Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall

coronation. Six girls in ball gowns hovered in the wings. “
Now
,” said the retiring Queen, “
now
comes the moment you’ve all been waiting for!”
    The dean sitting beside me on the platform whispered in my ear, “She doesn’t mean it the way it sounds!”
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    Once I flew half a day to be picked up in Oklahoma for a reading the next morning in a corner of Arkansas, to read at chapel—a compulsory gathering of all students—at a small Christian college. Sometimes at such places a self-satisfied piety hovers over faculty and students like smog in Los Angeles. Sometimes these places are lively and responsive. It’s hard to plan what to read, but I would never choose a poem to
épater
my hosts. This time, three people picked me up—a woman who chaired English, shy, who spoke little; a man who ran Humanities, thrilled by poetry and ample in literary knowledge; and the older woman who had brought me there, I think a dean of Honors, who was ebullient and talkative, funny and smart and warm. Because we had a long way to drive, we stopped outside the airport for supper before continuing. I was returning from the men’s room when I heard the dean address her companions: “Well, Ah’m going to
tell
him.”
    As I sat, she turned to me and spoke sweetly—smiling broadly, saying what she needed to say, unashamed of her language: “Donald, if you say ‘fuck’ in chapel tomorrow, Ah’ll get
fahrd
.”
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    Some readings prove memorable for a single eccentricity. On an occasion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an orchestra was finishing rehearsal in the auditorium as the poetry reading was due to begin. Introducer and poet carried music stands into the wings. In London a reading was to begin at six p.m. in the ancient Church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Evensong prevailed. Another time, in the state of Chiapas in Mexico, eight writers sat onstage waiting hours for the governor to arrive. A large audience had departed by the time he walked in, surrounded by bodyguards with machine guns. In fatigue we each read to the governor for five minutes.
    â€œ
Gracias
,” we said. “
Gracias
.”
    Â 
    As I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did. Performance held up, but not body; I had to read sitting down. When an introduction slogged to its end, I lurched from backstage, hobbled, and carefully aimed my ass into a chair. For a while I began each reading with a short poem I was trying out, which spoke of being eleven and watching my grandfather milk his Holsteins. In the poem I asked, in effect, how my grandfather would respond if he saw me now. When I finished saying the poem, there was always a grave pause, long enough to drive a hayrack through, followed by a standing ovation. Earlier, I had never received a standing O after a first poem; now it happened again and again, from Pennsylvania to Minnesota to California, and I thought I had written something uncannily moving. When I mailed copies of the poem to friends for praise, they politely told me it was terrible. I was puzzled and distressed, until I figured it out. The audience had just seen me stagger, waver with a cane, and labor to sit down, wheezing. They imagined my grandfather horrified, watching a cadaver gifted with speech. They stood and applauded because they knew they would never see me again.

Three Beards
    IN MY LIFE I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower’s day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, and during the Civil War beards were as common as sepsis.