{"id":2115,"date":"2012-04-27T13:55:55","date_gmt":"2012-04-27T17:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/?p=2115"},"modified":"2014-02-03T17:42:44","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T21:42:44","slug":"hall-to-mcnair-february-15-1982","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/hall-to-mcnair-february-15-1982\/","title":{"rendered":"Hall to McNair: February 15, 1982"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"Letter<\/a>\"Letter<\/a><\/p>\n

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[Click image to view]<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

15 February 1982<\/p>\n

Wes McNair
\nBox 43
\nNorth Sutton, NH 03260<\/p>\n

Dear Wes,<\/p>\n

Good to hear from you, and I\u2019m glad you got Joey\u2019s postcard.
\n(Basically some place or other I must be Celtic, with all this
\ndual personality stuff. Next I will be Fiona McLeod.)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think you are good enough to submit to the New Yorker.
\nI think you are too good to submit to the New Yorker. With this
\nmost recent issue, full of Howard Moss again, I concocted a
\nbitchy definition of \u201cdisinterestedness\u201d: When a poetry editor
\nprints great quantities of himself, on the basis of quality
\nalone, although he realizes that he will be criticized for it\u2026<\/p>\n

Good to hear about the writing and re-writing. Me too.
\nSometimes I think I carry it a bit too far! You know, I have not
\npublished a satisfactory poem \u2013 virtually not a poem \u2013 since Kicking.
\nOne little one which will stay as it is \u2013 but which I probably will
\nnever reprint in a book because it is too damned little. And
\nPloughshares is coming out with one, the Joyce Peseroff issue \u2013
\nbut I am changing it in the meantime. And last week New Republic
\ncame out with one, and I had already changed it, and now I\u2019m changing
\nit some more \u2013 and that little thing is only a few lines long
\nanyway.<\/p>\n

But I am working on long and ambitious things, and maybe
\neventually they will not only be publishable but Immortal\u2026
\nAnd after all, that is the only thing worth thinking about!<\/p>\n

Well, I am both pleased and sorry about the extra teaching,
\nyou will understand. I\u2019m glad it is there if you need it; I am
\nsorry that you need it, but my goodness the economy is terrible,
\nand going to get worse. Reagan is worse than Nixon any day. The
\nworst president we have ever had, and the country is going to be
\nin the worst shape, quite possibly.<\/p>\n

Lately, I have been hearing from Gerry Costanzo \u2013 and not
\nabout you. I have written him twice about you, and he has not
\nmentioned it in reply, and I am going to shut up \u2013 because I don\u2019t
\nwant him to get the sense that he is being pushed. However, I don\u2019t
\nthink it all bad that he is being in touch with me, because appar-
\nently he wants to write about me \u2013 he asked me, and he sounded
\nserious, if he could be my authorized biographer. Well, I don\u2019t
\nwant one of those<\/span>! But I think he means it about writing about me.
\nAnd I am going down to his place again this spring, to read poems
\nand give a talk. I am hoping that he will do you, next year,
\nbecause I think he does good books, and I think he makes them
\nattractive. He doesn\u2019t do all good books \u2013 nobody does that \u2013
\nbut he has done a couple of good ones lately, and I really think
\nhe\u2019s one of the better small places.<\/p>\n

2\/<\/p>\n

But in the meantime if one of these other things comes
\nthrough\u2026I will be delighted of course.<\/p>\n

I think that Max Kumin is judging the Princeton things
\nright now. Dan Hoffman is through.<\/p>\n

I saw that you read for the Monday Night. Good for you.<\/p>\n

Back in the forties there was a book club for poetry, which
\ndidn\u2019t last very long. I could tell you about it, but it was
\ndoomed. In England, there has been one for years and years and
\nyears, the Poetry Book Society. It comes out of the Arts Council
\nwhich is government sponsored. The only way it could happen in
\nthis country is if the Poets and Writers (the Coda people) or the
\nAcademy of American Poets did it. They in a sense have an annual
\nbook, with the Lamont, which they distribute\u2026 I think there is
\none other book that they annually distribute.<\/p>\n

It would be a losing proposition I suppose. The book club
\nin the forties had five or six members, nation-wide. I was one
\nof them. Once I met one of the directors, and asked him. Amazing.
\nBut that was a little thing run out of one quarterly magazine\u2026<\/p>\n

I seriously think that a national book club would not have
\nmore than two or three hundred members. And everybody would be
\nquitting all the time, because everybody would get pissed off
\nabout which books were selected.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d be all for it anyway of course. But I wouldn\u2019t want
\nto do it myself.<\/p>\n

In a sense, any one person could probably do it, because
\nit would never get very big. And so if anybody had about $10,000
\nto lose, I think they could do it, and do it single-handed \u2013 maybe
\nhiring a high school student to stitch up book bags four times a year.
\n(I suspect it would have to be quarterly rather than monthly.)
\nTen thousand dollars would go for ads to start it off, and the
\n\u201cprofits\u201d on the ongoing club would pay for one or two ads or
\nmailings a year thereafter\u2026but I doubt very much if the initial
\nten thousand would ever be earned back.<\/p>\n

Want to try it?<\/p>\n

Who wrote The Private Life? The title does not ring a bell.
\nI don\u2019t like Sharon Olds, or not much anyway. I like Linda Gregg \u2013
\nAnd I like one or two other people here or there, for that matter!<\/p>\n

We had a wonderful time to England. We ate sausages and read
\nFrench novels. It was cold, there was a train strike \u2013 and it was
\nlovely. We went to the theater a lot, to the opera once, we looked
\nat some pictures in museums, some sculpture\u2026 We saw Geoffrey Hill.
\nI saw John Fowles and interviewed him for Esquire. But mostly we
\njust took it very very easy. And I return here and am delirious
\nwith joy at the old fourteen hour day!<\/p>\n

Love as ever, to all of you,<\/p>\n

Don<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\n

A note from McNair about this letter:<\/strong><\/em><\/span> The \u201clong and ambitious things\u201d Don says he is working on eventually appeared in his acclaimed collection, The One Day<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Click image to view] 15 February 1982 Wes McNair Box 43 North Sutton, NH 03260 Dear Wes, Good to hear from you, and I\u2019m glad you got Joey\u2019s postcard. (Basically some place or other I must be Celtic, with all this dual personality stuff. Next I will be Fiona McLeod.) I don\u2019t think you are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2206,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35294,596,42965,42979],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2115"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2849,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions\/2849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}