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Donald Hall - 'String Too Short to Be Saved' and interviewing TS Eliot (43/111)

986 views · Published 31 July 2017 · 1:45 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Entertainment

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To listen to more of Donald Hall’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyDI47p9qm-ZJtApB_9leMl

US Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018) published essays and anthologies of both poetry and prose including "String too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm", and "Ox-Cart Man", a children's book which won the Caldecott Medal. [Listener: Kendel Currier; date recorded: 2005]

TRANSCRIPT: I wrote 'String Too Short to Be Saved', my first prose book, almost entirely in that house, and writing it in England, further away even than Michigan, was probably key. I did intend to do it that year... I wrote lots of poems... and poems... I wrote poems that in general I liked more than I did the earlier ones, that year in that house, and 'String Too Short to Be Saved'. I worked on poems in the morning, and then I would go upstairs to the cold music room in the afternoon, and write the prose of 'String Too Short to Be Saved'. And I also wrote other things and interviewed Moore.  But there was one more major event in... in that year. That year I was 39, and 'The Paris Review' had had me interview TS Eliot a year or two earlier, and it had worked out very well. Interviewing Eliot was easy. I read everything and came up with a hundred questions or so, some of which I used, and just sat with him and talked, and he was very happy. It was after his second marriage - shortly after - and he was eloquent, and amused, and amusing, and he spoke in complete sentences, he spoke in paragraphs, like an Englishman, and there was very little that he wanted to revise from the transcript of the... of the interview. But then they wanted me to interview Ezra Pound.

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