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Donald Hall The Grandmother Poem |
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In junior high school, Jane Kenyon
found poetry when she read Witter Bynner’s
translations from the Chinese, The Jade
Mountain. The aesthetic of the image remained with her forever. At first,
poetry was only one of the arts she loved and practiced. Like her brother Reuel, she drew pictures, and she sang with a chorale.
From the age of fifteen she worked to save money. She cleaned house one day a
week, which she loathed. She baby-sat and worked in John Leidy’s
gift shop in downtown Jane never enjoyed school, except for
some literature classes, English and French. One high school English teacher
filled her with love for Shakespeare and left her with hundreds of memorized
lines. When she first entered the When she returned to the university,
she majored in French. Spring term of 1969, Jane took my course “An Introduction
to Poetry for Non-English Majors.” It was a class I loved to teach, in which
I could evangelize— “Come to poetry!”—with enthusiasm, but that year was a
bad one for me. My first wife and I had separated in 1967, and the divorce
was final on Valentine’s Day, 1969—the same day I underwent general
anesthesia to remove a spermatocele from my left
testicle. A month later I had my gall bladder out and missed two weeks of
classes. I think I taught well, despite the miseries, but I never made Jane’s
acquaintance among the hundred and forty students. The following summer, Jane
applied for admission to my fall class in writing poetry, then the only such
class at the university. Annually, about fifty people submitted their work,
and I picked ten or twelve students whose work I liked best. Jane’s
manuscript included “The Needle,” as yet untitled, which is reprinted in
Otherwise and resembles her later, best work. Among the poems that she
submitted, it stood out. Once I had read it—in August of 1969, summer of
astronauts on the moon, summer for me of bourbon and lonely misery—Jane
Kenyon’s name went on the list of students accepted for English 429 that I
posted on my office door. The rest of our lives—a twenty-three year marriage,
Eagle Pond Farm, and many poems—derived from “The Needle,” which she wrote
when she was nineteen, about visiting her sick grandmother. Every young poet
writes a grandmother poem; Jane’s was not generic. That poetry workshop was the best of
a dozen I taught during my years at There were no stars in that class but
a cluster of bright, irreverent people who loved poetry. Jane is the one who
developed, persisted, and produced the best work. Teachers become familiar
with good students who take off in other directions. Two of these poets
became lawyers, another hosts an NPR talk show, another edits a newspaper.
(Several have continued to write poems and have published books.) Eventually,
Jane wrote the poems of Otherwise, but no once could say that Otherwise was
implicit in 1969 in the work of the twenty-two-year-old agreeable witty woman
with short straight hair, a handsome figure, and a military vocabulary. So
much in our lives depends on chance. Jane, seldom happy in groups, was happy
in this group of student poets. She charmed and argued, swore and praised and
denounced, laughed and teased with the rest of them. She made long
friendships in that class, and in conference with me she was natural and
easy. She never made me feel like an institution—but apparently I was
terrifying enough—before classes began. After Jane’s death, I read a notebook
from her undergraduate years that contains a sentence she wrote before
English 429 started meeting. My house was near her co-op, and she wrote a
note: “When I found out Donald Hall lives 3 houses away I felt like I did
when I found that When the term was over, Jane came to
office hours with new work, and I saw her socially with other members of the
class, or at poetry readings. I enjoyed her for her brains and humor, her
kindness and support for others. She had a number of boyfriends or lovers but
only Bill—I’ll call him—was serious. Jane was fond of him but he wanted to
marry her and Jane was skeptical. She compromised, and in June of 1970 moved
in with Bill. I saw little of her while they lived together. She was practice-teaching
in the autumn, toward a certificate. “Mrs. Canyon” loathed practice-teaching,
and her relationship with Bill deteriorated. She felt angry all the time, she
told me later, and exercised her rage on Bill. Then Bill started seeing
someone else. As 1970 drew to a close I heard from Jane’s friends that she
was moving out of the menage, and had taken a room
in another co-op. Although it was she who did the breaking-off, she felt
miserable over what she perceived as her failure. I called her up and asked
her to supper in January, 1971. Unhappy myself, I worried for Jane whom I
knew to be vulnerable. When we ate supper that night she talked about nothing
but Bill. (I countered with my own complaints.) We continued to see each
other, about once a week, and for a while the subjects remained the same.
Jane spoke of needing psychotherapy. Through friends in the field, I helped
her find a smart Freudian whom she visited two or three times a week, cheap
enough because he was still a student. Therapy did not cure her depression
but helped her identify feelings (telling love from rage, for instance) so
that she could attempt the deliberate life. Whenever we saw each other, she
stayed overnight. We were not passionate or committed lovers but comforts to
each other—and in 1971 if a couple had dinner together,
they tended to have breakfast together. I continued to date other women, and
made sure that Jane knew it. If she saw anyone else I did not know about it,
nor would I have minded. After two or three months, one night a week became
two nights a week, and we spoke less frequently of
other people. Meantime we were both writing poems,
neither of us well. Jane wrote angry poems about Bill. Receding from
inadmissible reality, I wrote poems of a light and goofy fantasy. College
audiences laughed when I read them aloud but the poems were evasive and
trivial. In these slapdash weeks and months I looked forward to my dates with
Jane but began to feel nervous, noting that increasingly I attended to one
woman, as old loves sloughed off, got married, or moved to Oregan. Neither Jane nor I said, “I love you.” Maybe both
of us feared that “love” was a synonym for “pain”—and we were feeling only
pleasure together, light pleasure. We laughed together; we spoke of poems; we
fretted over friends. In summer Jane sunbathed at a
municipal pool and wore minidresses that showed off
her tanned legs. Always when I parked at her co-op, to pick her up for a
date, I watched her walk from the front door before I turned off the
ignition. (We remained promptness freaks, something in common.) Then I signed
a contract to write a biography—never completed; a long story—that required
my presence in We saw each other not only alone but
in company. My children liked her. I took her to middle-aged cocktail parties.
We had picnics and played volleyball in Delhi Park outside Ann Arbor with the
young scholars and writers of Michigan’s Society of Fellows and with poets
from Jane’s old workshop. We began to see each other three nights a week,
sometimes four. Therefore, I worried about what would become of us. It would
hurt to stop seeing each other—yet obviously we couldn’t remain together
because I was nineteen years older. Actuaries had Jane outliving me by
twenty-five years. One night we were drinking a nightcap in my living room
when my mother cat entered through the catport with
a large flap of stomach skin torn open and hanging down, red meat showing.
Horrified, we packed her into the car and drove to a veterinarian who stayed
open at night. The wound, though ghastly-looking, was superficial. The vet
knocked her out, applied antibiotics, dispensed some pills, sewed Catto up, and sent us home. We sat down again, to finish
our watery drinks, with hearts still pounding. As adrenaline flowed and
defenses disappeared, I found myself asking, “Do you think we ought to get
married?” That night, we spoke of the issue reasonably. (We were unromantic
lovers; ten years later we practiced candlelight and flowers.) We decided
that we were too far apart in age; we would stay as we were. Jane was
completing an MA in English. Maybe later she would do an MFA at Jane wept through her psychotherapy
and began to perceive a coherence and history to her troubles. I was her confidant;
intimacy became habitual. From time to time, in our evenings and early
mornings together, we alluded again to the possibility of marriage and put it
aside again. Then on Christmas Day of 1971 we had a terrible fight, worse
than any other fight before or after. We parted shaken, trembling, uncertain when or if we would see each other again. After
twelve or fourteen hours apart, I felt bereft and desperate at the prospect
of losing her. I telephoned and discovered that she felt as I did. When I
picked her up, her face was wretched with fatigue. “Maybe we should get
married,” I said. Jane nodded, and we embraced without speaking. Surely the
dread of separation has accounted for more than one engagement, and doubtless
there are better reasons for getting married—but all marriages start in
ignorance and many from need; what matters is what you do after you marry. We
set the date for We went ahead, although I was
tormented by misgivings and I am sure that Jane was. It was a relief to
concentrate on one woman—but did I love her? Was this what I wanted for the
rest of my life? She was so young, twenty-four. (I was so old, forty-three.)
Suppose she stopped writing poetry? Poetry was what brought us together, and
Jane’s commitment to the art burned at her center, but would it endure? Would
she remain a poet and prevail? One night I was regretting that as a poet she
would be Jane Hall. The moment I said so we looked at each other with the
same thought: in 1972, it was no longer obligatory for a woman to lose her
name, so Jane Kenyon remained Jane Kenyon. We were anxious, but before the
wedding we were distracted by a crazy adventure: we flew to School was over soon, and Jane and I
flew to From This place had been the The autumn of 1972 I took leave
without pay for a term, and Jane and I spent a month in The next summer, before another visit
to Although my mother had power of
attorney, and although Kate would never leave the Peabody Home, no one wanted
to complete the transaction while she was alive. I would give my mother a
mortgage of thirty thousand dollars, to pay for the Peabody Home, a sum which
would later become the down payment. My lawyer told me I could afford to
borrow the money but I had a better notion. When I was twenty-one, my
grandfather and grandmother gave me a sixty-five acre farm across from their
land on A year after he gave me the land, he
had another idea. Adjacent to my sixty-five acres was another abandoned farm,
thirty-five acres owned by my skinflint cousin Jesse Johnson, who had sold
off the timber. Every spring when he paid eight dollars in property taxes,
Jesse whined about it. My grandfather said, “I think Jesse would sell it
cheap.” “How cheap?” “Maybe fifty dollars.” Put together with the Morrill
place it would give me a hundred acres. I had fifty dollars in the bank and
liked the notion of extending and rounding off my acreage. “You mean just
before taxes?” I said. “No,” said my grandfather. “Just after.” Jesse sold me the farm for fifty
dollars in 1951. Year by year my taxes rose, maybe reaching as high as twenty
dollars. At some point in the 1960s, a letter arrived for me in When I needed thirty thousand dollars
cash for the mortgage/downpayment, in the summer of
1974, I remembered McGuff’s inordinate lust for my
land. I would be willing to sell my grandparents’ gift to buy my
grandparents’ house. A real estate man told me that my hundred acres might go
for as much as eight or ten thousand dollars. With malice aforethought, on
the summer visit to Jane and I could look forward to
owning the farm after my grandmother died. Freud says somewhere—it doesn’t
sound like Freud—that an adult’s greatest bliss is the fulfillment of a dream
from childhood. My mother and her sisters were delighted by the notion of
succession: the same family continuous in the same house since 1865. No one
was happier than Jane, and if her family regretted our potential exodus from My mother left for her |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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