Sunday Short: Three Beards by Donald Hall

Jane died at forty-seven after fifteen months of leukemia. I mourned her deeply, I wrote nothing but elegy, I wailed her loss, but—as I excused myself in a poem—“Lust is grief / that has turned over in bed / to look the other way.” Among spousal survivors, many cannot bear the thought of another lover. Some cannot do without. In “Ulysses,” Leopold Bloom thinks of a graveyard as a place to pick up a grieving widow. Thus I found myself in the pleasant company of a young woman who worked for a magazine—a slim, pretty blonde who was funny, sharp, and promiscuous. (We never spoke of love.) I will call her Pearl. After dinner, we sat in my living room drinking Madeira and talking. I pulled out a cigarette and asked her if she would mind… “I was going crazy,” she said, and pulled out her own. She told me about her mother’s suicide. I spoke of Jane’s death. When she left the room to pee, I waited by the bathroom door for her to emerge. I led her unprotesting to the bedroom, and a few moments later, gaily engaged, she said, “I want to put my legs around your head.” (It was perfect iambic pentameter.) When we woke up, we became friends. We drank coffee and smoked. When I spoke again of Jane, Pearl said that perhaps I felt a bit happier this morning.

I didn't really know much of Donald Hall before reading this moving piece of memoir in The New Yorker.  I've since inhaled a bit of his poetry (and am keenly keeping an eye out for more!) This story of a long life well-lived is aching and beautifully told through the three beards he's grown in his life, and his reasons for shaving them are alternately heartbreaking and sweet. The women he's loved are artists, bohemians, good and smart, if not sweet, and he writes about them so tenderly it's hard not to feel it so fully. It's a pretty remarkable piece of writing.

You can read 'Three Beards' over on The New Yorker website here.