Remembering two great poets who were also great friends.
Who knows what forgotten chains of association join our night's dreams to our first waking thoughts?
For reasons unknown to my conscious self, this morning I woke up with a number in my mind: 03287. Though ignorant of the associative mechanisms that set it down in the center of the spotlight of attention, I knew what it was: the late poet Donald Hall's ZIP code. Recognizing this, I then dispatched the Librarian of the Unconscious to retrieve the rest of Don's address, which she obligingly delivered: Eagle Pond Farm, 24 US Route 4, Wilmot, N.H.
This is an address I should know, having typed it hundreds of times over the 30 years I worked as Robert Bly's personal assistant. Don was Robert's best friend from Harvard undergraduate days, when they tested their mettle writing for the Harvard Advocate, one of the premier American college literary journals.
In their decades of friendship they exchanged literally thousands of letters, which now swell their respective archives. Their friendship was funny, irreverent, brilliant, heated and occasionally crossed the line into conflict. They regularly offered scathing critiques of each other's work. This was not a friendship for the faint-hearted!
As colleagues they initiated the "48-hour rule" according to which, if one received a request for feedback on a poem, he was pledged to reply within 48 hours of its receipt. That also helped keep the letters flowing. I have no idea how many times Robert said to me near the end of one of our work sessions, "We've got to get a letter out to Don yet today!"
Curiously, I began to feel as though the letters were from me, as well, a vicarious participation. Robert's frequent references to me as his assistant and Don's mentions of his assistant Kendel Currier, I think, served to bring both of us helpers closer to the other correspondent.
Both men at the height of their fame received more mail than a normal human being could read. Robert used to refer to a bathtub full of mail in his study, and he wasn't kidding. Don, however, got so much mail that his small New Hampshire town issued him his own ZIP code. Imagine having a ZIP code all to oneself!
I don't know whether the traces of their epic literary friendship will ever be made public. When once Robert suggested that a collection of their correspondence be published, Don rejected the idea on grounds of "fear of unedited prose." It would be a shame if these letters, bristling with lively intelligence and snarky wit, remained locked away in university archives.
Don died in 2018 at age 89 and last November Robert, a month shy of 95, passed on also to that place where so far as we know no letters are written. Meanwhile, we inhabit an increasingly un-lettered cultural landscape given over to the emojis and crass acronyms of email and texting.
For a time that now seems to me improbably lucky, I lived and worked in the midst of that verbal crossfire of fun and fight between a man in Minnesota and a man in New Hampshire who despite their arguments loved each other dearly, modeling a friendship founded on spirited honesty, feisty affection and goofy humor (Don near the end signing off with the salutation "Loveburgers").
I miss that time, and this morning Donald Hall's ZIP code dropped anchor in the harbor of my waking for a visit of two old friends who also became my friends.
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Thomas R. Smith is a poet in Wisconsin. trsmithpoet@gmail.com
