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The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

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I read an excerpt from this book in a magazine not too long ago. I was so moved by it that I decided to read the entire book. I'm glad I did because it is a wonderful piece of writing.

In this memoir, the poet Donald Hall tells of his relationship with the poet Jane Kenyon. In it, he tells of meeting her, marrying her, living with her (first in Michigan and then in New Hampshire) and, finally, losing her to leukemia. "The Best Day The Worst Day" comes from a chapter in the book where, after a day when Ms. Kenyon seems to be recovering and doing well, they receive the news that her cancer will be terminal. However, it is also an appropriate title for the book because Mr. Hall alternates beautiful chapters of the "healthy" parts of their relationship with more harrowing chapters describing Ms. Kenyon's progressing illness.

This is not a memoir for the faint of heart. Though there are beautiful passages of love and joy and living together in a rustic farmhouse in New Hampshire, death runs through the entire book, not only because we already know Ms. Kenyon's ultimate fate but also because her death is not the only one. Both Ms. Kenyon's mother and Mr. Hall's mother are elderly and, trying to take care of them and their ultimate passing just before Ms. Kenyon's is a strong thread in the book. There is also Mr. Hall's own cancer which is diagnosed a few years before Ms. Kenyon's that overshadows events. Ironically, Mr. Hall's cancer was expected to be fatal and yet he has managed to survive.

How he has done so is somewhat of a mystery. The avalanche of tragedy that Mr. Hall experiences has destroyed others. But Mr. Hall has managed not only to continue but also to produce this wonderful work. Perhaps only those who have suffered through cancer the way Mr. Hall has can fully appreciate this work. Certainly, it is difficult to get through it more than a few chapters at a time. In the end, however, the model of Mr. Hall's strength and perseverance are something I think any reader will appreciate.

If you can handle reading a blow by blow description of a woman's losing battle with leukemia, don't miss this book. Donald Hall is a poet as was his wife Jane Kenyon. He has spent a lifetime mastering the economy of words to make each one count. His prose accomplishes the same thing....This memoir is breath-taking reading for its directness and beauty as it takes you through the graphic paces of a losing battle with leukemia against a background of exquisite love. I couldn't put down this book....and feel privileged to have chosen it without any prior recommendations. It is most unlikely that this will be a "best seller" because of its content....but if you appreciate fine writing and can handle this kind of content....you will be moved!!!!!

I saw Donald Hall read at AWP almost a year ago and decided then that I had to have this book. I was moved to tears in the reading. I bought it and it took me a while to have the time to read it, and then a month and a half to read. It is not in anyway shape or form, easy to read. Not only is language dense and medical at points, but somehow each technical word is embedded in a love that is as strong 10 years after Jane Kenyon's death as I imagine it was at Hall and Kenyon's marriage 35 years ago. It a book that moves you to tears on almost every page. And not only is this written in tribute and memorial to a life of love, but it is a catalogue of life for popular and well respected poets. Writing habits, readings, trips, the things you write and do to have the money to write, the way that dedication is your life.

I recently finished reading Jane Kenyon's collected poems which left me missing her and wanting more. And so I picked up The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon written by Kenyon's husband--the esteemed poet Donald Hall. While the subtitle of this book is "Life with Jane Kenyon," I would argue that it is not so much about Kenyon's life with Hall as it is about her death, her dying. Yes, Hall does recount memories and vignettes of their life together, particularly how it was they came to live in their beloved farmhouse in New Hampshire.

Mostly I found this touching book to be an exploration of a husband moving through the process of grief, of holding on, and of letting go. Throughout, Hall beautifully and matter-of-factly reveals what it feels like when the one you love dies, and what are those threads that carry you through to this end, and what are those threads that bind you to this life afterward: "Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexity of feelings in their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears."

I actually bought this book as a gift to a freind who was in the a similar situation but she was the one with cancer. I got a library copy to read before I gave it to her and cried so hard (I had lost my husband to cancer a year before) that I could not give the gift as I was afraid that I would make her situation worse.

I have the book in my collection and will get through it in my own time. It really is a book of love and should be taken that way. I recommend it.

Although this is so overtly a chronicle of losing a loved one, about the horrors of cancer and its various treatments, it is also a very real picture of what makes a good and lasting marriage. Although Hall and Kenyon knew the odds of their union lasting were very slim, given the 19-year age difference and her bipolar illness, they took the plunge, Hall noting that "all marriages start in ignorance and need; what matters is what you do after you marry." Fifty-five pages later, Hall affirms what makes their marriage last -

"What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other's eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages ... Each member of a couple is separate. The two come together in double attention."

He speaks further of what, for them, constituted those "third things" - John Keats, the BSO, children, pets, or Eagle Pond. The twenty-three years Hall and Kenyon had together had their ups and downs to be sure, but in the end love prevailed. This book is Hall's very personal love song, written just for Jane. Read it and learn what love is really all about. - Tim Bazzett, author of Pinhead: A Love Story

I am in the middle of this book, after having read Jane Kenyon's collection, Otherwise, and Donald Hall's collection, Without. For days I dove into their poetry and was overcome by the love they shared not only with each other, but with their readers. I am also grateful to them both for having the courage to write about all the difficult things: depression, cancer, death, mental illness, sexual frustration and fear.

Coming to this book after the poetry puts me in a place where I find myself saying out loud "Oh, yes..." Mr. Hall's plain and straightforward narrative fills in between the poems the stories of how they came to be as a couple, how they loved, lived and saw one another through whatever arose. The cadence of each chapter moving forward and back, forward and back creates a mosaic that is at once joyous and horrifying. Each chapter holds the other up and together they make this story buoyant and beautiful. I for one am grateful to Mr. Hall for opening up his memories of his and Jane's life for me to witness and cherish all the same. Thank you.

Hall lifts off the ornate cover of his 27 year marriage to the poet Jane Kenyon, once his student at Michigan, to reveal some down home truths about her personality. It seems that Kenyon's depression made his life pretty bleak, for she might lash out at him as easily as she tormented herself with her vague phantoms of anxiety--all very real to her, of course, for drugs of the Prozac class had no effect on her unfortunately. So take it all in all whenever the family came to call they were never sure whether or not Jane was going to be her warm, friendly and sometimes bawdy self, or her other self, the tormented one who preferred to be "invisible." My hat is off to Donald Hall because even if she was great, it's not always easy to be around someone who's dour to that degree.

But Hall does not suffer in silence, and he lets us know that her famous friends, poets like Galway Kinnell and Liam Rector, also witnessed episodes of depression that were pretty chilling. There's a new book in which the friends give testimony to this effect, celebrating her life and work, yet not skimping on her acerbity and gloom. And yet they loved her! She must have had something. For me, "THE BEST DAY THE WORST DAY" was a bit of a tell-all, and has its exploitative moments like the recent book by Michael Bergin about Carolyn Kennedy. Why couldn't Hall have shown us more of the happy hours? Why alternate every chapter of her life with one of her dying? It smacks of something a poet might do, for effect, for formal reasons, rather than sitting back and thinking, "This will make my readers think that I valued her only when she was dying."

There's something of a Jane Kenyon industry right now, and this book and others like it will, of course, add bricks to the mortar. As we turn our love for Jane Kenyon's writing into an actual house of mourning, I find it hard to predict what will be next on the platter. I expect that somewhere, somebody is working on a volume of selected letters to go with the selected and collected poems we have already been given. The Bill Moyers film, oddly, already came out. It was one of the few things Jane Kenyon was happy about, for as Hall tells us sometimes work helped, and sometimes the occasional good news like getting the NEA award of the Guggenheim. Good for her. Everybody needs something.

Donald Hall's prose account of the fifteen months that he and his wife Jane Kenyon fought her illness with everything they had ("it was January 1994--the month when leukemia came to our house") is one of the rarest of books: so full of love, so little of self-pity, so beautiful, so kind. It is one of the best books I ever read on illness and grief but then Mr. Hall is one of our best writers, but more importantly the most decent of people. Of course we know that Ms. Kenyon died from the disease in April, 1995.

What Mr. Hall does in this book is interject chapters of his life with Jane Kenyon before her diagnosis with the fifteen months of hell they experienced with the stay in Seattle for a failed bone marrow transplant, the side-effects to the myriad of drugs his wife had to submit to--pneumonia, herpes, the constant nausea, the loss of her mane of beautiful hair, the weight loss--all the things that cancer patients have to endure. But there is his account of how he met his wife--she was a student in his class at the University of Michigan-- their trips abroad--to India, Japan, China, England, their writing and reading poetry together, their families--his two children by a previous marriage, their aged mothers--so much love, so much caring, so much joy. When Kenyon and Hall were apart, they talked twice a day by phone. One of my favorite chapters is "Animals Inside the House." When Hall and Kenyon married, they had fourteen cats. When the couple moved from Ann Arbor to the farmhouse in New Hampshire where Hall's family had lived for generations, they eventually acquired Gus, "midsize, forty pounds, part golden, part sheepdog, with a sheepdog's handsome nose." Both Gus and their cat Ada outlived Jane; but upon their deaths, Mr. Hall scattered their ashes on his wife's grave.

Then there is Mr. Hall's language: so beautiful, so profound, so precise--as you would expect from someone of his genius. "Death minimizes hangnails." Although they had never entered a church in Ann Arbor, Hall and Kenyon started attending a local church in New Hampshire: "By community we slowly approached communion." His description of cleaning out his mother's house made my eyes burn as I remembered my brother and me doing the same at our mother's house: "My mother over ninety years had collected little but acquired much. . . "Then I carried white plastic bags in my left hand and with my right hand swept my mother's lifetime of possessions into sacks for the dump--decades of used-up life: Christmas presents and souvenirs of travel, decorative coaster, pretty perfume bottles dry for forty years, doilies in tatting and lace, WALDEN, leather boxes, letter openers, candlesticks, a sewing bag, bad paintings, audiotapes snapshots of my father at college, a framed picture from the ninetieth birthday." The list goes on. As Hall and Kenyon await an infusion of Cytoxan, that could kill her, "the clock ticked toward separation." He never lies to her about what might happen to her: "I never lied to her, didn't cheerfully assert that she would survive to write poems and climb Mount Washington again. In mortal circumstances, nothing is so repulsive as mendacious optimism."

Finally the last paragraphs of this book that must have been so difficult to write will make you love this man if you didn't already: "Today, ten years after her death, her poems endure. So do I. . . where Jane fills the air around me like a rainy day. Her handwriting labels jars of spice and lists telephone numbers. . . I am old, hobbling through my eighth decade, but I do not fret about dying. I am able to love and to work."

This is a book that you will recommend to those you love.

The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon
This compeling memoir took me into the most intimate life of these two outstanding poets. The details are such that I felt that I was actually a part of their lives. Jane Kenyon's life and death are contrasted in words that bring her to life by one that knows her best. A most excellent read.