Donald Hall
Describe your latest project.
The Best Day the Worst Day is a memoir of my twenty-three-year marriage to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia at the age of forty-seven, ten years ago. The book begins with her funeral, and then there is a chapter about our happiest event — when we left Michigan and its university for my old family house in New Hampshire, in 1975. The next chapter is about her diagnosis, almost twenty years later. The chapters follow this pattern, the progress of her illness on the one hand, and recollections of our life together, a marriage that was happy and productive, as Jane and I lived together in this big old house, writing our poems, struggling with illness, and the events of our lives large and small — the death of a father, the death of a cat. The contrasts from chapter to chapter are extreme, but there is a constant that holds them together, and the constant is love and pleasure.
What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. I suppose it is the contrast between the dour society of Puritans, and the unlimited sensuality of the heroine. When Hester unloosens her hair — that scene in the woods — Hawthorne foresees the possibility of a great unloosening.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good place to start.
If they haven't done so, people should read Jane Kenyon's poems, selected as Otherwise. A new Collected Poems will come out this autumn.
Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why or not?
Sure, true. Why not try out in improvisation what we do every day in revision?
What section of the newspaper do you read first?
I read the first section first, conventionally enough — but only because I am saving the best for last — of course, the sports section.
What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?
My favorite shoes are the easiest to take off and put on, especially when traveling through airports.
Describe the best breakfast or your life.
My last book, a collection of essays on poetry, is called Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, so I think this is a good question. Whatever else it contains, it contains sausage. I think that the English breakfast, generic, is the best of all — with fat bangers and bacon and fried tomato and eggs over easy and baked beans. When will America ever catch on to baked beans in the morning?
What is your idea of absolute happiness?
Absolute happiness is being so lost in what you do and what you love — as in poetry, as in love — that you lose all sense of your own identity. You are exactly what you are doing and you are nothing else.
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