A Life’s Work is Never Done

by

Paul Clark

For over 50 years, Donald Hall has been one of America’s most prolific authors. He has produced dozens of volumes of poetry, essays, children’s books, short stories, plays, biographical studies of poets, and textbooks. I have many of his books in my collection, but two in particular are intertwined in an interesting way.

In 1993, at age 65, Hall published Life Work, a meditation on work, using as his source material to a large extent the history of work at the New Hampshire farmstead where generations of his mother’s family had lived since 1865. Hall and his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, moved to the farm in 1975 after Hall left the safe confines of a tenured position at the University of Michigan for the much more fragile existence of the freelance writer.

Hall’s great-grandfather and grandfather farmed the land, usually just for subsistence, not as a way to make money. Hall writes, “In the old rural world, cash lay outside the work-center; meanwhile, the work-center was powerful to provide the necessities of warmth and nutriment—and self-esteem.” The work of a farmer was regular and constant, following the seasons. “The farm produced little money, and my grandfather wore my father’s old hand-me-downs; everywhere rags of poverty flourished like skunkweed.  Still, my grandparents appeared to enjoy their work, which did not extend human consciousness but occupied or absorbed it.”

On the paternal side of his family, his grandfather had started a successful dairy. Hall’s father—the first one in the family to attend college—wanted to be a teacher, which he did for several years before being convinced to come into the family business—as an accountant. Hall notes that his father hated his job but “no hobby or passionate pastime suggested itself as a substitute.” When Hall was a baby, his father “shook his fist over my cradle . . . 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.”

Hall, indeed, loves his work, as he makes clear early in the essay in which he details a typical work day . . . resisting the urge to get up too early, because he can’t wait to get to his writing desk; meticulously making breakfast and reading the morning paper as he thinks about the work waiting on his desk; then a morning of writing new poems and revising old ones, sometimes dozens of drafts; a break, and then moving on to other projects, an essay perhaps, or a children’s book. He dictates his work and his breaks often involve driving to his typist’s to drop off tapes and pick up pages to revise. He writes several letters a day to friends (this is 1993, long before e-mail was standard, but based on Hall’s enthusiasm for letter writing and loathing of the keyboard, I imagine his enthusiasm still stands).

Hall leavens his essay on work with observations of others at work. He writes about professional baseball players, like a batter who would swing a bat 600 times a day in the off-season to stay sharp. Over the course of Hall’s career he has written several articles and a book about English sculptor Henry Moore, and Hall recounts some of his many visits with Moore. When Moore was 80, Hall asked him, “What is the secret of life?” Moore replied, “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.” For Moore, the “something you cannot possibly do,” according to Hall, was to be the greatest sculptor who ever lived, and know it and it was something Moore could never know for sure, no matter how hard he worked at his art.

Hall notes that the drive to work, to accomplish, runs long and deep in his family. His mother is still alive, at age 89, as Hall writes this book. She lives on her own, cooking meals for herself, continuing a lifelong passion for needlework (two aprons finished for a local church’s fair) and, like her son, staying in touch with family and friends with daily letter writing.

Early on in Life Work, Hall explains the genesis of one of his most beloved children’s books, The Ox Cart Man. Hall heard a story from a friend: “Did you ever hear the one . . . about the fellow—used to live around here—who filled up his ox cart every year with everything his family made or grew that was left over? Maple sugar, I suppose, wool and woolens, maybe linen or flaxseed, shingles, birch brooms, potatoes. Every year he filled his cart and walked by his ox to Portsmouth Market—once he went all the way to Boston—and sold everything out of the cart. Then he sold his cart. Then he sold his ox . . . Then he walked home and started getting next year’s ox ready, building a new ox cart I guess . . .” Hall took this raw material and meticulously turned it into a poem that was published in The New Yorker. You can read the nineteen drafts here .

Then the poem was illustrated by Barbara Cooney and turned into a children’s book that I read over and over again to my children when they were small. I think they grew tired of my re-readings long before I ever grew tired of reading it; Ox-Cart Man was a perfect tonic for a tired dad after a long day of his own work. When Hall recited the poem to audiences, he discovered their reaction to it split down the middle. “Half felt the exhilaration I felt in the ox-cart man’s work cycle; another half found the story discouraging, all that work and you have to do it over again. Temperament, temperament. Each human division reads the same story; each responds from an opposite place.”

A few years before Hall started Life Work, he was diagnosed with and treated for colon cancer. In the course of writing this book, the cancer metastasized to his liver. In between his reminiscences of his family and his current work life, he undergoes surgery to have most of his liver removed and prepares to undergo chemotherapy. He rushes to finish projects on his desk, not knowing the outcome of the surgery and treatment.

The end of Life Work is hopeful yet melancholy, a demonstration of how little we really can control our lives. Hall goes down a list of projects he will return to—children’s stories, short stories, perhaps another essay, “but no more long-term projects. Today if I begin a thought about 1995 I do not finish the thought. It is easier, and it remains pleasant, to undertake short endeavors which absorb me as much as any work can.”

There were two important things that Hall didn’t know as he finished this book. One was that his wife, within the following year-and-a-half, would be diagnosed with leukemia and die, at the age of 47. What he also didn’t know was that his health would stabilize and his creative output would remain high—he has published more than a book a year over the past 15 years. He also was poet laureate of the U.S. for a year starting in October 2006.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it