D.H.
Wilmot, N.H., 2003

ONE

I’VE NEVER WORKED A day in my life. With the trivial exceptions of some teenage summers, I’ve never worked with my hands or shoulders or legs. I never stood on the line in Flint among the clangor and stench of embryonic Buicks for ten hours of small operations repeated on a large machine. Oh, I’ve watched this work, visiting a plant; I’ve watched Modern Times also. When I taught at the University of Michigan, many of my students worked summers installing gas tanks at River Rouge or building generators in Ypsilanti. Some of them came from families of line-workers; the university was a way out of Flint and Toledo. These children of line-parents moved to desks in offices, nine-to-five, which was my own father’s work, and which I escaped. Doubtless my grandfather Hall, my father, and I made a stereotypical three generations: My father’s father grew up without much school, doing muscle-work, and built a successful business; so he sent my father to college who worked out his life at a desk adding columns of figures among blonde-wood cubicles where properly dressed men and women worked with numbers five days a week and half a day on Saturday. Then there’s me: I stay home and write poems—and essays, stories, textbooks, children’s books, biography … Work?

Work. I make my living at it. Almost twenty years ago I quit teaching—giving up tenure, health insurance, and annual raises—as one of my children began college and the other was about to. I worked like crazy to pay tuitions and mortgages—but because I loved my work it was as if I did not work at all.

There are jobs, there are chores, and there is work. Reading proof is a chore; checking facts is a chore. When I edit for a magazine or a publisher, I do a job. When I taught school, the classroom fit none of these categories. I enjoyed teaching James Joyce and Thomas Wyatt too much to call it a job. The classroom was a lark because I got to show off, to read poems aloud, to help the young, and to praise authors or books that I loved. But teaching was not entirely larkish: Correcting piles of papers is tedious, even discouraging, because it tends to correct one’s sanguine notions about having altered the young minds arranged in the classroom’s rows. Reading papers was a chore—and after every ten papers, I might tell myself that I could take a break and read a Flannery O’Connor short story. But when I completed the whole pile, then I could reward myself with a real break: When I finished reading and correcting and grading and commenting on seventy-five essay-questions about a Ben Jonson or a Tom Clark poem, then—as a reward—I could get to work.

From the middle sixties into the seventies I saw Dr. M. M. Frolich in Ann Arbor, which at that time supported more psychoanalysts than Vienna. My first marriage was thrashing itself to death, I was unhappy—and it was the thing to do. Dr. Frolich, the only local analyst who did therapy, helped me greatly—as I saw him once a week when things were tepid, three times a week when the psyche hotted up. He didn’t help by talking but by raising his eyebrows when I talked. Over the years I learned how to be helped: When I walked into his office I started emptying my mind out, thoughts of the instant, not thoughts saved to tell my therapist. I learned to be unguarded enough to allow slips of the tongue, always grist for the mill. Once in a headlong sentence I clearly intended to say “life” but by mistake (as the actress said to the bishop) said “work” instead. Dr. Frolich’s gentle gray head nodded in confirmation.