One of the books I’ve most recommended to students, friends, really everyone I know, is Life Work, one of the memoirs (of a kind) written by the poet Donald Hall, who passed away in 2018.
Life Work is a memoir about work, which is not something people often really write memoirs about. Not just his work as a poet, but as a person living in New England, and the work of his family, and his ancestors. Hall doggedly attends to this single point, which means that so much is packed into this slim volume—it’s only 124 pages.
Structured as a diptych, the book begins with an essay that feels full of joy and gratefulness for the gift of work. “I’ve never worked a day in my life,” Hall begins, though it’s obvious that he means that provocatively, if only because we’re sitting there holding a book in our hands that he presumably worked on.
This first essay circles around to the realization that it’s not so much that Hall hasn’t worked as that he hasn’t labored a day in his life. He’s started down that path by the second page: “There are jobs, there are chores, and there is work . . . When I finished reading and correcting and grading . . . then—as a reward—I could get to work.” Fifty-eight pages later, he’s still there.
Before then he writes on his process, remembers work his grandfather did, and gives us an exuberant recounting of the “best day,” and near the end, he concludes, with the help of the Bible and Hannah Arendt: “Maybe labor is the fall, not work . . . Culture’s thrust has twisted our language: ‘From the standpoint of “making a living,” every activity unconnected with labor becomes a “hobby.”’”
Following that conclusion is a short soliloquy in which he revisits his “best day” by musing on the worst day (“when grief or sorrow overcome you”), with this conclusion: “I realized I had always worked—the real thing, the absorbedness—against death.” Then he pauses before beginning the second half, both a darker, sadder counterpart to his more exuberant meditations and proof that his thesis still stands: work, when you love it, is not work—it is a way of grasping for life. Where the first essay was full of life, the second knows death is hovering around the corners, and it begins, “These last words I wrote more than a week ago, and I wrote them on a Friday without consciousness of anxiety . . . We drove home . . . to find a message on the machine; I should call my internist Dr. Clark. He had bad news.”
And then this: “When I come out from anaesthetic, back in my room after the sojourn in ICU, I will open my eyes to ask Jane what they found. She will not lie to me.”
As he is treated for his cancer, Hall writes the second half of the book, and in some of the most interesting passages, he looks at the work of the women in his family (particularly his grandmother), as well as the work of his father, who hated what he did and whose work reduced him, apparently, to a shell of a man. I wondered why he chose to focus on these in his essay. Although his father’s dismal experience seems of a piece with the darker tone of this half, I wondered: Is traditional woman’s work somehow more laden with sorrow, in his mind, than man’s work? He makes statements about how little it had been appreciated: “She worked like my grandfather the sixteen-hour day and the six-day week. When she was forty-four years old, the United States and the State of New Hampshire, in generous condescension, decided to allow her to vote.” And more generally, including not just farmers’ wives but women of means in this dark picture, he says, “Thus as the farms broke up—where women worked in equality with men—men lacked jobs, poor women were exploited, and their prosperous sisters languished in an idleness without purpose.”
Work is not all joy; this diptych pays its dues to the fall, to work made into labor, as well.
In this second half, he also returns more frequently and in short bursts, paragraphs or so, to his illness—at one point he literally interrupts himself after a sentence about his grandfather (“In the winter Wesley chopped cordwood on the mountain”) to talk about the work he’s trying to complete while living as a morituri, as he says, then picks up the flow with the same sentence. This interrupted stream mirrors the distracted state of mind he’s experiencing as he can feel his time to complete his beloved work ending. It’s effective, and disturbing to the reader. We feel anxious, too.
Hall’s essays are in chunks, with separators, and the ideas seem at first disconnected, but there are threads that string them together—like the history of his family, and Hall’s own chronological musings as he writes his way through the book, and the central premise. Even at the end, Hall is making plans for future work: he will not make long works any more (though it turns out he would, anyway), but he will continue to write short work and poems, and anyhow, it is all of a piece, all “life work”: “There is only one long-term project.” My weakness as a writer has always been that I try to find the narrative too soon, and forget to let the pieces spool out and then counting on the revision process to help me understand what it is about. I can imagine how Hall’s revisions went in this book, and it’s inspiring to me.
Life Work is all about the work of writing, and what it is to love work, love writing, love reading. Hall wakes up in the middle of the night excited to get started on the day’s work and, like a child on Christmas Eve, has to keep himself in bed until the clock says he can finally get up. Weird? Or amazing? I can’t decide. Usually when I wake up that early, I just want to sleep longer.
Yet I love my work, which is like Hall’s, writing and reading and teaching and editing. Until adulthood, I didn’t really know many people who took absolute delight in their work. So I’ve had to learn to accept the gift of pleasure, joy, and deep satisfaction I often receive from my work. Sometimes I’ve assumed that if you like work, it should be because you have evolved to some higher plane and can find enjoyment in labor by somehow transcending the act, not because you enjoy the work itself.
There’s a place for labor, of course (and all of my work requires a good deal of dishwashing and grading and things of that sort), but most everything I do connects with my “work” in some way. So it’s true that almost everything I do — the books I read, the movies I watch, the podcasts I listen to, all of that — links to my work, and sometimes people misunderstand that. The implication is that if you work that much, you’ve got problems.
But Hall’s book reminds me that finding pleasure in reading things that also do relate to what I do for a living may just mean I’ve found my vocation, and it is what I love. In that sense, Hall’s book redeemed my idea of work for me, years ago, and I love giving it to people so they can follow his example.
You can get Life Work here.