Judging Donald Hall 14 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

“When you like a woman, / you talk and talk. / One night you kiss. / Another night you fuck.” “After their tumult, as they quieted, / She breathed into his ear / The tunes she loved to sing.” “When love empties itself out, / it fills our bodies full. / For an hour we lie twining / pulse and skin together....”

These lines are from three poems in the new collection by Donald Hall, one of America’s most revered poets, now in his eighties. I’ve been reading the collection, called The Back Chamber. Of the seventeen poems in the book’s first section, about half detail Hall’s apparently recent sexual escapades with a string of women—in language like that I’ve just quoted.

I don’t consider myself a prude. Yet I found myself repulsed by these poems while I was reading them. A man in his seventies or eighties is doing this? And exposing it to all his readers?

I was judging Hall critically, in my heart condemning his behavior. His obsession with sex—and at his age!

Then I read his most recent memoir, Unpacking the Boxes (2008). The chapter called “Grief’s House” is a cry of pain. It moans over and mourns the loss of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995 at age 48.

Theirs had been an idyllically happy marriage, a true companionship. After her death, Hall wrote two books about their marriage, her illness, her dying, and his grief: the poems of Without (1998) and the prose memoir The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005).

Yet his grieving has no end, as this chapter in Unpacking the Boxes attests. He feels compelled to keep writing about it, about his loss, about his response to his loss.

“Thirteen months after her death, I went manic.... Acting out my fantasies, I pursued women boldly.... I felt no inconstancy to Jane, only a cheerful lechery.... My neediness was monumental and I moved from woman to woman... I was not looking for love; love was unthinkable. I wanted sex, only sex, with as many women as possible.... What was I looking for? Maybe it was the comfort of touch, of skin, rather than the satisfaction of desire. Or was I cheating on Jane because I was angry at her desertion? Or was it life against death?” (164-6)

Reading this anguished confession, I felt rebuked. I had judged Hall harshly because I hadn’t understood him—hadn’t understood his pain.

Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount came to me: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged” (Matthew 7:1, NRSV).

Lord, have mercy, I prayed in response.

Now I am chagrined that I was so quick to be judgmental about the sexual explicitness of these poems in The Back Chamber. I now understand the poems as Hall’s efforts to make sense of behavior that he knew was excessive but had no power to stop.

I now hear the deliberate vulgarity of the “f”-word as Hall’s attempt to stare in the face the vulgarity of his actions and his needs. Like the great poet that he is, he wanted to find language that was perfectly true to his experience.

These are not poems that I will go back to, that I’ll want to read again (though the poems in the final section of the volume, very different in tone and topic, are ones I will indeed return to). These sex-driven poems are too raw for my comfort. But I pray that I will feel compassion for their author, not contempt.

And compassion for the failings of all of us—including myself—in this scary, mysterious experience we call “my life.”