Good to hear from you, and I’m glad you got Joey’s postcard.
(Basically some place or other I must be Celtic, with all this
dual personality stuff. Next I will be Fiona McLeod.)
I don’t think you are good enough to submit to the New Yorker.
I think you are too good to submit to the New Yorker. With this
most recent issue, full of Howard Moss again, I concocted a
bitchy definition of “disinterestedness”: When a poetry editor
prints great quantities of himself, on the basis of quality
alone, although he realizes that he will be criticized for it…
Good to hear about the writing and re-writing. Me too.
Sometimes I think I carry it a bit too far! You know, I have not
published a satisfactory poem – virtually not a poem – since Kicking.
One little one which will stay as it is – but which I probably will
never reprint in a book because it is too damned little. And
Ploughshares is coming out with one, the Joyce Peseroff issue –
but I am changing it in the meantime. And last week New Republic
came out with one, and I had already changed it, and now I’m changing
it some more – and that little thing is only a few lines long
anyway.
But I am working on long and ambitious things, and maybe
eventually they will not only be publishable but Immortal…
And after all, that is the only thing worth thinking about!
Well, I am both pleased and sorry about the extra teaching,
you will understand. I’m glad it is there if you need it; I am
sorry that you need it, but my goodness the economy is terrible,
and going to get worse. Reagan is worse than Nixon any day. The
worst president we have ever had, and the country is going to be
in the worst shape, quite possibly.
Lately, I have been hearing from Gerry Costanzo – and not
about you. I have written him twice about you, and he has not
mentioned it in reply, and I am going to shut up – because I don’t
want him to get the sense that he is being pushed. However, I don’t
think it all bad that he is being in touch with me, because appar-
ently he wants to write about me – he asked me, and he sounded
serious, if he could be my authorized biographer. Well, I don’t
want one of those! But I think he means it about writing about me.
And I am going down to his place again this spring, to read poems
and give a talk. I am hoping that he will do you, next year,
because I think he does good books, and I think he makes them
attractive. He doesn’t do all good books – nobody does that –
but he has done a couple of good ones lately, and I really think
he’s one of the better small places.
2/
But in the meantime if one of these other things comes
through…I will be delighted of course.
I think that Max Kumin is judging the Princeton things
right now. Dan Hoffman is through.
I saw that you read for the Monday Night. Good for you.
Back in the forties there was a book club for poetry, which
didn’t last very long. I could tell you about it, but it was
doomed. In England, there has been one for years and years and
years, the Poetry Book Society. It comes out of the Arts Council
which is government sponsored. The only way it could happen in
this country is if the Poets and Writers (the Coda people) or the
Academy of American Poets did it. They in a sense have an annual
book, with the Lamont, which they distribute… I think there is
one other book that they annually distribute.
It would be a losing proposition I suppose. The book club
in the forties had five or six members, nation-wide. I was one
of them. Once I met one of the directors, and asked him. Amazing.
But that was a little thing run out of one quarterly magazine…
I seriously think that a national book club would not have
more than two or three hundred members. And everybody would be
quitting all the time, because everybody would get pissed off
about which books were selected.
I’d be all for it anyway of course. But I wouldn’t want
to do it myself.
In a sense, any one person could probably do it, because
it would never get very big. And so if anybody had about $10,000
to lose, I think they could do it, and do it single-handed – maybe
hiring a high school student to stitch up book bags four times a year.
(I suspect it would have to be quarterly rather than monthly.)
Ten thousand dollars would go for ads to start it off, and the
“profits” on the ongoing club would pay for one or two ads or
mailings a year thereafter…but I doubt very much if the initial
ten thousand would ever be earned back.
Want to try it?
Who wrote The Private Life? The title does not ring a bell.
I don’t like Sharon Olds, or not much anyway. I like Linda Gregg –
And I like one or two other people here or there, for that matter!
We had a wonderful time to England. We ate sausages and read
French novels. It was cold, there was a train strike – and it was
lovely. We went to the theater a lot, to the opera once, we looked
at some pictures in museums, some sculpture… We saw Geoffrey Hill.
I saw John Fowles and interviewed him for Esquire. But mostly we
just took it very very easy. And I return here and am delirious
with joy at the old fourteen hour day!
Love as ever, to all of you,
Don
A note from McNair about this letter: The “long and ambitious things” Don says he is working on eventually appeared in his acclaimed collection, The One Day.
I love the book in its gross state, and think it is a
great improvement, far more improvement than it ought to be.
I love the feel of it, and really think it makes a quantum
leap. I also like the three new poems, and they are already
gone.
Yes, it was lovely to see you two – and Lily and Wolf also.
And it would be good to see you more often. We are very laggard
this way, both of us inclined to go to bed at about the time we
would be having people over. But when we do see people – I mean
a few people! – we love it.
You are absolutely right about the energy and the vulgarity
of country-western, and this is something wonderful in your work,
and generally it is the best part of your work. Yes, and do not
forget “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal-posts of life/ ,
end over end, neither to the left nor the right.”
Iowa was a lot of fun. I saw quite a bit of Don Justice,
whom I admire. Also there was Hank Coulette, and Larry Levis
and Marcia Southwick… And the Justices had a lunch
party for me, and two other people had dinner parties for me,
and somebody else had a big party after the reading. I felt
feted…and I feel even better to be home.
Unfortunately my piece about Kevin McHale seems to be
doomed. Inside Sports is folding. I feel about fifty-two per
cent disappointed, because I had looked forward to writing it;
and forty-eight percent relieved, because I can do something
else instead.
Best as ever,
Don
A note from McNair about this letter: “Wolf and Lily” were local restaurateurs and mutual friends who swelled our dinner company in North Sutton to six….The three poems referred to in this letter are “A Dream of Herman,” “Mina Bell’s Cows,” and “Small Towns are Passing.” So Section IV concludes with one more generous letter from Don, thanking me for a visit; complimenting me about the poetry collection I will once more send out to editors; and submitting new McNair poems in the guise of Joseph Amaryllis. Less noticeable, but also helpful, is his last paragraph, with its model of cheerfulness in the face of writerly disappointment.
I’m so sorry to take so long with you, all fall. You
know there have been all sorts of little things. And now I
have been interrupted by this and by that – but (sic) a poetry
reading, by having to go down and watch the Celtics practice
and talk with Kevin McHale…all sorts of things that just keep
me from concentrating.
I don’t feel the urgency that you feel in one sense: the
book is going to change every few months anyway. I know I may
be wrong. I don’t believe I’m wrong. I don’t think that you’ve
hurt yourself madly by leaving these poems out – but I do think [you]
hurt the book. Because I think that these [poems] include some of
the best things that you have written. I don’t know as you are
doing this, but let me counsel against something that some people
do from time to time: they hold back on new poems in order
to get started on the next book. It is always wise, I do believe,
to print your best poems now, and hold nothing back. And it is
wise to get rid of the weaker old ones, even when they are old
affections and old favorites for various reasons. Also, I would
say that the shape of the book, that you perceive, as you put it
together, is far less important than the individual poems. I do
believe in trying for a shapely book – but only after you make
the decision to include all the best poems and leave out all the
weaker ones.
The book will seem thicker, with more texture and tweed
to it, more grit, more content, and much more particularity, with
most of these poems added, and one or two of the old ones taken
out. Just how you do it – just how you make it a single whole –
I’m not sure. But also, I do not worry terribly about it.
I love the new one, by the way. I have one or two little things
to question about it. But very very good. The only one of these
poems – nine poems – that I would omit is The People upstairs. You
were having some doubts about it. I would put the whole thing back
in the drawer. Two years from now you may find it and it may be
the start of something else great. As I have come to see it, over
the last year or two, I have come to feel that it does not work.
It is too thin. It is too tenuous a music.
I tend I guess usually to like your thicker and grosser
things – like the absolutely wonderful Peaceable Kingdom, which
was the poem in your manuscript at the very beginning which took
my eye – and my eye has never left you since! The new one is an-
other one of your thick and gross things. (By “gross” I am using
an exaggeration, as opposed to the very ephemeral, very short-lined
things, of which The People Upstairs is an example.)
2/
Leaving out. I would leave out Elinore. Elinore has
never been a favorite of mine, and as you have written more
poems, and gotten better and better, Elinore has receded until
Elinore just waters the soup at this point. I think that you
could put Holding the Goat and When Superman Died in the previous
section. In general, I think maybe you have too many sections –
and all the blank pages and the short line pages and the short
pages combine to make the manuscript seem a lot thinner than it
genuinely is. I want you to look for, and even enjoy the idea
of greater bulkiness. The book feels thinner than you are. I
would think about omitting some of the poems in the second part –
but I think that in a bulkier book they would stand up better.
They wouldn’t have to carry so much on their own backs. I don’t
think that Fire in Enfield or Kuhre are up to the best of your work…
but I don’t think that they actively hurt you, unless they seem to
be padding out the thin book. Lines or paragraphs like “Kuhre/
just lurches/ off/into the tractors/ noise and/…” This is very
very thin, when the word “off” has to carry whole line on its
back. And there is, in this second section, really less vigor
than there is in much of your work. I like your work best when
it is thick and muscular or even fat, when it is vigorous in its
positive or negative way – I don’t really make any distinction
between the positive and the negative! I make a distinction between
the vigorous and the frail.
I would leave out The People Upstairs. I would leave out
Elinore. I would think about leaving out Kuhre or cutting things
down. I would think about jamming things together a little more…
And I would add these eight poems and I would have absolutely
no doubt about that. Of the eight, the most nearly weak one
is the Beggars. I meant to say, it is not quite up to the wonderful
other ones. Even Calling Harold, tiny as it is, is wonderful and
gritty.
I don’t think you ought to worry about affirmation. I think
that books work as well by contradiction as they do by consistency.
In a poetry reading, for instance, I like to put poems right up
against each other that are absolutely opposites, that contradict
each other in every way…you get energy from contradiction. And I
think you can do this in a book as well. You need not – as everybody
assumes – print like with like. I really don’t [like] printing by sections
anymore. Maybe I will do it again, as I used to do it, but in the
Kicking I did not do it.
I am writing in haste Monday morning, dictating that is,
and I must get up and drive down to Brookline almost immediately,
to watch the Celtics practice, then talk with Kevin McHale,
Cedric Maxwell, and Bill Fitch, and then drive two and a half hours
back… It’s a good life, really, and I’m not complaining…but
I mean to say I cannot answer your questions about Ploughshares
(and I probably won’t know for sure for a month or two) and the
revisions in the Herman…although I like the poem as I read it
right now.
3/
And I do love Mina Bell’s Cows…although I have a couple of
changes to suggest. When you have contemplated the changes and
possibly made anything that sounds sensible, could I have another
copy of it, for Joey that is?
Three things. First of all, totally trivial, shouldn’t it
be hay “chute”? In my copy you have “shute.” It seems to me there
is the word “shoot,” partly working by folk etymology, but that
the real word is “chute” from the French for “fall.” Maybe I’m
talking about a typo. Then in the last line, when I read it,
I hear it in a way that you didn’t type it… I absolutely hear,
every single time, “who never would come home.” And Ifind (sic) it very
hard to say it the other way.
Then I find something a little awkward in the second to last
line, it seems to center around the word “and,” which is idiomatic
enough, but not exactly grammatical, and a little strange…and
kind of slows me down every time. And I am not sure that “meaning”
is [the] exact word, or that it is the exact word if you come at it this
way. I mean to say, I might want you to say something like “ape,
ape, as if she called all three of them,/ her walleyed girls…”
I’m not suggesting this as the right way to do it…just that some-
how the word “meaning” seems like the author’s interpretation,
and therefore to insert the author into the poem suddenly. The
author having a window into her skull and her hidden “meanings.”
I love the poem. Love the book, also,
Don
A note from McNair about this letter: In this extensive and insightful response, Don gave me a new way to think about arranging my book, which was organizing its poems around a signature approach that was beginning to emerge in my work. As I look back, I see that I bumped poems out of my manuscript partly because of my overly strict adherence to themes, and partly (though I never confessed this) to save them, out of the fear that the slow trickle of my work in this period might eventually dry up and leave me with only one collection.
Below is the text of “Mina Bell’s Cows” as Don first saw it:
Mina Bell’s Cows
O where are Mina Bell’s cows, who gave no milk
and grazed on her dead husband’s farm?
Each day she walked with them into the field,
loving their swaybacked dreaminess more
than the quickness of any dog or chicken.
Each night she brought them grain in the dim
Barn, holding their breath in her hands.
O when the lightning struck Daisy and Bets,
her son dug such great holes in the yard,
she could not bear to watch him.
And when the baby, April, growing old
and wayward, fell down the hay shute,
Mina just sat in the kitchen, crying, “Ape, Ape,”
and meaning all three cows, her beautiful
walleyed girls who would never come home.
Jane is doing just fine. Of course after the relief –
even the high of the death of someone whom you have seen to
suffer the torture of the absolute damned…then there is time
for the grief to begin. But she shows every sign of taking it
all well. What is so important: she knows that she did the right
things. Oh, maybe some day there will come the day when they make
a computer which relieves us of being good. But I don’t look forward
to the day.
Jane got an NEA. The relief and pleasure for her, the
independent affirmation of her worth…you know something about
what that feels like! Very good for her.
I know Gerald Costanzo a little bit. He is a good man.
I’m delighted that he liked the book, and that
he wants to publish it… As you well know, nothing is firm until
you have the book in your hand, or see ten copies of it at once!
Still, I’m absolutely delighted.
I don’t think that one should ever save poems for a new
book. One should at any moment present the strongest possible
book. On the other hand, sometimes it is wise to leave poems out
of a book, not in order to save them, but in order to give a shape
to the book. I don’t know which you are doing, or whether you are
doing something else… I wondered if I might be able to help by
supplying an external opinion. I didn’t mean to leave you “most
concerned…”
You know, even after a book is taken, you are usually allowed
to revise it, to add to it, to subtract from it, to revise the poems
in the manuscript. Jane’s From Room to Room hardly resembled,
when it was printed, the manuscript that was accepted.
Your reasons for leaving out these eight poems… A lot
of them make sense. But sense isn’t always what matters. That is,
I think you may be worrying too much about “affirmative” and “negative.”
The quality and power of the poems is what matters, I think I might
argue. Do you have copies of these eight? Obviously I know them all –
but I don’t have copies of them handy. Could you make xeroxes of them
over at the English Dept., and send them to me, and let me play
with the manuscript as a whole, and make a (non-dogmatic) suggestion?
2/
I don’t think enough people pay attention to the book, [as shape,]
but pay attention just to making an anthology of poems; it is
possible that you pay too much attention to the book, and not
enough to the anthology of poems. But I don’t mean to tell you
so, in this letter – just to think that I might think about it,
and might wind up saying so…and if I did, that would be no
disaster, and if you disagreed with me, that would be no disaster
either…
I think it is important – and I’m sure you agree – to
put your best possible foot forward. Spend every penny you have.
Save nothing. In your first book.
I did not get a bunch of poems recently, except for the
book itself…maybe you sent them more recently than you think –
but I got the letter here, and have not yet received the revisions
of a dream of Herman or others.
Joey is about to submit some McNair poems to Donald Hall
for a special issue of Ploughshares. Probably the new revisions
are in order, in such a case.
Love as ever,
Don
A note from McNair about this letter: The poems Joey submitted to Ploughshares for Don, as a guest editor of the magazine (which was a matter of Don submitting them to himself) were: “Old Trees,” “The Fat People of the Old Days,” and “Calling Harold.”
I like the book very much, and the order seems to me
sensible… Yet I may have notions about how to improve it.
I want to sit on it some more, dream on it some more. And
also, I would appreciate it if you would send me copies of
any of the near-misses. It seems to me that I remember a
few poems, recent ones, not the old “sexist” ones, that you
have left out. I am wondering if I can see a place for them,
and argue with you. But maybe I would not want to.
Why do you have so few lines on a page? Does one of the
contests demand that you only have so many lines on a page?
It has the curious affect of seeming to thin a rather solid
and bulky manuscript. Maybe that number of lines suggests
double-spacing.
I am going to wait, for further conversation, until I
hear from you.
Did I tell you in my last letter – I cannot remember whether
I wrote you a note a week ago or not…maybe I did…maybe this
week… – that Jane’s father died last Friday? We are relieved,
and it is wonderful to be back here together, and staying here.
We look forward to seeing you again, inspecting your
remodeling.
We had a wonderful time with Geoffrey Hill and Aileen.
And yes, it was invigorating, because nobody in the world is
so serious, and – when it comes to composition and publication –
so disinterested.
You have not heard from me because
I have not been here. We went back to ann Arbor.
Actually Jane has been there all but six weeks, since
early in June. And I have been there seven weeks, all
together. I just came back after twelve days. And
Reuel died just as I got back here, last Friday af-
ternoon. Thank heaven. End was peaceful. Jane
will be back on Tuesday. Maybe again we can start
to live the old life. Of course “normal life” is
nothing but how you live in the interstices among
disasters. And I will read the book! It must seem
strange to you that I have not been able to. But I
really have not been able to. I will be back with
you – and back among the living, for a while – as
soon as I can be. Love to you all, Don
Many thanks for the manuscript. Unfortunately,
I cannot read it right away. I am just about to
go off on an author-tour for Oxford, for the Anec-
dote book, and when I get back there will be a
great pile of things. I wish I could read it right
away, but things are rather frantic right now! As
soon as I can!
Many thanks for the good long letter. We have been back
here for quite a while, but of course it is a strange time.
We stayed here, after coming back at the end of July, because
Jane’s father – we were told – would have to remain in the
hospital or a nursing home until he died. The cancer metastasized
to his brain. However, he has now taken a turn for the better,
and he may go home again. But he may be well enough so that we
do not have to be out there.
Jane just went out for another little visit, and when
she came back we had timed it so that Geoffrey Hill and Aileen
came into the airport at the same time, and they are up here
now, staying with us for nineteen days. We all work in the mornings,
and then play in the late afternoons and evenings. It is a good
thing.
We have had a tremendous amount of work done on the house,
and it is just horrible. All last summer was lost, when we tore
off the old bathroom and converted the old bedroom into a new
bathroom and hallway, and built a new bedroom on at the end.
Earlier, we have suffered through the replacement of two chimneys,
through lifting up the woodshed and putting new sills under it,
all sorts of things. Horrible. Now I don’t think we will have
to do any more major work – just roofing and painting from time
to time. I hope so. And the dozers like to get here at about
six a.m..
Very good about Diane’s recovery. Bad to have to recover…
but good to recover. Not only that but worker’s compensation.
I look forward to the new book manuscript. By the way, the
situation at Dial – Fran McCullough – is bleak, and I’m in the
process of looking for another publisher myself. Not that i
have anything to show right now to show. But will do. The revision
of the manuscript sounds good offhand. But I want to spend
some time with it.
I am writing every day, and now feel a little more encouraged
than I did a year ago. I have some newish poems, revised poems,
which seem better to me. The Intersection is very different,
I think I am finally getting those horizontals and verticals
straight.
Wes McNair
Box 43
North Sutton, New Hampshire 03260
Dear Wes,
The stationery tells a lie. I am dictating this in a cellar in Ann
Arbor on July 3, and I will mail it out to Pacific Palisades, where an
old helper/typist/assistant of mine now lives, who will type it and mail
it from there, without me having read it. Don’t think this is too strange:
just be grateful I did not try my handwriting on you!
Well, I am so sorry about Diane. Everything will be all right I
realize—but that is a lot of time to wait. And in the meantime, I reckon
she has to miss the longed-for potting this summer. What a shame.
Yes, you know why we are out here. Jane was here two weeks without
me, but neither of us could stand that. She came back for a week, and
then we drove out here, and I believe that we will stay here until the
end. I loaded the car up with six months of work, etc., and we
will manage.
Do keep in touch. Danbury forwards mail so that it gets here in
about 48 hours. Good people. But you might as well write us here.
2896 Newport/Ann Arbor, Michigan 48103.
Very good to get your letter. And it came at a time
when I was on the road almost continually, so you find me
unusually slow in replying. Last weekend we flew south,
Jane to Virginia to the Orrs, and me down to Clinton, South
Carolina, where I gave the graduation speech and got an
honorary degree at a little place called Presbyterian College
in Clinton, a nice little place where I have read my poems a
couple of times. After the graduation, a young poet named John
Lane drove me seven hours to Charlottesville. And the next
morning I tied up with Jane and the Orrs. We worked on poems
for a day and a half, and then flew back here. Tuesday night
I saw the Celtics beat Houston, Wednesday morning answered
some mail, Wednesday noon did a reading in East Andover that
I had agreed to do fourteen months ago, and after that I flew
to New York. Ihad (sic) dinner with Andrew that night, and the next
morning addressed the Oxford University Press’s sales force,
whipping up enthusiasm for the Oxford Book of American Literary
Anecdotes. After that I flew back to Boston, drove out to Exeter
and did a reading! Then I had to hang around there for a couple
of days to talk with students. Just got back up here Saturday
night, and I have to go off again Tuesday night, and all day
Wednesday – but after that I get to stick around for a while,
thank heaven.
I hope that the financial situation begins to steady-out
now. Sorry to hear that Diane has had to go through an operation.
That is always a lot of fun. Good for Diane with the months
at Haystack – which I hope will work out all right. I mean to say,
that she will feel well enough to go.
You say that news on the book is all bad, and of course
I know what you mean – but being a finalist in all these things…
being a bridesmaid, in this case, is a sign that you will be a
bride. I know it is small comfort to hear these things – but I
still think Iought (sic) to tell you the truth!
I think the title is good. I think you should probably
continue to change it to make the best book possible, if you
can determine what that is. When I was sending my first book
around, I changed it every single time, between rejections,
so in a sense the same book was not rejected thirteen times,
which I always say. You are older and the book is better – but
still I think that you lose nothing by dropping some poems you feel
less confident about. Ten years from now, if you continue to like
them, you can publish them at that time. A poem is not destroyed,
simply by being left out. And if you make a better book – or even
2/
merely a more fashionable book – I think that the bird in
hand is worth cooking.
I feel that I am about to be able to get into a good
patch of working on poems. Usually if I feel that way it
happens. I need one. I have not sent out a poem for three
years. The house is full of almosts. But I am not sure that
any of the almosts is as good as the four or five best poems
in Kicking the Leaves. Well, who am I to say anyway?
I knew that Wally had had bad luck with his nightclub.
I did not know about the golf course. I’m delighted to hear
about the honors for Carl, who is a wonderful teacher, who
sometimes I think wants to convince us that he is not. You
have always been around him and seeing him at work, but for
me the exposure has been briefer. But perfectly clear. I hope
Carl enjoys retirement. I think it is a little frightening
for him, although he also looks forward to it. Nothing like
that is ever unconflicted!
Thank you for writing, and good luck to us all! I
mean in our work especially…but why not everything else?
