The Old Life by Donald Hall

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

He liked to repeat

advice that Rodin gave to young sculptors:

“If you’re working

on a maquette, and it doesn’t go right, don’t

keep picking at the clay,

making little changes here and there.

Drop it on the floor.

See what it looks like then.” And he liked it

that Rodin remembered

tips from the craftsman who counseled him

when they labored

together in an artisan’s shop. “Rodin,”

said Adolph Constant

to the apprentice, “your leaves are too flat.

Make some with edges pointing

straight up at you. Never think of

a surface except

as the extremity of a volume.”

The last time I saw him,

he was eighty. I asked him, “Henry,

what is the secret

of life?” He didn’t hesitate; he said:

“The secret is to devote

your whole life to one ambition.

Concentrate everything

you know, everything you can summon,

to accomplish this

one desire. But remember: Choose something

you can’t do!” He laughed

and coughed, shifting his weight in the wheelchair.

✶

At the opening

cocktail party of Playboy’s conference,

“Great Young American

Novelists,” Styron and Bourjaily

speculated about

procedures or engines by which they

might rectify certain

reviewers. Their words exemplified

the spirit of this

writers’ weekend, which ended when Nelson

Algren stubbed his cigar

on a teacher of English’s grand

piano, all the great

young writers took off in a taxi

to pick up coeds

(returning shortly without coeds, drunk,

and thirsty), and

my friend Floyd the old novelist with bad luck

hurded down two flights

of stairs to remainder his collarbone.

✶

Every Friday there were

at least two cocktail parties, and on

Saturday four or five.

I went to them all. At each the same

student bartenders

and waitresses passed the same hors d’oeuvres

to the same people. Midnight,

we straggled off, stuffing our mouths

with a last sausage

or artichoke heart, drunkenly driving

to the City Bar

with its trio of jazz musicians, where

we ate enormous hamburgers.

Then I drove home drunk, and drove

babysitters home drunk,

and fell into the Saturday night

coma until noon

on Sunday, the New York Times and bagels,

a late afternoon date

for tennis followed by another

cocktail party or supper—

for a decade of Rusty Nails,

children, hangovers,

babysitters, love affairs, melted cheese.

✶

The names I put to feelings

contradicted the feelings. (I

malefacted

benignancy.) For the first half of my life,

my forehead wore an erratum

slip: “For ‘love’ read ‘rage’ throughout.”

✶

At his last Ann Arbor

reading—at the age of eighty-eight,

months before he died—Robert

Frost nodded, smiled, waved, and trembled

while two thousand people

stood applauding. Drinking 7-Up

afterward, he told us

that Ezra Pound was effeminate,

Yeats talked bunkum,

and Roethke was jealous of other poets.

When he shuffled

from green room to limo, a crowd of students

gathered to catch

sight of him. He V’d his arms like Eisenhower

and told them, “Remember me.”

In the back of the limousine,

Frost shook his head:

“To think that I wanted only to lodge four

lines somewhere, to stick . . . !”

While I watched, his face—full of victory—

reversed suddenly

to guilty sorrow: “But we were so poor.”

✶

When my daughter was four

or five, she acquired football language

from sitting on my lap

as I watched the Detroit Lions. One

Sunday night, as I put her

to bed, she asked me to perform

“unnecessary roughness,”

by which she meant tickling. Every

night thereafter we

roughhoused at bedtime, until the divorce.

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