"Let It Grow in the Dark Like a Mushroom": Writing with Jane Kenyon

In a fireproof box in my study are letters the poet Jane Kenyon wrote me between the time we met in 1979 and her death, at the age of forty-seven, in 1995. I wrote to Jane first thing every Monday morning, when I could hardly bear being a writer. Jane wrote less often, but often enough. I look at a letter of hers from May 28, 1985. She was trying to place her second book of poems, The Boat of Quiet Hours, and waiting for her newly published book of translations from Akhmatova to arrive. For two and a half years she and Joyce Peseroff and I had been meeting several times a year to work on writing together.

 
Later in the letter she speculates on when we'll be able to hold a workshop meeting:

 
A postcard from November 10, 1986:Dear Alice,

 
Though we lived in different places and worked in solitude for long periods, Jane and I—and Jane and Joyce and I—became writers together, partners and friends, to a degree I hadn't imagined and hadn't known I wanted. Being writers as a group—thinking of two other people as colleagues or coworkers rather than rivals, even friendly rivals—was quite different from going about that business alone. I think we taught ourselves, together, how to live as writers, and a fair amount about how to write.

Jane's feelings were intense, her perceptions acute, and she was honest. It would have been impossible to be her friend without acknowledging pain, often the pain in small things—though sometimes Joyce and I teased her about discovering pain everywhere. Once, greatly moved, Jane told me of seeing a man leave a hospital with a woman's coat on his arm. Surely he was newly bereaved, as Jane assumed, but I mischievously invented a different explanation: perhaps he was taking his wife's coat to the dry cleaners while she was in the hospital for a facelift. In Jane's poem about the incident, "Coats," there's no doubt: "The sunglasses he wore could not / conceal his wet face, his bafflement." Jane was often depressed, and her depression did not lead her to feel sorry for herself nearly as frequently as she felt sorry for others; I sometimes found myself trying vainly to deflect Jane's deep sympathy about a problem that I didn't mind much.

Above all, or so it seemed to me, Jane tried to live decently as the self she found herself to be—as a writer, and also as a person whose depression sometimes made her unable to act. Being a writing colleague of Jane Kenyon's meant that certain issues, certain questions, were always on the agenda. I think I became a different person from the one I'd have been without her. I want to speak here about what we gave one another in our workshop, as I remember it, and what I learned from knowing Jane.

In the nineteen seventies and in my thirties, I was living with my husband in New Haven, writing poems, teaching part-time, and looking after three young sons. I had a couple of old friends who were poets, but on the whole I was alone, writing and revising, sending manuscripts out. Then one of my poet friends told me about a new magazine called Green House, edited by Joyce Pes eroff—a poet I'd once met whose work I admired—and someone I didn't know named Jane Kenyon. I began reading Green House, which printed a couple of my poems in 1977. In the following issue, one of Jane Kenyon's poems, "From the Back Steps," appeared. I liked it enormously, responding, I imagine, to its frankness about feelings one would rather not have:

 
When Alice James Books, already Joyce Peseroff's publisher, published From RoomTo Room by Jane Kenyon, I sent for it and read it with delight.

I too had a manuscript of poems, and Alice James Books had seen it more than once. Alice James is a cooperative press. In those days it was located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and nearly all the work of running it was done by the poets it published. Anyone whose manuscript was accepted—mostly women—joined the cooperative, attended meetings, helped out in the office, and took charge of her own book's publication. In 1979 I submitted my much-rejected manuscript in a new version, and then, by chance, was asked to give a short poetry reading in Cambridge during the period when manuscripts were being considered.

At a crowded book fair, I was to be last of a large group of readers, and I sat beside my husband, waiting for my turn and watching in dismay as the audience grew smaller with each reading. Even the poets didn't stay. Just before my reading, people began to enter the room. In my nervousness I decided they were just passing through, but not finding a second door out, they sat down. I gave my reading and then the newcomers crowded around me, shaking my hand and introducing themselves. They were the Alice James poets, I gradually realized, and they had come on purpose to hear me. They were mostly shorter than I'd imagined them, and one of them told me later that they had thought I'd be bigger than I am. A woman a few inches taller than I, with lots of wild curly hair, said her name in a low, calm voice: she was Jane Kenyon.

My book was accepted and I began attending meetings of the cooperative and putting in time in the office, taking the train to Cambridge from Connecticut every couple of weeks. Jane lived at a distance in the other direction, and her book had been out for a while. She was becoming less active in the cooperative, and I didn't see her often.

When the first copies of my book arrived at the Alice James office, in February of 1980, I rushed to Cambridge to see them. In the office I found Jane, who was spending a few hours there before nervously taking a plane to Long Island, where she was meeting Vera Dunham, the Russian woman with whose help Jane translated Akhmatova. I don't remember whether Jane imitated Vera's gruff voice and tragic intonation that afternoon, but I heard her do it—her admiration as notable as her amusement—many times later. "It eez impossible! It cannot be done! Let us begin!" Quite possibly Jane didn't imitate Vera, or even tell me where she was going; she might have thought it sounded like bragging.

I was pleased that Jane was afraid of airplanes, as I was, and impressed that she was flying anyway. We set out to spend our time usefully, filling book orders we found in a drawer. Later it turned out that we'd misunderstood the process, and all the books we mailed out had already been sent. Somewhere are twenty or so people with duplicate copies of Alice James books, souvenirs of the day Jane Kenyon and I became friends.

That spring I suggested to some people who ran a reading series in New Haven, where I live, that they invite Jane Kenyon and Joyce Peseroff. They asked if I also knew Donald Hall. (I've always been proud of the fact that I admired Jane's work before I knew she was married to Don.) I hadn't met him, but I supplied his address, and two readings were arranged, one by Jane and Joyce and one by Don, to take place at an old barn in Hamden once used by Eli Whitney. Donald Hall grew up in Hamden; his mother and her friends attended both readings, and Joyce worried about the blunt language in some of her poems. After Jane and Joyce's reading we all ate strawberry shortcake at my house. Don's reading, a week later, was attended by everybody from the Yale literati to his old elementary school teachers. Jane and I sat together, talking freely and intimately as we waited for him to begin. Ease had come to us quickly, I remember thinking.

When Jane invited my family and me to visit them at Eagle Pond during our vacation, I was excited. In those years, Edward and the kids and I spent two weeks every August in a rented cabin in southern New Hampshire, and starting in 1980 we always visited the farm one afternoon. Don would give us tours of the house and barn, or we'd drink lemonade on the shore of Eagle Pond. Edward and Don obligingly entertained the children, giving Jane and me a chance to walk and talk by ourselves. Jane and I would also walk and talk in New Haven whenever she and Don came to visit his mother.

We began writing letters. Looking over some from those first years, I see that Jane wrote to me more formally than she did later, but already with directness and openness about her feelings and her work. In a letter written on March 29, 1982, not long after the death of her father, she speaks of a trip to England, where she "finished the really depressive phase of grieving." (It's the trip she described in "Travel: After a Death.") In her letter she wrote,

 
Jane's letters always contained more about the rest of life than about writing, however. At the end of this one, she says "The other day I took an axe to the snowbank on top of the crocus-bed . . . still four feet high, it was. I went nuts, chopping and yelling, 'Go away!' Took it down at least twelve inches!"

A letter from June 23rd of that year apparently responds to a note of congratulation from me, though I don't remember what about. She said, "I tell you I know who my friends are: when something good happens they're not mean about it. You, and dear Joycie, are pleased for me . . . I know that." Later in the letter (which was written in longhand),

 
During Thanksgiving weekend of 1982, when Jane and Don were visiting Mrs. Hall and Jane invited me there for tea, she proposed that the two of us meet with Joyce, who'd been Jane's friend for years, to talk about writing. Joyce was low, Jane thought, which may or may not have been true; Jane was always deciding that her friends were in need. Jane needed help, she said, because she was afraid her iambics seemed old-fashioned. I too was having difficulties. Just as my youngest child started first grade, a full-time teaching job opened at the college where I taught as an adjunct, but I was rejected for it. I was hurt and troubled, but also felt that I now had permission to make writing my chief business—a frightening idea. I had begun writing fiction, but was full of doubts about it.

We three met as a workshop in Joyce's house, in Lexington, Massachusetts, in January of 1983. Later we sometimes gathered at Eagle Pond Farm, sometimes at my house, and twice at the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst (where Don kept us company when we weren't working), but we met most often at Joyce's. We'd begin just after lunch, work through the afternoon—pausing for coffee and dessert—then go out to a Chinese restaurant. In the evening we'd chat with Joyce's husband, Jeff, and go to bed early, Jane and I sleeping on cots in his study. In the morning we'd work again. Exhausted, I'd take Amtrak home in the afternoon.

Before each meeting, we mailed one another copies of all our new work. At the workshop, we'd take turns reading our poems aloud. (When I began to bring stories, I read those aloud, and when I twice brought novels to the workshop, I read aloud a lot more of them than you'd think.) Then we'd try to figure out what was wrong, and make suggestions. We did a lot of specific pencil-on-paper work right there. I think I remember that in the first meeting we considered Jane's poem "Trouble With Math in a One-Room Country School." She'd been ready to abandon it, she claimed, for want of a preposition. She was describing an enraged schoolteacher pulling the little girl Jane, whom she'd caught talking, out of her classroom. (We never asked whether anything in a poem or story had really happened, but I think this incident did.) At the end of the poem comes the wonderful line about the change that comes with the loss of illusion: "I . . . hardened my heart against authority." Jane wanted to be true to the drama of the story, but she also wanted to tell it without repeating prepositions. How was she to describe the teacher leading her from the classroom to a closet? She'd already used "from" and she didn't want the double preposition "out of." I am afraid I remember this conversation because I was the one who came up with the answer: "through." The line remains, "And led me roughly through the class." Jane liked "through" because it had only one syllable, a syllable she hadn't employed before, but also because it made the humiliation worse. She wrote down the word with a satisfied flourish. After that first workshop, I took the train home and stepped into Edward's arms saying "I'm healed." I'd put behind me the disappointment about the teaching job. I was going to be a writer. The train pulled out and I realized I'd left my wallet on the seat.

In all our meetings we worked hard on diction, trying to be brief and clear. From Don, through Jane, we picked up a horror of dead metaphors and excess articles and prepositions. Jane would announce, speaking of her husband, "If I used two prepositions in a row, Perkins would hit me with a stick." We wanted balance (Jane taught me, in gardening as well as writing, to have groups of three or five, not two or four) but not too much balance. Sometimes Jane reported that "Perkins" wanted her stanzas equal in length, and she took some pleasure in defying him.

Mostly, though, when fooling around with words we were after freshness and strong feeling. We congratulated ourselves when we moved the most outrageous line in a poem or story to a more prominent position, or found a stronger, less predictable expression. Near the end of our years together, we talked about Jane's poem "The Way Things Are in Franklin." Jane had used the word "laconic" to describe the "wives / of pipefitters and road agents," and Joyce suggested that word was, perhaps, too expected. Briskly Jane raised her pen: "Garrulous!"

Jane's most frequently repeated remarks, during workshop, were "What clever friends I have. What clever friends I have" and "The natural object is always the adequate symbol," which she found in Ezra Pound's Make It New and which was the closest thing we had to a group creed. We said it to one another when we'd just cut an explanation, a justification, or an abstract formulation of feeling or belief, clearing away clutter around an image. Jane trusted the natural world to provide all the meaning we needed, which doesn't mean that in her own work she always described what she experienced or had always experienced what she described. She looked for concrete, specific images, but became impatient with herself if she thought she was simply writing down what she saw. When "Three Songs at the End of Summer" was reprinted in The Best American Poetry: 1989, Jane provided a comment: "This poem is personal, and painful, and it is the kind of poetry I'd like to turn away from. There's very little invention in it. It is memory and reportage."

I have mixed feelings about that remark. I think Jane must have been depressed when she wrote it, or embarrassed because Donald Hall was the editor of the anthology. I'm also fascinated that she wrote not about what she'd done but what she planned to do next—and many of her subsequent poems are full of invention. On the publication of "Gettysburg: July 1, 1863," about the intimate thoughts of a dying Civil War soldier, someone wrote asking Jane whether she'd arrived at the poem through channeling. "What did you answer?" I said. We were walking in New Haven. "I said I used my imagination," said Jane firmly.

Jane used her imagination and her knowledge, changing details and inventing. Joyce and I had dogs before Jane did; early dogs in Jane's poems, like the one in "Parents Weekend: Camp Kenwood" who "established her front feet / on the fence and barked" or the one who stopped barking in "Campers Leaving: 1981" originated in what we called "dog envy." And of course, Jane's firm belief in concrete language, whether or not it described what she'd actually seen, didn't prevent her from writing beautiful and powerful abstract statements: "But sometimes what looks like disaster / is disaster." "God does not leave us / comfortless." "You see, we have done harm." "It might have been otherwise."

"If you've got it, flaunt it," Jane used to say. As a workshop we pushed one another's writing as far as it would go, letting the folks on the page suffer and also allowing them joy. In our own lives, too, we encouraged one another to flaunt what we had and to want what we wanted. That first workshop meeting was not only good for my writing, it was one of the few times I'd talked honestly with other writers about success. We wanted it—publication, readers, and money—even though we'd already had a little. Jane used to say, "The day after a banquet you're hungry again." I'd gotten into the bad habit of apologizing for ambition, saying hypocritically to people I knew, "Oh, I'm just grateful that somebody once printed something I wrote." As Jane's friend I learned to know, and to admit, that I wanted more.

For eleven years, until Jane became sick with leukemia a couple of weeks before a scheduled workshop meeting, we met as a group three or four times a year. During Jane's illness we didn't stop critiquing one another's work; she never had a well day during those final fifteen months, but we exchanged suggestions for her poems and my stories by mail, on the phone, and in visits. The three of us were not together again, however, except for Jane's funeral. Joyce and I now work by mail.

I said earlier that Jane and Joyce and I were colleagues rather than competitors. I don't want to suggest that we were saints who felt nothing but pleasure at one another's successes, although certainly we felt a great deal of pleasure: we worked so hard on all our stuff that it would have been impossible not to feel triumphant when other people admired it. Still, I am sure there were times when each of us got something the others wanted, at a moment when one of the others could have used a little encouragement. I think Jane's honesty, there too, made things easier. "I can't die until I have a reputation, Alice," she wrote me on July 16, 1986. She used to say ruefully, "I want all the praise all the time." Writing to me in sympathy after one of my books received a mixed review, she said, "It simply kills me that not every human being on earth loves every word I have ever written!" (11/1/88) She recognized that at some level we are all insatiable; having acknowledged that, it was easier for all of us to start celebrating when one of the others had good fortune.

One terribly sad effect of Jane's depression, I think, was that it was hard for her to believe that her successes counted. Mention of publication or a prize came in a scrawl at the bottom of a letter, or not at all. Jane was modest and careful not to brag, but also, I'm afraid, she didn't get nearly as much of a lift from such occasions as she might have. She doubted them, as well. She once speculated that an editor had accepted a poem of hers only because he and Don had had lunch together thirteen years earlier. She worried that any success came only because she was Don's wife. On a bad day she could convince herself that almost nothing that had happened amounted to much, and I think occasionally her doubts led her to resent other writers' successes. When I began publishing fiction and acquired an agent, Jane let me know often how furious she was that agents scorned poetry because there was little money in it. Now her poems make plenty of money. Sometimes I think that happened because Jane dared to want it.

Jane was quick to dismiss other people's failures but temperamentally unable to put aside her own, whether because of depression, her dour, pious grandmother, or some other cause. If a magazine rejected my work, it was edited by idiots; if it rejected hers, maybe she wasn't any good. In March of 1985 Jane mailed me a rejection letter she'd received from a magazine editor to whom she'd sent her poem "Sun and Moon." She didn't send a copy; she sent the editor's actual letter, which reads,

 
After some thought, I realized that by "pathetic left-over" the editor meant residual feeling. Pathetic as in pathetic fallacy. But of course his choice of words had a completely negative effect. Jane scribbled on the edge of the letter that this editor "always manages to insult one . . . I'd like to take the pathetic left-over and smear him with it." After that, Jane and I used the words "pathetic left-overs" when talking about cleaning out refrigerators, but also when talking about writing. I joked; she didn't quite joke. The unfortunate phrase hurt her more than it might have, I think, because it suggested a fault she worried about. She'd speak of "pathetic left-overs" when she felt her writing was tired and uninspired, when she thought she was rewriting poems she'd already written.

Our conversations, as friends and as workshop members, were often about our habits as writers, the pace at which we wrote, how much writing was enough for people who considered themselves full-time professional writers, and whether there was such a thing as too much writing. I think Jane had different and contradictory feelings about these questions, as she did about many others; Jane was untroubled by contradiction. (We once pointed out to each other as we walked down Ragged Mountain that below us the pond appeared to lie between us and the road, though we knew it didn't. I hung myself off the edge of a cliff to discern the road located where I knew it had to be, but Jane wasn't perturbed; she knew the road was between us and the pond, and also not between us and the pond.) About the pace of writing, I think Jane sometimes believed one thing and sometimes another.

None of the three of us held a full-time job. Joyce has always taught a good deal, and during the years we worked together she had a time-consuming baby. Though Jane once taught a class and for a long time wrote occasional essays for the ConcordMonitor, on the whole she didn't work for money except as a poet. I have always taught, but Jane and I often needed to assure ourselves that writing was our job, and a real job. Jobs are done regularly, and as a fiction writer I did write more and more. Jane, however, didn't write when she was depressed, and that made her feel worse. Still (she'd point out to me, and I'd point out to her), when she wasn't depressed she mounted the stairs to her study every day and wrote steadily: a working person.

Yet I think at heart she had another view, and it was that for writing to be highly charged, to be worth reading, it had to come at the right time, and maybe after long silence. When Jane was writing steadily, she was often dissatisfied with what she wrote. In May, 1985, she wrote, "I went to Ann Arbor, helped my mother put on a yard sale, came home and wrote a poem called 'Yard Sale.' Boredom!" In June, 1990, came a letter in which Jane said, "I've drafted three shallow poems in three days. Maybe I can make them thicker and more interesting as I work on them. They are 10¢ poems." At least she thought there was hope for those. On June 10, 1988,

 
Or, on August 10, 1989, "My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard."

The writing about which she spoke with pleasure often broke through a silence, then came easily. April 16, 1989:

 
I think she enclosed it, and it was almost exactly the poem we have now.

I believe that Jane went back and forth on the question of whether it's better to write steadily or to keep silent until one is truly ready: if she waited for inspiration and intensity, she wasn't working at her job; if she didn't, she produced pathetic left-overs. Waiting was hard. "I'm having a terrible time at my desk," she wrote on March 1, 1988, "(by which I think I mean I haven't started anything new for two months). I can't seem to start anything. I'm revising but I need to do both."

Because I've been most comfortable when I work most days, I was always advising Jane to do that too, to enjoy the daily work even if it wasn't always obviously first-rate. Her depression when she wasn't working was so terrible that I wanted her to work and escape it. And she'd try to comply: "I am upstairs on Monday morning, waiting for a delivery from United Aesthetic Service" (11/10/92). Or,

 
Of course she did go on thinking that way, as she had to. And I believe that she was proud of thinking that way, knowing how good her best work was and what she had to go through to produce it. She was quick to tell me when she thought my work was becoming forced; reading her comments on what I did, I can see that she worried that I wrote too much, that I wrote when I should have refrained from writing. On March 5, 1993, she wrote me a devastating letter in response to one in which I'd said impatiently that I might not wait for the workshop to meet before sending new work to an editor. "Dim your lights a little, pal," she wrote.

 
Earlier, in response to stories, "The new story I feel ends willfully" and "The story feels made to me, not inevitable. It distresses me not to like it better than that" (3/29/88). When I was at work on my first novel, which I admitted was a long piece of fiction but didn't call a novel for a long time, she counseled me to slow down, to let it come from the unconscious, unforced. In the same letter in which she claimed to be taking my advice about writing, she said, "Now I'm going to dispense advice—you don't have to hurry the Big One. The Big One will get more and more interesting over time. Let it grow in the dark like a mushroom. And don't pick it too soon."

Slowly I've learned to keep what I'm writing even from myself. I'll never be the kind of writer Jane was. I don't have the nerve to stop for months or even weeks; but at least I know about the darkness she spoke of. The more we worked together, the more I could keep what I wrote secret and unformed until the right time had come. We were writers together except when we were writers intensely apart.

We were also readers together. Letters of Jane's talk in detail about her reading of Proust, Tolstoy, E. M. Forster, and especially Keats. Jane told me once that it pleased her immeasurably that her publisher, Graywolf, embossed her books with her initials, J.K., especially because those were also Keats's initials. She lectured about Keats, Bishop, and Akhmatova at Bennington College just before she became ill with leukemia; people there reported that she asserted that Keats was a "fuck 'n' die" poet. She wrote me on December 22, 1993, as she was preparing for those lectures, "I think 'Nightingale' is the greatest poem in the language. Everything he ever wrote prepared him to write it. He only had to live his way, inexorably, to the moment." And a month later, just eight days before she was diagnosed with leukemia, she wrote about Dickinson:

 
Of course I didn't know anything about what Jane had discovered, and I never found out.

The workshops, and our friendship, weren't always easy. I visited the farm in the winter of 1992, not long after Jane and Don's first trip to India, where they lectured and read on a State Department tour. Jane's response to India was profound. She came home enthralled with Indian people, clothes, art, food, and religion. During my visit I watched her slides with pleasure, and loved the Indian meals she cooked, but I also felt uncomfortable. It seemed that she was suddenly rejecting everything in her life that had preceded the Indian trip, including her religion and the very way she thought. Much later I understood that she was troubled to discover that Indians seemed to have a religion that felt true; how then could her own, different, belief also be true? At the time, when she expressed doubts about subjects I knew had always been important to her, and doubts about her own life, I thought she was indulging in intense rejection of herself. She talked and talked about seeing a dead baby in the Ganges, and how a new Indian friend allayed her dismay by explaining what his religion and culture made of that baby. I was wildly jealous of this man, Rajiv. I suppose I thought she didn't love me anymore, and only wanted Indians for her friends. At one point in the visit she insisted I was angry with her. I was, but denied it. I said she was angry with me, and she denied that.

A month or so later, Jane brought a poem about the dead baby in the Ganges, and her crisis of faith, to a workshop at my house in New Haven. We argued. She didn't know what I meant and I didn't know what she meant. Joyce tried to be decent to everybody. Jane found me unkind, and I was burning with jealousy and rage that my Jane should be rejected and dismissed—by herself. I felt that the poem, "Woman, Why Are You Weeping?," was asking us to concur in her self-rejection. (Later, Jane made some clarifying changes and I saw that I had misunderstood what she had in mind.) The poem was never quite finished, and was not included in Otherwise, the selection of Jane's poems published by Graywolf. It is included in A Hundred White Daffodils, a volume of Jane's work, mostly her prose, published in September, 1999.) Another poem, about Connecticut, was, I felt, contemptuous. I was hurt at that, too; I thought she was expressing disdain for the (non-Indian) place where I lived. I happened to be tired and tense, and I expressed my anxieties much too harshly; Jane was hurt and angry.

Still, before she left she helped me make a list of what I needed so that I too could attempt Indian cooking. She wrote a long list of ingredients: cardamom, coriander, cumin. The list, in Jane's distinctive handwriting with a few additions in mine, now hangs framed in my kitchen, where I do sometimes cook Indian food, though more timidly than she did.

Jane went home and wrote me a letter in which she threatened that if I was as harsh as I'd been, I'd destroy our friendship. She included a sticker on which she'd typed "Be Kind," saying the phrase came from the Dalai Lama. She'd applied one like it to her refrigerator and proposed that I apply this one to mine. I felt terrible and guilty, but I couldn't put a sticker reading "Be Kind" on my refrigerator. I just couldn't. I still have it.

After about a week of unceasing misery, I phoned the farm. Jane was out. Don listened to my story, saying sympathetically, "I know, I know," whenever I paused. As we spoke, Jane came home and took the phone. She said it had been the worst week of her life. We cried. We calmed down. I had bought a cookbook and was preparing Indian food. Jane wanted to know what I had in the house. A cauliflower? Let's see, what could I do with it . . . did I have ginger?

During those years, Jane and I saw each other, in addition to workshop meetings, quite often for people who lived two hundred miles apart. I wrote to her at least once a week and she wrote back when she could. She was the colleague in the next office. A moment after typing the last sentence of the first draft of my first novel, I rolled a new sheet of paper into the typewriter, typed "I finished my novel," and mailed that news to Jane.

When we were together, Jane and I didn't talk about writing as much as about friends and families and husbands, though we talked plenty about the writing life, about how to find time to write despite the legitimate needs of others. We climbed Mt. Kearsarge several times, Mt. Cardigan once, and took many walks near Eagle Pond Farm and in New Haven. Jane taught me to garden and visited the soup kitchen where I volunteer; it made her cry. When I visited the farm, we often cooked. Once we picked rhubarb from the field across the road from the house and made a strawberry rhubarb pie. "Let's make a dessert every time you come," Jane said. She hated being what she called "Suzy Homemaker," but she was an excellent, imaginative cook, ferociously devoted to health. I remember only one meal she cooked that I didn't especially like; it seems to me it was almost entirely beets. I have a recipe Jane gave me for a Brown Soda Bread she served me, made with steel-cut oats and cracked wheat flour. I called it Leisurely Breakfast Bread because it took so much time to chew and swallow, and cheated when I baked it, adding raisins. At times Jane was strict with herself to an impossible degree; the only poem of hers I don't much like is "Potato," about feeling guilty because she'd thrown out a partly rotted potato.

Jane's capacity for guilt was legendary. She felt guilty that George Bush was the president of the United States, though she hadn't voted for him. She felt guilty that Gus the dog trusted her when she offered him a biscuit. Joyce and I teased her about the poem "Biscuit," in which Jane speculated that she might have offered him a stone. We pointed out that Gus liked chewing stones.

Conversation with Jane was freer than the talk I've had with anyone else. It wasn't so much that we told each other secrets, as that we didn't consider any topics off limits. Jane seemed willing to say anything to anybody. She and Don read together at Yale in the summer of 1989, when I was teaching in the summer school there. I introduced them to the Deputy Director of the Summer School, who said politely to Jane, "How are you?" Jane replied, "Pre-menstrual."

During my visits, there wasn't too much evidence of depression; I know that's because when it was really bad, she didn't let me come—which hurt, though I knew it shouldn't. She did tire easily, and, like a nursery school teacher, was always sending me off to take a nap. And Jane had a deep pessimism interwoven with her unmistakable delight in life, a pessimism that I think was her birthright as a depressive. When one of my sons was going through a hard time, she and I sat in my back yard, listening as he played his guitar and sang, and I found myself able to hear with Jane's ears: to hear the pain in his voice I'd been missing.

Occasionally I thought she detected pain that wasn't there, or exaggerated bearable pain. Another son wouldn't do his homework and failed math. She agonized for him, because she couldn't do math when she went to school, and dismissed my assurances that he could perfectly well do it if he'd just bother. When I finished reading a new story to the workshop, Jane would murmur, "So much pain!" Usually I was glad she saw it that way; I'd been trying to write about something hard, and other people sometimes didnnotice. In her letters I heard a great deal about depression and sadness:

 
In the workshop and in our friendship, Jane taught me that kindness matters more than success, that success can't help but matter, that the main thing is to write simply and clearly—and that the main thing is to tell the truth about feeling, no matter how hard that is. She taught me that if only we three could be writers together, then maybe we could be writers. When she was lying ill in Seattle, in terrible pain from the radiation that accompanied the bone marrow transplant that might have saved her, she told me on the phone that she felt as if she were someone new. I think she felt different because she'd gone through so much, but also because she now had somebody else's marrow in her bones. We had talked and joked in advance about taking in a stranger's bone marrow, fascinated to learn that recipients acquire the blood type of the donor, if it's different, and become immune to diseases the donor has had instead of their own diseases. So when Jane said she felt like someone else, I couldn't quite take her seriously, but I also did take her seriously. "Do you still believe in God?" I asked her.

"Yes."

"Do you still believe that the natural object is always the adequate symbol?"

"Passionately," said Jane.

She hadn't changed all that much, so I asked if she still loved me. That week, we thought she'd live.

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