Mini-Group Read: Life Work / Donald Hall

I'm setting this up for my own selfish reasons, namely, so that whatever anyone says is in one place, easy to find if I want to refer back to it. It's just a tiny group read but of course, if anyone is interested, come on in.

Thanks for setting this up, Lucy. I was wondering how we were going to do it (post on our own threads or what). Now I just need to get to page 12 so I know what "onomastic" means!

Found you! Great idea.

I read the first 25 pages tonight and thoroughly enjoyed them. I must say I'm very envious that Hall loves his work of free-lance writing so much. I cannot imagine wanting to leap out of bed every day by 4:30 in the morning to start working.

"Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working." Contentment is "absorbedness. . . . total loss of identity, hours that pass like seconds or without any notion of time elapsing: It is always the paradox of contentment--of happiness or joy--that to remain at its pitch it must include no consciousness of itself; you are only content when you have no notion of contentment." (pp 23-24)

This quote made me think of the concept of "flow" that I read about in a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a number of years ago. "According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task." (I copied this from Wikipedia) I've experienced this at times in my life but not on a daily basis.

I was amazed by how many drafts he can go through for one poem (I think it was up to 600 for "Another Elergy"). "I am swept away: I am happy; I am manic. . . . Who else counts the number of drafts?"

Some other things I liked:

"Always I hope that I might be doing my Best Work"

His comments about listmakers on p. 10, especially when they accomplished some task they never planned to do, and therefore never listed, and how they would then write the item down and immediately cross it out! (I've done that.)

The descriptions of his great-grandfather's and grandfather's dairy business and the home delivery of milk in glass bottles. (I remember similar deliveries when I grew up on Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s.)

His grandfather, Henry Hall, passing on the secret of life to him: "keep your health--and woik-woik-woik."

The meaning of "moonlighting"--working outside on clear nights when the moon was full.

Notes:

In the preface, Hall writes about his wife’s death and the process of grieving, that it was five or six years before he could properly engage with people and his work.

Hall is steadily going to focus on the notion of ‘work’ -- what it is and isn’t. How his whole life is wrapped around the concept and comfort of 'work'. Cites farm life, the cycle of it, the regularity and insistence of it (say on a dairy farm) as the template. I think he draws strength from thinking of how hard is ancestors worked, how steady and determined and mostly sensible they were. I'm thinking that perhaps he has struggled with ambivalence with his own life as a writer and poet .... and that 'working' hard and steady at it has been what makes it 'all right' -- and that he has struggled during times when writing has not been easy. I expect somehow that most of the book is going to be a meditation around this important area. -- Not to rant or anything, but I think our culture has gotten seriously mixed up about work.

One thing I'll say, is that all the farmers I know, and I do know a few, work all the time but always have some time to stop and talk - they never seem to be in a rush. There's something we can learn from that, to be sure.

I too loved the listmaking riff. I do that too. Hmmm. I would assume that the LT profile includes being a listmaker, now why would I think that?????

onomastic = pertaining to names and naming. All those stupid names of developments are products of onomasty. I LOVE it.

I looked up Ragged Mountain -- it's just a little north of 89 as it crosses from Lebanon to Concord NH -- southish central NH. Something all you folk from elsewhere might be interested to know is that the VT/NH border (and on down the White River to, uh, I think?, the Connecticut) is where, a jillion (sorry) years ago, what is now Africa crashed into this continent and then left behind a piece of itself. So Vermont, geologically speaking IS totally different. At the border you enter a sort of confused jumble of mountains and then suddenly the land is so different, lush and much much greener. I'd go recheck all this exactly but that book is definitely in storage.

I always think of NH as being bleaker and tougher and sadder and greyer than VT. Think Russell Banks and you know what I mean. It is just a gloomier place, don't ask me why. But Hall is right that it is different.

Pat -- what a self-absorbed dummy I am! Your insights were right on and forced me to dig deeper to come up with something to say!

I think I might try to get this book from the library. Although I live on Long Island, I was born in Rhode Island, and actually have a number of New Hampshire relatives.

Marvelous! And welcome! We haven't gotten very far, so there is lots of time to catch up, and it doesn't matter anyway.

BTW, just added a link to this thread on the group home page with the rest of the group reads.

I finished Part One tonight (pages 25-62). Some of the things that I noted were:

"Our ancestors emigrated to this country, for the most part, to better their material conditions; in the United States it is only acceptable to do something if you claim to do it for money. It is not respectable to work because you love your work." (p. 29) Hall also says that people love to complain about their work but that they're usually bragging. Lucy, I was curious about your comment that our culture has gotten seriously mixed up about work. Were you agreeing with Hall's comments here? I must say I can't think of anyone I know at the moment who loves their work, most people I know complain about it or avoid discussing it.

My husband and I have been retired for awhile (no kids) and neither of us regrets having left the corporate world but I winced when Hall says, on p. 26, "not working becomes conviction of unworthiness."

At the end of Part One, on p. 62, he says that "People happy in their work suffer like anyone else" and there were more indications in this section about the things he's struggled with--like depression (several times it seemed) and illness (both his and his wife's). He also makes a reference to drinking and its side effects: bruises, adultery, liver failure and divorce, on p. 39. I assume he was talking about suffering these side effects himself.

I also liked that he asked Henry Moore "Now that you're eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is the secret of life?" "Henry Moore answered me straight: 'The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is--it must be something you cannot possibly do!'" (I always want to ask people older than me what the secret of life is but I rarely do.)

I have got to go find that book on Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi because Donald Hall should have been one of his examples.

I also want to go back and read some of his comments about farming again. He definitely seems to respect that work but, if I remember correctly, he doesn't like farming himself.

Thanks for the comments about what New Hampshire is like. I don't think I've ever been there, maybe driving through to Maine, but I have spent time in Massachusetts and Vermont. It's interesting that NH is so different.

I was thinking of a friend who was talking about a developer she knew (who was involved, in fact, in bringing Walmart to Vermont) who inherited a lot of money. She was saying how much she hated what he was doing to this little town outside of Burlington, but then she stopped and said, "But at least he works at something." I was flabbergasted by that. It is much harder, in the US, NOT to work at some recognizable job, to do something really different, work maybe, but not one that makes money -- and I suspect that much of Hall's anxiety and obsession with this whole topic is his own unease at being a poet, not doing something directly 'useful' and lucrative. My father who was a professor worried about this constantly, that he never made money. Believe it or not he was somewhat ashamed of being a scholar. That is the kind of confusion I am thinking of.

What I am finding fascinating here is that he is almost arguing with himself about what work is -- one minute he is talking about work existentially - ...you are only content when you have no notion of contentment. totally absorbed in a task, in your work. That lovely word, absorbedness that a fellow writer comes up with. Contrast that with the way he sort of hammers at the word work -- wuk, woik, work, work, work as if it is a word that is also lashing at him and hounding him..... not working becomes conviction of unworthiness. We prove ourselves worthy by the numbers of work. And so he actually counts how many drafts he takes a poem through. I love it that he is so totally out there about how compulsive that is, but it is indeed a very compulsive thing to do.

It did resonate with me that when he was a kid he felt free to sit for hours at a time taking potshots at the woodchucks, but now I was too impatient for such sitting; now instead I wanted to read a book or write one.

..in the United States it is only acceptable to do something if you claim to do it for money. It is not respectable to work because you love to work.

I loved the image of the rich man happiest on his tractor -- and the Lawrence insights, 'for some mysterious or obvious reason, the modern woman and the modern man hate physical work.".... which then moves us toward the topic of what is work, what is leisure. (One man's work might be another man's leisure, the golfer and the golf instructor, but never mind) . I'm only up to page 40 -- I'll try to catch up today, but who knows what lies in store for me.

Is a Buddhist who has decided to sit still all day watching the wind blow across the water of the pond working?

I suspect Hall was tortured by questions like that.

Gosh, I was trying to sneak by you Jim..... I thought you would be stumped by the word 'mini'.

Hi Pat -- I'm just finishing up Part I -- will write more tomorrow, but I'm fascinated by how he veers between minutiae and breathtaking insights! I mean do I need to know when and where he flosses? But it is all part of his 'carefulness' and attentiveness to the flow of his days.

Hi Lucy. I'm actually reading a couple of children's books by Hall that I took out of the library today--Ox-Cart Man and I Am the Dog I Am the Cat--as well as flipping through a book of children's poems he edited--The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems.

I still think he was blessed to enjoy his work so much and to make his living that way. I'm not sure if I'm picking up that much unease about his work life as much as his awareness that his situation is unusual. He seems surprised that so many people think he has to force himself to write (I'm thinking of the reaction he got at his college reunion when he told people he was free-lancing and had left teaching).

Anyhow, I think I'm going to try and read some more of Blindness tonight so probably won't get back to Life Work again until tomorrow.

The flossing and the insane number of drafts actually make him more human to me--he's not perfect!

Oh yes, and I don't mean to be critical, just observational (if that's even a word).

I'm going to throw out some bits I liked along the way to the end of Part One:

Everyone needs to let the inner child out, to undertake some mildly pleasant activity that absorbs or engages us only a little. (He watches baseball while doing easy tasks, to relax.) I do LT!

I average five thousand letters and postcards every year. Once when the mailman was late I bit his leg.

We walk the same road most days all year, and the walk is different always.

When Henry Moore saw granite poking through the ground in the woods, his eyes took the stone in, the texture and weight. I watched him as he spoke sometimes, holding a pebble's weight in his stubby fingers, rolling it back and forth, loving it and taking it in through the nerves under his skin.

... maybe I use numbers to prove to an internalized authority that Donald is a good boy and his finished his homework, stacked the wood, fetched the eggs, washed the car, and weeded the cabbages.

The section ends on a slightly morbid note as well, not surprisingly, in a way he has been building toward it, that he works with such absorbedness against death.

I'm looking forward to Part Two. Thanks Pat for waiting for me to catch up with you!

What I thought of reading your comments about Henry Moore was the way Hall used to love to rearrange words. I have a slightly dim memory of a section where he is asked by a Japanese businessman (I think) to look at something he's written and can't help himself and gets lost in re-crafting the two sentences he's asked to read.

I thought there was another passage (I think where he's comparing the work of a stone mason to that of a line worker) where he clearly thinks the stone mason's work is superior in the sense he gets to make something from start to finish and has so much more satisfaction in his work.

I agree with you about LT--at first I thought it might compare to Hall's work but it's not that kind of absorbing and I don't consider it work in anyway (except when I "need" to write reviews which I'm always behind on--but I guess Hall would probably call that a chore).

I loved the section about walking his dog. We try to vary the routes with our dog to make it more interesting but since the weather is usually different in some way, there is usually something different about the walk each day.

I'm looking forward to the next part, too. This has been fun reading it together--makes me think about it more than I normally would.

Yes, yes, exactly -- that poor businessman!!!!! I wonder if he ended up with anything usable!

Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to do LT and pay bills at the same time. I would if I could! I guess it is somewhere in between. What I like is we can make what we want of it, use it seriously or quite lightly. I love that.

I'm thinking more too. All good!

Hi Lucy. Just checking in. I got up to page 89 tonight but will wait to post more until tomorrow (had a margarita tonight and now I'm sleepy). But it looks like you were very prescient re your comments in post #5 about Hall's reverence for his grandfather's work of farming.

It was great to read this section after reading Ox-Cart Man--so many comparisons to the life his grandfather led as a farmer.

Hope you're feeling better tomorrow.

I've caught up with you! For some reason, perhaps my cold, I feel I have less to say about what I have read so far -- but I will start something and see where it goes.

So Hall is diagnosed with a recurrence -- this time an ugly barbell in his liver (this is what my father died of btw) -- and the prognosis is bad. With his usual calm, Hall describes his panic and his resolve, alternating between ordinary details and the sort of cosmic thinking that overwhelms at such times. This gives way to a elegiac and lyrical description of working for his grandfather Wesley - no doubt in my mind this forms the heart of the book and of Hall's life, the memory of these days spent going from one task to the next under the summer sun. This experience connects him to traditions that very few experience now and yet were, until the 1930's-40's the experience of most -- even if family had moved off the farm, somewhere was a grandpa or ma still farming -- as in John Updike's novel Of the Farm so many still did as Hall did, spending at least a few summers working outside. I think here too of Wendell Berry's passionate attachment to his farm and the natural cycles, his sense that the contemporary detachment from all of this has led to excesses and tremendous and dangerous ignorance of the true power of natural forces.

Well, well, here I am dithering on! I spent a summer working for my step-grandmother - I had one summer of the girl version of this kind of work - picking berries, canning, even making butter and a myriad other things in her huge garden -- she loved these arts even though it was a little bit of an affectation not at all of a necessity. She had a few dairy cows and people had to come and 'steal' their milk because she didn't pasteurize it! I also polished and cleaned and did things in the house, but I mostly remember the time outside. Anyhow, reading this made me think a lot about that time, because of course we talked and talked and she was a very interesting person who had a rich life. (A second wife, she married late.)

I am feeling better, thanks, but I know I have to restrain myself for another day..... not easy!

Hi Lucy, glad you're feeling better but you're wise to take it easy today. I'll post more on Life Work later today--my husband is anxious to get out to the farmer's market!

Some comments on Pages 65-89:

It was nice to hear that his memories of his childhood summers with his grandparents on the farm he's now living on 50 years later bring him so much comfort while he seesaws between despair and hope over his illness.

My grandfather was the model for my adult manhood . . . . It pleases and amuses me to compare the way I work to the way Wesley Wells did. Comparisons need distance to be useful, and the work is different enough, farmer and writer, but each of us worked or works the whole day at diverse tasks, making an unpredictable living by producing a variety of products . . . .

I liked his description of scythe mowing. Finding a meter, one abandons oneself to the swing of it; one surrenders oneself to the guidance of object and task, where worker and work are one: There is something ecstatic about mowing with a scythe.

Things were done because it was the way to do them, an aesthetic of work . . . .

What I really got this time was how important the process of work is to him, not just the end-product.

On page 74, he regrets that his work interfered with his parenting of his son when he was young--because I was impatient to write and read, I did not play catch with him as much as I might have done. This is obviously very different from the way he was able to share his grandfather's work with him. I think that's great that you remember doing something similar with your step-grandmother while the two of you talked.

I think what I must have picked up on in the beginning was Hall's dislike for the work of his other grandfather's business of the Diary--milk pasteurizing and bottling and delivering; every-day-the-same, temporarily efficient subdivision of the industrial world; my father's curse--that I grew up determined to avoid or evade. And did. Just above that passage on p. 11, he says (as you noted earlier) It is the family farm . . . that provides a model for my own work; one task after another, all day all year, and every task different.

This was a great section to read in conjunction with Ox-Cart Man.

I haven't read anything by Wendell Berry but both Stegner and Hall have mentioned him in reverential terms and I have a copy of his book Hannah Coulter sitting on my shelves which I really must get to.

Hope your cold is on the way out!

It's marvelous isn't it? Reading a book this way -- you highlighted some great passages -- the scything, for instance. Now there is an art that has gone by the wayside.

Wendell Berry is someone who has walked the walk. As in, he has fully lived the life he intended to live. It is quite remarkable, the degree of thought he gives to almost every single thing he encounters.

One advantage to being sick but not too sick is that you can read while you lie around. So I have finished up the Hall sooner than I normally would have.

In brief - Hall continues with his theme on work, but now what becomes evident -- with his description of how miserable his own father was -- that the model of the farm life draws him with its connection to the earth, the dedication to process and being fully in the moment with whatever task is at hand (even though Hall finishes lots of books and likes to count pages and so on, I think he sees it more like a good big woodpile or a barn full of hay for the winter than, say, money in the bank). Absorbedness. He describes his mother's cousin, Freeman -- a man who would have a hard time in our modern world, having no taste for authority of any kind -- but who could barter his considerable skills for what he needed back then. There is, perhaps, some ambiguity about his grandmother Kate, whether she regretted giving up her scholarship to medical school to run the farm or not -- she seemed contented to him. He is very clear though that everyone, male or female, should have the opportunity to make a choice about how they will focus their lives, what they will work at and that there is no greater waste than spending your time on earth doing something you hate. His father's life (dutifully working at the dairy) fills him with horror.

And suddenly my mind has gone blank! If I think of anything else, I'll come back.

This last part was not as compelling to me and as a result I don't have too many comments on it.

Notes on pages 89-124:

Women's work--the dignity of utility. Comparing the work of Kate, his grandmother, to that of Lucy, his mother. No matter how hard Lucy tried, her work could not matter to the surburban economy as Kate's work mattered to the farm's.

Although I want to live among my children, my grandchildren, my mother, and Jane, otherwise I want to say: KEEP OUT. Is this coldness? I would rather write a letter to a friend than talk with her.

It pains me to think of my father's work. . . . He always loathed his work at the diary. . . . He detested what he did.

He hated what he did and I love what I do. Opposites are never accidental. He shook his fist over my cradle, I was always told, saying, "He'll do what he wants to do"--and he stuck to it years later even when it turned out to be poetry that I wanted to do. What a gift from his father!

Good quotes, pithy and exactly right on. All things that struck me - interesting, the question of work that matters and work that doesn't....

I can relate to the second quote -- the older I get the more I feel that way!

You too felt this last bit was less ..... something?

That was great! And on to the next book. Let me know when you are ready.

I agree with you about the second quote. I'd much rather write a long email to a friend I don't see often to catch up than spend one to two hours talking on the phone.

I've been discussing this book with my husband on our morning dog walks and we both feel that Hall is unusual in loving his work so much. I think the two of us were so achievement oriented in our work lives that we never stopped to consider the process of work much. We were able to retire early because of it but never really thought about what we'd do after the event of retirement. It's been easier for me to fill my time because I like to learn so I'll take classes on almost anything.

I'm not sure what happened in the second section--obviously his illness changed things--but I didn't feel I was getting the same insights out of it. And the stuff about his father's work life was sad.

I hope to be ready to start Family Portrait tomorrow or Wednesday night. Just need to catch up on a few reviews.

I've really been enjoying your discussion of Donald Hall's book, Life Work. I went back to my notes from the end of May to see if I had the same thoughts about the second half. If you're interested, here's what I wrote:

The second half of Donald Hall's Life Work, while very good, wasn't as good as the first half. This is a man who lives to revise his writing, and in the second part I don't think he revised at his usual level. This was at the same time that he found out his colon cancer, previously in remission, had metastesized to his liver. The surgeon removed one-third of his liver and they put him on chemo. He was using the memoir to more or less distract himself from not only feeling terrible physically, but facing the almost certain fact that he wouldn't be around for very much longer. Ironically, while his cancer again went into remission, his wife developed leukemia and died. I guess it just proves that writers write because they have to, and they use everything. Don't get me wrong, the book in my estimation still rates 5-stars; but I don't think Hall would disagree that the second half of the book feels a bit disorganized and distracted.

Lucy, did I understand you to say that your father died of liver cancer? My grandmother died of that at the age of 65. Once when I was giving a medical history to some doctor or other, I told him about my grandmother's illness. His question startled me then and intrigues me now: "Why? meaning, I guess, why liver cancer? At the time I had no answer, but since then I've come to believe that my grandmother used one of those "elixers"--like Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound--12.5% alcohol! I think she used it all her life, so she was effectively an alcoholic without even knowing it. Wowzer! Which by the way has nothing to do with "work"--haha.

Becky - thanks so much for that wind-up -- you've got it exactly right, I think, there is something a bit limp about the last half, and well, why not, since he was feeling pretty terrible and putting a good face on it, keeping busy.

Yah, well, that is the why, innit? -- my Dad could put the stuff away. They all did, in his generation and milieu (which includes Hall btw).

Oh, absolutely, so typical for so many in Hall's generation and also the one before. Prohibition created an entire generation or two of alcoholics--unintended consequences. Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947), who literally drank himself to death, uses the word "dipsomaniac" in his letters to describe problem drinkers (himself not included--heh). My grandmother was born in 1899, so she fits right in there as well.

Becky, I also thought the second part could have benefited from more of his famous revisions. But what a shock it must have been to him to not know how much longer he would live and how he'd feel during chemo and the possibility he wouldn't be able to work the way he wanted to.

Thanks so much for bringing this book to my attention. Before this, I'm afraid, I had never heard of Donald Hall.