences.

You had this forty-eight hour rule.

Bly is always deciding things. He decided we should reply to each other’s poems within forty-eight hours. Sometimes I accuse him of changing it to the forty-eight day rule. We have tended to work together. It happened in our generation. Eventually Galway Kinnell and I worked together.

We have a hazy grasp of Kinnell. He was here for last year’s Poetry International.

I like him.

Clive James wrote a review of something he did a few years ago – The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World – calling it ‘the long Ezra Pound poem that Pound himself could never have written.’ Was Kinnell a part of The Sixties thing?

He was to the side, not in the centre of it. But he also moved away from metre – from Yeats to Whitman.
    I met him for the first time in Bly’s apartment. Carol and Robert would take an apartment in New York while somebody went to Florida, about a month in New York. Kinnell and I got talking, poetry, literature. After a while Galway said to me, ‘I used to hate you.’ Exiles and Marriages pissed off a lot of people. Galway and I became close friends.

Bly was very keen on translation, but this seems never to have had very much interest for you. Not everyone’s attracted by translation, of course, but it’s quite common amongst poets who endure dry spells, and you’ve had one or two of those.

I translated some poems from the Spanish. With help. Maybe ten or fifteen. But, no, I never felt that I had another language securely enough. I did Horace, at Harvard, with a prose trot. I used the same prose trot when I did the unHoratian adaptations from the first book of the Odes in The Museum of Clear Ideas. When I find it difficult to get started on new poems, I have tended to engage in some ongoing parody or nonsense that I can fiddle with. Playing with words.

The Fifties turned into The Sixties, and The Sixties turned into The Seventies. What happened then, because The Seventies never turned into The Eighties, did it?

Editing a magazine becomes tiresome – as you know. I don’t think that there was an issue of The Eighties.

What about Dickey? You knew him too, didn’t you?

I knew Dickey. I brought Dickey to Wesleyan. It was dangerous to know Dickey.

Why was that? Dangerous with his crossbow and arrow?

Oh, he was someone who could never forgive a favour. Bly promoted him and Jim later put knives in his back. I was Jim’s editor at Wesleyan. I quit the Wesleyan board just as I was finishing editing his third book. I had sent him the manuscript of my third collection, A Roof of Tiger Lilies, and he’d written me a letter praising it greatly and then, after I stopped being his editor, he reviewed it in The American Scholar and gave it hell. It pissed me off at the time but by now it seems funny. Later, when he had the poetry chair at the Library of Congress, he had me along to read with Bill Stafford. Jim got terribly drunk and we stood behind the curtains while we waited for them to open, and Jim said, ‘Isn’t this a grand thing to do for your country?’ What on earth did he mean by that?

He’s the only guy I‘ve ever seen in real life take off his stetson and throw it so that it landed on the hook. I mean, how many times do you think he practised at that?

I spent a week with him once when he was at Reed College. At first I thought he was a friend. He asked me to be his literary executor, and later I found out that he had asked a number of other poets at the same time. He was a terrific liar. That visit, we were driving along and I said, ‘What was the best thing you did in the War, Jim?’ And he said, ‘It was the time I shot down two unarmed Japanese transports. They just sat there in the air like ducks and I shot one down and curved away, gave the other a little time to think about it, and then I shot that one down too. Lots of men died that day.’ I knew when I asked the question I would get a lie. Later I said to him, ‘You know, Jim, I think the best quality in the world is loyalty, don’t you?’ And he said, ‘No, I think it’s the worst.’ We knew what we were talking about. He praised Bly to the skies in print, and when I met him for the first time I said, ‘I’m glad you like Bly so much. I like him too.’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s no good.’ Jim told me about the time during the War he married an Australian girl, and he was off fighting in the Pacific when she died. None of it was true. Still, I love some of his early stuff: ‘The Heaven of Animals’. Remember that?

Yes, the gentle Dickey.

With the later grandomania of the stewardess poem and the ‘May Day Sermon’, it became typing.

When I met him he’d just had a big success with his novel, Deliverance, so he was being Burt Reynolds, you know. He was in the movie, as the sheriff. He took me out to a lake and he had a crossbow with him. He said: ‘Look at all this: it’s so big, so goddam big. And no cocksucking English critic is going to tell me that it isn’t.’

He was funny. Bullying and posturing and so on.

Remember the interview he did for the Paris Review? Damning almost everybody, including Frost: ‘If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.’

He attacked Frost elsewhere as well. If you read the Letters you will see him praising first and then attacking. He had some smart things to say about poetry but most of his letters are self-serving. He attacked Frost partly because Frost was a northerner, but mostly because Frost was on the top of the American heap.

When I visited him, he had a table with all his own works spread out individually. We went from room to room and looked at his works, and then we went into a study area where he played blue grass music very loud. After that we went out to the lakeside where he had this crossbow and intoned lessons on manhood and how to be a great American poet, and so on. It was quite extraordinary.

I once told him I never had wanted to play football because I was afraid of pain. And he said, with disdain, ‘I’ve never understood that.’

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