Life Work

in memory of Lucy

WORK IS THE ONLY PRACTICAL CONSOLATION FOR HAVING BEEN BORN.

—Miguel de Unamuno

CONSIDER THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, HOW THEY GROW; THEY NEITHER TOIL NOR SPIN.

—Matthew 6:28

ADMIRABLE IS THAT RELIGION OF THE OLD MONKS, LABORARE EST ORARE, WORK IS WORSHIP.

—Thomas Carlyle

O, WHY DON’T YOU WORK
LIKE OTHER MEN DO?
HOW IN HELL CAN I WORK
WHEN THERE’S NO WORK TO DO?

O, I LIKE MY BOSS—
HE’S A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE;
THAT’S WHY I AM STARVING
OUT IN THE BREADLINE.

—The Little Red Songbook

WE MUST WORK THE WORKS OF HIM WHO SENT ME, WHILE IT IS DAY: NIGHT COMES, WHEN NO ONE CAN WORK.

—John 9:4

PREFACE

In the ten years since this book was published, my life and my work have changed utterly. I finished it, after a cancer operation, convinced that I wouldn’t live long. If forebodings were accurate, they were radically misdirected. At the end of Life Work, I wrote, “Today if I begin a thought about 1995 I do not finish the thought.” These words will forever spew irony’s acid. In 1995, it was my wife Jane Kenyon who died, at forty-seven.

As I write in 2003 I am seventy-four, reversing her digits, still breathing and walking and even working. While we were both healthy, as I tell herein, I worked on many projects many hours every day. I excused my workload because it paid the mortgage, tuitions, groceries, cordwood—and accumulated an estate that would support Jane after I died. But when I gave such reasons for my habit of labor, I laughed at myself. Surely I did what I did, not out of prudence, but because I loved doing it.

Maybe I was right the first time. After Jane died I could no longer write children’s books. I tried and failed. When I worked on periodical essays, I had to force them out, excruciating syllable by syllable, and they were no good; I learned to turn down commissions. Revising a textbook I struggled with boredom and lethargy. I made hard work out of a collection of poems for children. All I could do was to write grieving poems about Jane, a book called Without and much of a subsequent collection, but I could concentrate on poetry only an hour or two, and therefore my day was largely empty of work. I missed long hours at the desk, joyfully swimming in language. I had not realized how much my work had derived from the companionate life, how intensely my life was life-with-Jane. When she was first sick I repeated a sentence to myself, “My wife has leukemia,” but it came out, “My life has leukemia.”

This new edition of Life Work appears eight years after her death. Grief has a life of its own and its own work to do. It is born howling, it labors, it grows old. For five years my days were dominated by her absence. Somewhere around the sixth year my life began to take on independence, to find or assume a life of its own. I was able to care for another woman, not in relation to Jane’s absence, but attending to the woman herself. At the same time I returned to the desk in something like the old spirit, enjoying the acts of pen on paper, damn the subject, words and sentences uncoiling down the page in purple, felt-tipped, illegible, revisionary rapture. At seventy-four, I do not think of 2005 without understanding that I may not take part in it, which is only sensible, and which serves to brighten the moment. But I go to bed again looking forward to getting up in the morning—to black coffee, to newspaper, to life and to work.

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.

Today I begin Life Work. We were up at four-fifteen this morning, and at six we drove to New London for a small ceremony: Jack Jensen died two years ago today (St. Patrick’s Day) and Jane organized a memorial at the marble bench erected in Jack’s memory outside his office at Colby-Sawyer College where he taught philosophy. I worked on a poem before we drove the twelve miles to stand in a circle, six of us, reading Scripture and praying. I was as cold as I have ever been; it occurred to me, in my egotism, that my suffering was appropriate to the anniversary. Do I think I will suffer Jack out of purgatory? Jack’s own theology mocks me. He was our minister, with a degree in philosophy to go with his divinity degree; often he was more philosophical than mystical and he never spoke of purgatory. Jane and I loved him, and his death two years ago was devastation.

We moved to New Hampshire in 1975, to undertake the life of free-lance writing, and to live in the farmhouse my great-grandparents bought in 1865. My grandmother was born here in 1878 and my mother in 1903. Our first Sunday in New Hampshire I thought: “They will expect us to go to church.” I suppose they were my cousins; church was the small white clapboard South Danbury Christian Church two miles north, which my great-grandparents Ben and Lucy Keneston helped to build in 1868, and where my grandmother played the organ seventy-eight years, from the age of fourteen until she was ninety-two, and where I sat on Sundays as a child when I visited my grandparents. For decades I had not gone to church, nor had Jane, and we went that first Sunday grudgingly, without enthusiasm, to hear the young man in the pulpit quote “the German poet Rilke”—which pricked up our poetical ears.

But there was something else, something that endures—a community radiating the willingness or even the desire to be careful and loving. This community was my cousin Edna, her sister Martha, our cousin Audrey, Annie Walker who played the organ following my grandmother, and other neighbors who assumed us into their rows as if we had just returned from a journey. The tender welcome was irresistible, and we went again the next Sunday and the next. One Sunday morning Jane was ill and stayed in bed; I would stay home with her—but five minutes before Church I knew I had to go, and sped off in the Plymouth, astonished at my desire.

In the meantime Jack’s sermons touched us: Jane was first to follow him; I followed Jane as we read Scripture and then saints and mystics. I found Meister Eckhart and Jane Julian of Norwich as well as Saint Teresa—do our hormones choose our metaphysicians?—as we joined a two thousand year history, full of murder and compassion and grace, under Jack Jensen’s leadership. We saw him sometimes for dinner or at a party, saw him drink too much and argue—with me to aid and abet. We learned how he lived, how hard he worked. At Colby-Sawyer he taught philosophy and the history of religions, five classes sometimes, and taught every day arousing the sometimes-lethargic young women of his small college. Also he counseled them, formally and informally, all the while he ministered to us. For years he worked on a long novel out of the classical world—he admired Yourcenar’s great Memoirs of Hadrian; he admired Mary Renault; most of all he loved the classical world, and visiting Greece was overwhelmed to walk in the Athenian agora where Paul and Plato walked—but he was not a novelist. He was a minister; on Saturday afternoons, for most of his life, he wrote his sermons. We heard him when he was spiritually alert and lively, and heard him when he was exiled and thirsty in the desert. When skepticism rode him as a jockey rides a horse, his sermons were historical and philosophical, dry but informative; but then the rains would come, especially during Advent when he waited again for the birth, or in contemplating personal saints like Dietrich Bonhoffer. The Christian year enthralled us, and rhymed with the countryside’s year: the birth in cold and snow, Maundy Thursday with its journey toward torture and death, Easter with its sunburst of resurrection. Jack permitted me to alternate skepticism with Christianity. When Jane and I visited China in 1986, reading our poems for USIS, on Easter we went to a Chinese church, two bignoses among five hundred enduring Chinese Protestants, and when I heard the choir belt out, in Chinese, “Up from the grave He arose,” I felt myself melted into two millennia of the round world.

Then Jack discovered a problem in his abdomen. Doctors could not agree whether it was cancer or not, an ambiguous cell structure, but they tried chemo just in case. He returned to health but later the symptoms returned; more chemo, which had to cease because it destroyed red blood cells. Jane and I were in Boston, baby-sitting a friend and his small daughter while her mother was hospitalized for a minor operation, when the phone rang: Jack had two days to live. So we sat by his bedside as he turned cold. The last night, Jane and another friend spent the darkness beside him as his breaths grew slower, repeating,

Lord, have mercy upon us.
Christ, have mercy upon us.
Lord, have mercy upon us.

At six-thirty the next morning, exhausted, with Jack unresponsive, Jane drove home to sleep. I held Jack’s cold hand in her stead. I was fetching a cup of coffee when Jack died early on the morning of March 17, two years ago today.

Today we threw tuberoses—Jane bought them in Cambridge yesterday—onto the granite bench and drove home, where I returned to my poem and an essay almost finished and a letter recommending a poet to a prize panel. Meantime, Jane in her study upstairs worked on her own poems. After an hour, I was ready to begin Life Work. Every day I will write a few pages on the subject. I will write about my own work and the sensibilities I derive from, my parents and my grandparents. Oh, I have many notions about work. I would: Whatever I write about—when I write an essay or a children’s book, when I write about the ox-cart man or Dock Ellis or Henry Moore; when I try putting everything I know into a poem—always I write about work. When I talked with Dylan Thomas in my early twenties I asked how he worked; now if I meet a twenty-three year old with talent, I determine how she works.

That’s enough for today. Work is my obsession but it is also my devotion. Jack Jensen loved to work and it was one of the bonds between us. Work is not redemptive—God’s work—but it is or it can be devoted.

My Connecticut father’s father was Henry Hall, who married Augusta Wuestefeld, whose father Andreas was a cabinetmaker and emigrant from Hanover (the family had lived ina house, I was told, where the poet Heine had lived) to Orange Street in New Haven. I have a children’s toybox he knocked together for my father. The five children of Dorothea and Andreas knew no idle hours: Work was holy; work was the daily text of the life lived. For recreation the brothers and sisters Wuestefeld played bridge and teased each other heavily. My grandmother Augusta was witty, seeing through all surfaces to the greedy bone. When she was a young wife—with Henry Hall’s dairy business thriving—she handled the books with a shrewd, exact, and scrupulous eye.

My great-grandfather Charlie Hall, Henry’s father, worked hard but played harder. A working man, he labored building New Haven’s reservoir (off Armory Street in Hamden) in 1860, with a wife and two children at home in a cottage near the icehouses by Lake Whitney, and one day at noon walked off the job without telling his boss or his wife, walked four miles to the Green in New Haven and enlisted for a year in the war for Union, the war against slaveowners and rebels. I preserve the combination knife-fork-spoon he ate with, fighting in the West, and the bugle he blew. After his one year he came home, taking no pleasure in the work of war; later when he was drafted he bought a substitute rather than fight—even though as a laborer he needed to borrow the money.

This purchase never impeded his later expressions of patriotism, as on the Fourth of July through the eighties and nineties he led Charlie Hall’s Fife and Drum Corps in Hamden parades. Maybe nothing much bothered him. Rumors suggest he took pleasure in alcohol. When he died of a stroke, not young, family stories tell that his widow stood by the head of his coffin, weeping, as two strange women glared at each other across the foot.