Unpacking the Boxes by Donald Hall

Author:Donald Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Donald Hall

Is fat and tall

But the ego within the matter

Is taller and fatter.

Because I expressed my irritation with Oxford poetry, people feared me and I found myself deferred to. I was appointed literary editor of the Isis, and secretary of OUPS, which meant I would preside over the Poetry Society the following term. I would invite poets from the larger world to read us their poems, which they did for expenses only. I entertained Louis MacNeice, Ver-non Watkins, Kathleen Raine, W. R. Rogers, C. Day-Lewis, Dylan Thomas.

My Oxford was the university more than the House. In the social mores of Oxford, one could be active within one’s college or one could put oneself forward in the university at large—but if one was English, one could not do both. It was acceptable to take part in activities within the House’s walls—clubs for theater or beagling or rowing or politicking—but it was unseemly to be known in the larger university world, OUDS in theater or Isis in literature. Because my poems and my name turned up in Isis, I would have been infra dig in the House if I had been a normal undergraduate. I could get away with it because it was understood that Americans didn’t know any better.

And I made friends who have remained friends over the decades, mostly from the less social schools and even from grammar schools not private but public. There was the poet George MacBeth, who succeeded me as president of the Poetry Society and who became a talks producer at the BBC, for whom I made frequent broadcasts. He visited me in Ann Arbor and in New Hampshire. Robin Jordan I knew in the House, a talented actor who despised acting. We played squash racquets together and stayed up late, talking and drinking Nescaf, as everybody called it. One spring day he took me with him to visit his old school, Charterhouse. He introduced me to masters and walked me through his old precincts on a bright English day in June. An Oxford college was playing cricket at Charterhouse that day, and we rode home on the cricketers’ bus (we had journeyed by train), which stopped for two hours at a country pub. Alastair Elliot was also in the House, a poet straight out of school, naive and intense, and dedicated to poetry although dedication was prohibited. We stay in touch, and have visited each other in England and America. Jenny Joseph and Elizabeth Jennings were poets I saw much of, and Jenny visited me in Paris and later in New Hampshire. My closest friend was Geoffrey Hill, whom I met at the end of my first year. He had published a poem in Isis that I admired, and I invited him to my rooms for a Poetry Society sherry party. When I praised his poem, he reacted with an effusion of gratitude that I took as ironic. I was overprepared for mockery, and my reaction was mistaken. Geoffrey came from a village where his

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