Customer Reviews

Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first discovered Donald Hall when teaching high school English. Hundreds of my students, through the years, read his classic "My Son My Executioner" in my class, and since first discovering that poem at an AP conference, I've read everything I can find that he's written. This memoir is a gentle, moving, ultimately rather heartbreaking book. I recommend it.

One might be excused for thinking that Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006-2007, has written as many memoirs as he has books of poetry. I may well be off by one or two (either way), but by my count UNPACKING THE BOXES is his seventh memoir. Years ago I read two of his earlier ones ("String Too Short To Be Saved" and "Life Work"), and they proved to be easy, moderately interesting and literate reads. UNPACKING THE BOXES can be described in the same way, but it doesn't quite measure up to those previous two. Maybe it has something to do with my own aging, rather than (or in addition to) Donald Hall's.

In any event, UNPACKING THE BOXES basically covers the stages of youth and old age of Donald Hall. The first three-quarters of this memoir cover his childhood in Hamden, Connecticut, schooling at Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, and teaching at the University of Michigan. Throughout this discussion, Hall gives particular emphasis to his enthusiasm for poetry and his education and development as a poet. As a parenthetical, it is remarkable how many other distinguished poets were fellow students with Hall at Harvard circa 1950 -- for example, John Ashberry, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, and Adrienne Rich. At Michigan, Hall met Jane Kenyon (she was one of his students) and eventually she became his second wife. In other books, Hall has written about their 20+ years together, mostly in New Hampshire, and about her death from leukemia. The last quarter of UNPACKING THE BOXES deals with Hall's life after Jane's death, including three years of intense and debilitating grief and then Hall's own struggles with the decrepitudes of old age (he writes the book as an octogenarian).

Throughout, Hall seems to be forthright, even when the result does not reflect very favorably on him. At times, especially in the last quarter of the book when discussing his inner psychological turmoil brought on by the illness and death of Jane Kenyon, Hall's account becomes rather uncomfortable, and once again I encounter a writer who has relinquished drapes of personal privacy that I would never let drop. Does art really demand such baring of the soul or psyche?

UNPACKING THE BOXES should be of moderate interest to devotees of post-WWII American poetry, and perhaps of keen interest to fans of Donald Hall or Jane Kenyon. For the rest of us, it is, I fear, somewhat on the tepid side.

When former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall lost his mother in 1994, he packed up everything from her house and moved the boxes, unopened, to his own cottage. His wife, Jane Kenyon, died the following year; and Hall mourned his closest losses at length. Only the passage of time gave him the impetus to finally go back and "unpack the boxes." What he uncovered were the memories of his childhood and the stories of his parents' lives, jogged into the present by tokens, mementos, scraps, and photographs. He shares those remembered scenes with us on these pages.

This memoir, then, covers his early years in New Haven, Connecticut; his schooling at Exeter in New Hampshire; his undergraduate study at Harvard; and additional education in Europe. Always in the background is the lure of his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire, a sanctuary and a retreat from those other "civilized" experiences. We shouldn't be surprised that he eventually chooses to live there, later in life. Since Hall documented Jane's life and death in the book "The Best Day the Worst Day," he skips over most of those details here. He does delve into his resulting despondency. And then he gets the call in 2006 -- a fax, really -- that he's been named the Poet Laureate. He's excited, he accepts, and that's the end of this volume.

I saw Donald Hall in person at the live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood in June 2008. I knew little of him before that night, I'm afraid to say. But after finishing this book, I can't wait to read more. Now I'll have to catch up by going back to all of his previous books.

I'm disappointed. I guess I wanted more from the former poet laureate, more meat about his working his craft, rather than just pages and pages filled with the names of literary acquaintances; names of streets on which he lived; Harvard and Oxford society groups; and the receiving of grants, fellowships and awards. Beyond telling me - repeatedly - that he works on poetry from 6AM until 8AM each morning, then takes a midday nap, Hall told me little about the details of his workings.

Again...disappointed, as I am particularly fond of Hall's poetry.

Don Hall has been a poet for nearly 70 years, after making a conscious decision to write poetry in early adolescence. This book reveals the inner life of a modest man who has labored at his craft through good and bad times. I admire him tremendously, both as a writer and a man. I have to confess I have not read his poetry; indeed that I don't normally read poetry at all. I'm mostly a memoir person these days. But I purchased, along with this memoir, BOXES, the newest collection of Hall's poems from 1946 to 2006, called WHITE APPLES AND THE TASTE OF STONE, and am now beginning to make my way through it. Maybe Hall will finally convert me to poetry. This is the third of Hall's memoirs I have read, having found and enjoyed STRING TOO SHORT TO BE SAVED more than a dozen years ago. And I recently read THE BEST DAY THE WORST DAY, about his life with poet Jane Kenyon, a beautiful, if heartbreaking, book. In this newest memoir Hall is not simply honest; he opens his soul to us as he speaks of his life, early and late, including his youth, unhappy prep school days, his Oxford, Michigan and New Hampshire years. And always it has been a life filled with books and other people who love books and poetry, both practitioners and readers. It was like a who's who of modern letters from the past fifty-some years. But Hall's openness also makes it a bit like watching someone open a vein - painful and heartbreaking, particularly when he speaks of the loss of Kenyon and his life since then. Here's a passage from near the end of the book I found particularly compelling, initially funny but ultimately, profoundly sad -

"When you are three years old and your socks are falling down, somebody says, 'Pull up your socks, Donnie.' Then you are twelve, solitary, reading books all day, then twenty-five and a new father, burping your son at two A.M. When you turn forty, divorced, your life is a passage among disasters. Then you marry again, you are happy, you turn sixty, your wife dies. Then you are eighty and your socks fall down again. No one tells you to pull them up."

The multifold indignities of illness and aging are touchingly told here, but through it all, Hall somehow manages to maintain his childlike sense of wonder, his intellectual curiosity, and his marvelous sense of humor. This is, finally, a wonderful story of a life well lived and examined minutely. I relished its art and its beauty. - Tim Bazzett, author of the REED CITY BOY trilogy and LOVE, WAR & POLIO

Hall leads readers from his earliest experiences with poetry as a public-school student in Hamden, Connecticut, before taking us to Andover (he almost flunked out), Harvard (where he began a lifelong friendship with poets such as Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich), to Oxford, Stanford, and finally to the University of Michigan, where he taught until he was able to abandon schools of all kind. He then settled on his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire, known to readers from String Too Short to be Saved, Seasons at Eagle Pond, and other books.

The last two chapters chronicle the death of his second wife from leukemia, and his struggles with various ailments in recent years.

Objections: I could have done with less about his late-in-life romances; a little too much information in some cases. Also, I found his brief excursions into politics tedious. They had that right-thinking, in-crowd tone of "of course anyone reading this book must be on my side." A sourness creeps in that is otherwise absent from the rest of the book.

Otherwise, however, this is a quick and stimulating read in Hall's characteristically simple, direct prose.

I agree with the other reviewers here however I found a slightly different, entirely practical perspective in this book that hasn't been mentioned. Mr. Hall says that he decided to write while still a child and methodically set aside time every day to practice and perfect the craft, decades ahead of widely published research showing that mastery requires habits along these lines. He subsequently developed a disciplined process for finding inspiration, working through countless revisions and assembling collections. He shares details of building a successful freelance writing career and networking that could be a blueprint for any entrepreneur in any field. Mr. Hall's story could transition to the management books section quite easily!

I have one editorial quibble about the politics. There are reasonable arguments to be made on all sides of current issues. A clear distinction should be made between people and their views - reasonable people should be able to disagree and retain mutual respect, and reasonably skilled writers ought to articulate their points accordingly.Broad rants to the effect that 'democrats are socialists' or 'republicans are evil moneymongers' are appropriate for a devoted fan defending a favorite sports team, not for a citizen that hopes to engage in rational discourse about the issues of our times. I was very disappointed that several pages of this book were a repeat of the type of childish sniping that we can easily see on Comedy Central, or any playground for that matter, as Mr. Hall is surely capable of articulating a rational argument to support his political views. It was a dreary detour in an otherwise extremely moving and motivating story.

One other technological note - this is the first book that I read on my new Kindle and I was extremely pleased. It was easy on the eyes and easy to use.

Like many people who do not follow contemporary poetry, much less read it, I wasn't conscious of Donald Hall until I read a review of his Unpacking The Boxes in the New York Times. Immediately it went onto my "To Be Read" list, and I'm glad it did.

What struck me beyond all else is Hall's balance as a person, and his willingness to write about himself honestly. In these days of so many confected, fictionalized "memoirs" this is a distinguishing element.

While the book, written when Hall was about 80, is plangent, it is also laugh out loud funny, and, therefore, hopeful. Hopeful for us all as our lives arc into their final quadrant.

Having now discovered Hall the memoirist, I'm off to discover Hall the poet. I can't wait.

I was so looking forward to reading this book of poetry. My expectations were not realized, however. I expected to read, in poetry, a tale of the poet's life as he looks back. I found it to be boring and not what I think of as poetry. The title initially intrigued me. Very disappointing.

Donald Hall was the poet laureate in the US for 2006-2007.

I saw this book in the New York Times Book Review section in November and ordered it immediately from my library. Sadly, I have to return this book to the library, having renewed it and renewed it and renewed it...

I read this book at night. In a few weeks, I will buy it so I can have a copy for myself.

Though it is prose, it is more like poetry than what most consider to be 'prose'. Not surprising.

A few excerpts that tell of Mr. Hall's remarkable and unremarkable life, as only a poet can write:


***

The book opens:

BEGIN EXCERPT:

'At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done. My parents supported my desire, or at least did not attempt to dissuade me. My father hated his work, and it was his passion that I should do what I wanted to do. My mother was prevented by her gender and her era (born 1903) from exercising her intense aimless ambition, which settled on me. They worried how I would make a living at poetry, but would not pressure me to join the prosperous family business, the Brock-Hall Dairy in Connecticut, where my father added columns of figures from Monday into Saturday. Their support was affectionate, passive and generous. Beginning when I was a freshman in high school, they gave me for Christmas and birthdays the many books of poetry I listed for them.


Why did I come to poetry at such an age? A few years ago in Nebraska, talking about my beginnings to high school students, I told about wanting to write because I loved Poe and Keats, later Eliot and Yeats. A skeptical boy asked, "Didn't you do it to pick up chicks?" "Yes!" I answered. "How could I forget?" In the absence of athletic skill, I found that poetry attracted at least the arty girls if not the cheerleaders. Ambition exists to provide avenue for the libido. This notion begets another, less flattering to the peacock male ego. Maybe all women are the one woman, and everything gets done to woo Mom.'

END EXCERPT

Sigh.



I read on. I was in Montreal, reading in bed, with fewer distractions than I had at home. I could not stop reading.


Hall describes the meaning of the title of his book "Unpacking the boxes". His mother died in 1994, at age 90, while his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, was ill. He emptied his mother's house, and a moving van took seventy or eighty boxes to his house, and also to a cottage the family owned nearby. Hall's wife died a few years later. For some time, Hall did not open the boxes. Three years after his wife died, his assistant moved into the cottage (not where he lived but another house) and helped him unpack the boxes. Many books in the boxes would go to the University of New Hampshire.

He describes the contents, which included various photos of his parents while young, photos of of cats dead for fifty years, model airplanes, toy cars, a Boy Scout manual, a baseball and baseball glove with its "oiled pocket chewed by mice". Hall states, that in all this unpacking, that he felt the "shock and exultation of exhumation."

Hall states that "in childhood nothing happened." Hall was born in 1928, the same year, he notes, that Mickey Mouse was born and Thomas Hardy died, "breathing the air of the Great Depression."

He was an only child. His father bought the Brock dairy and it became the Brock-Hall dairy, which delivered milk seven days a week by horse and wagon to the "back doors of New Haven and its suburbs."

Hall writes about memory, that "Memory is stronger when it recalls transgression." He talks about having played with a neighbor boy while a repairman was working on the refrigerator. Hall and the other boy were near the repairman's Model T which had been refitted as a pickup, and the two boys lifted chunks of concrete onto the truck's bed until Hall's mother discovered this and reprimanded the boys.

Attempting to undo the wrong, Hall lifted the chunks of concrete down to his accomplice, who wore an Indian headdress of some sort. Hall "carefully dropped a large lump of concrete onto [the other boy's] skull. Oh, the bliss of targeting a head circled by feathers! He howled and ran home, I was sent to my room."

Hall writes of the first time he saw a nude female body, when he was four. A three-year-old neighbor daughter dashed out of her house, naked, and Hall remembers his "wicked joy" as he watched his shocked and flustered grandmother run and grab the girl back into privacy. "License and rapture began with this vision."

Hall talks about the difficulties of his parents while growing up, about regional differences in accents between New Hampshire and Connecticut, about his early life, about his kindergarten teacher and his third grade teacher, Miss Sudell, with whom he fell in love.

Hall writes of his wife's death, that she abandoned him, of course, but that it was his mother who abandoned him first, in illness, as he was growing up, retreating to her bed, losing weight, becoming abnormally thin at an unhealthy 68 pounds. The first doctor told her to stay in bed, but that did not help. A new doctor told her to get out of bed, have a drink and enjoy herself. And so Hall's mother returned to herself, to him.

He writes of the maid, Aggie (Agnes) his family hired for 5 dollars a week, a live-in, even though his father only earned 35 dollars a week. Aggie was not servile, Hall noted, she drank coffee and chatted with the family, and the young Donnie sat on her lap and cuddled with the young Aggie. When Hall's mother insisted Aggie don a black skirt and white apron, Aggie sulked. Hall learned that his father had an affair with Aggie.

He talks about the prohibitions that he grew up with, and that his father grew up with. Drinking, smoking, card playing, dancing and swearing were "anathema." His father's Connecticut was "shameful about sex, but the rural world took it for granted. It was natural. Animals did it, whereas cows and horses were not known to drink hard cider, play bridge, or puff on stogies. Sometimes a cousin's first child was born six months after the wedding; aside from a moment's tsk-tsk there were no consequences. But let another cousin pass out in a tavern while playing poker, and disgrace was devastating."

Hall writes about school, about prep school, about Harvard, about coffee with Robert Graves, about writing poetry, about his first marriage and subsequent divorce, about his marriage to Kenyon, about their marriage together writing poetry in the morning and making love in the afternoon.

He writes about the first time in high school he felt the swell of a girl's breast, about the woman he dated at Harvard with black hair, pale skin and red, red lips whose erotic demeanor made his parents nervous. He writes about sex, about love.

Hall's writing about poetry is not writing about what makes poetry 'poetry'. Hall writes about pulse. Sex and love and life. Pulse. Passion.

Sigh.

I take this book to bed every night, and awake to find it still open face down, book mark in place, where I last placed it before drifting off to sleep.

It pains me to give up this book to the library, yet I know some other person desires this book as much as I. Soon enough I will buy it.

Superb write. No other words to describe it.

For literary enthusiasts, this is your food.