The Writing Life : Ancient Eyes

In October of 1951, at the end of an audience with T. S. Eliot, budding young poet Donald Hall receives this memorable wisdom: “Let me see,” Eliot tells him, “forty years ago I went from Harvard to Oxford. Now you are going from Harvard to Oxford. What advice may I give you?” After what Hall calls “the comedian’s exact milliseconds of pause,” Eliot asks, “Have you any long underwear?” Hall confesses, “I suppose it was six months before I started laughing.”

We’ve always loved to read about the lives of our writers. Long before our taste for celebrity profiles of movie and rock ‘n’ roll personalities foamed into its present lather, we feasted on the details of poets’ lives, given what seemed their special bent for suicide or early death, drunkenness and rancid literary pettiness. Yet even the most cliched cautionary tale of a literary life is never so simple as it first seems.

It takes a book as shrewd and balanced as Donald Hall’s “Their Ancient Glittering Eyes” (Ticknor & Fields: $22.95) to begin to set us straight. This expanded and mildly revised version of “Remembering Poets,” Hall’s well-known but long-out-of-print memoir of Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, now adds to its gallery of portraits the faces of Marianne Moore and two of Hall’s former teachers, Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters.

Donald Hall is a deft chronicler of his acquaintance with the already famous elders he encounters as a young poet. In several cases--Eliot, Pound and Moore--the visits arise from Hall’s role as interviewer for “The Paris Review” (these original interviews are reprinted in the book’s appendix). He is, at first meeting, somewhat in awe of these figures; it is an awe that is inevitably tempered by experience.

In Hall’s reflections on Frost, we find troubling if sometimes amusing accounts of the warping effects of a poet’s desire for fame. When MacLeish decides to enlist Frost’s aid in trying to get Pound released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (where Pound was being held, charged with treason for his World War II radio broadcasts from Italy), Hall asks MacLeish “how he planned to persuade Frost to intervene. Oh, he said, he would just tell Robert that Ezra was getting too much attention, locked up down there; if we get him out, people won’t notice him so much.”

Hall tries to provide a balanced account of Frost, measuring the Life magazine version of the “rustic, witty, avuncular, benign” Frost against the man later biographies depict, in the words of one critic, as a “monster of egotism.” For Hall, neither extreme will do. Instead, he posits a complicated double vision that reveals not only the public Frost pandering to audiences by playing the role of the simple New Englander, but also the private Frost, wracked by guilt over the wreckage of his family. It is a Frost, Hall says, who “lived in terror of madness and suicide.”

Though Frost reveled in his late celebrity, his ambition, Hall says, “was never merely to be a celebrated poet; it was larger and more serious than that, for he knew that to write great poems he had to make perfect works of art which embodied wisdom and knowledge beyond the perfections of art.” Still, in Hall’s remarkable framing of Frost’s self-portraiture, a Grant Wood mask hangs over a face by Francis Bacon.

Hall shows the outrageous Dylan Thomas in all his riotous glory, a genius of excess. At one point, during a full day of pub- crawling all over London, Thomas, a glass in each hand, invents for his audience an American gangster movie, playing all the parts and doing “a sampler of American accents, each of them exaggerated, accurate enough, and hilarious.” The young Hall returns to his hotel room that evening flush with his new friendship, not to mention endless pints of bitter. He dashes off a celebratory letter to his parents, noting with classic filial understatement, “Dylan is fine, though he drinks a bit heavily.”

This “public suicide,” as Hall calls Thomas’ drinking, leads him to an exceptionally powerful discussion of the relationship of artistic endeavor and personal self-destruction. Hall concludes that the poet “who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire.”

Yet throughout this book Hall is unapologetic about the often life-altering demands of art, especially great art. Paraphrasing Rilke’s advice to the young poet, Hall says, “You will never be any good as a poet unless you arrange your life by the desire to write great poems, always knowing (and if you do not know it you are foolish) that you are likely to mess up your life for nothing.” Hall is devoted to the power of poetry. He says, “the great poets as they turn older look . . . to pursue vision, to discover motions of spirit and of human consciousness, which it is art’s task to enlarge.”

Hall’s recollections of T. S. Eliot commend that enlarged sense of self in the man himself toward the end of his life. No longer the “cadaverous” figure of their first meeting, the newly remarried Eliot (at 70) appears “debonair, sophisticated, lean and handsome” and very much, Hall reports, “like George Sanders.” Hall adds that a friend of the Eliots “later told me that he had seen Eliot at a dinner party eating his soup left-handed, with some difficulty, because he was seated on his wife’s left and his right hand was engaged with her left, under the table.” Hall tells us, in this shrewd and succinct reckoning, “Eliot’s deadpan hidden (Old Possum) humor smiled at the center of his behavior.”

Sometimes reconciling the life and the art can be more difficult. The aptly titled chapter “Fragments of Ezra Pound” reveals the shattered Pound of 1960, living again in Italy after his release from St. Elizabeth’s, awash in fatigue, often disconsolate, and physically fragile. These fragments, Hall tells us, “assembled themselves in half a second, turned strong, sharp, and insistent; then dissipated quickly, sank into flaccidity, depression, and silence.”

We all know about Pound’s paranoia (in the mid-1930s in Rapallo, he believed that, because of his economic ideas, Wall Street spies watched him with binoculars from the hills above the tennis courts where he played), his megalomania and his antisemitism. We also know of his quite extraordinary and lifelong generosity to other writers, including Eliot, Yeats and William Carlos Williams. Pound’s personal courage here late in his life, in the face of these devastating fluctuations in his capacities, gives this chapter a genuine poignancy. Never have the greatness of the work and the contradictions of the man seemed more compelling.

Of the new materials, Hall’s memoir of Marianne Moore shows her to be, of course, charming and eccentric (lunch items are served in pleated paper cupcake cups), and above all else, precise. Hall says, “Precision was her passion, definition at the forefront of duty. She constructed her poetry of terms made exact.” Hall is terrifically useful in situating Moore in the context of her times and peers, but it’s in his two interviews with Moore (collected here) that her peculiar and often comic turns of mind become most evident and intriguing.

In his sketches of Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, Hall seems to carry still the same ambivalence toward MacLeish and his work that he describes himself having as a student at Harvard. About Winters, however, with whom Hall disagreed about almost everything concerning poetry, Hall is both wry and generous. An early Winters story, “The Brink of Darkness,” leads Hall to a startling conjecture--that the critic’s aesthetic ferocity and rigidity came, in part, from the fact that “Winters feared madness all his life. The right ideas, combined with willpower, could keep madness off.”

The title of Hall’s book is drawn from the famous Yeats poem “Lapis Lazuli,” which concludes, “Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, were gay.” The irony here is that this passage ends a page of epigraphs Hall begins with Wordsworth’s well-known couplet, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Yet, Hall also says, “Whatever old poets feel as they come toward the end of their lives, they have spent their lives trying to make antidotes to death; we honor this making when we attend to their lives and characters.”

It is rare to find such an expert witness in the defense and celebration of poetry, such a champion of artistic courage, as we find in Donald Hall.