Mark Twain’s Mind Waves

In February, in our family iMessage group, my brother asked our mother to indulge his craving for egg salad sandwiches. 

“That is so weird,” I replied. “I dreamt of mom’s egg salad two days ago.” It had been years since I had eaten it, but chewing in my dream, I realized the crunch of the celery that my mother added was the secret. “I had the same epiphany!!!” Dustin texted back. “The celery!!!”

He went on: Maybe this was the chemo he was doing, but Chinese and BBQ from spots we liked out of state were also appealing. He beat—by half a second—a message I was in the midst of sending about how I longed for food from those exact places. We exclaimed at the chances. Dustin joked that my two-month-old had “given us magical powers,” or that our family dog was controlling our minds. “THE LIMIT DOES NOT EXIST,” he said.

When my brother passed away at twenty-nine from complications of leukemia some weeks later, I livestreamed his funeral in Florida from under lockdown in France. The distance between us was imponderable, as great as it could ever be. We’d both wanted the egg salad. That the connection between us would be cut did not follow. Grief breaks your heart; also, it breaks your brain. While we keep the people we love in our hearts, it began to seem that Dustin was in my head more than anywhere else.

©ELLIS ROSEN

Mark Twain, though he did not go for spiritualism or immortality, would have agreed that siblings could tune into each other from opposite sides of the ocean. He believed, he once wrote,  that a mind “still inhabiting the flesh” could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as “the oddest thing that ever happened to me.”

The mail had just come at Twain’s home in Hartford, and he held a fat letter, still sealed. “Now I will do a miracle,” he drawled. He recognized the hand of someone from whom he said he hadn’t heard in eleven years. Even so, he knew without opening it that the letter contained a book idea. Their minds had been “in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of the 2nd of March.” Twain, in effect, had sat down to write to this very contact, on the same day, about this very same idea. Twain answered: “Dear Dan—Wonders never will cease.”

Dan De Quille was the alias of William Wright. In 1862, both men had started as staffers at the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, and fast became a double-barreled force: the best writers at the hottest paper during the Silver Rush. De Quille was six years older than Samuel Clemens, who showed up, dusty, at twenty-six, as “Josh,” one of dozens of pseudonyms he tried on before becoming Twain.

The territory was given to gunplay, dustups, fire, pranks, and “high hope,” as Twain wrote in Roughing It, and its print culture was unruly, too. “Get your facts first, and … then you can distort ’em as much as you please” was his twenty-four-year-old editor in chief’s guidance. Twain, De Quille said, was averse to fact-heavy “‘cast-iron’ items,” but he was ace among the journalists there who played hell with objectivity and spun elaborate “sells,” from lampoons to hoaxes. (De Quille favored science hoaxes.) The boomtown’s denizens, Twain biographer Gary Scharnhorst points out, had an appetite for Harper’s, The Atlantic, Dickens, and Shakespeare, as well as for the infotainment. It was said the Enterprise’s owners carried home thousand-dollar daily profits in water buckets.

De Quille and Twain “often cruised in company.” They shared a desk. They shared lodging—a double bed. “Mark and I agreed well as room-mates,” De Quille recalled. “Both wanted to read and smoke about the same length of time after getting into bed, and when one got hungry and got up to go down town for oysters the other also became hungry and turned out.” (Scharnhorst told me the theory the two were lovers has been “roundly scorned” by scholars, especially by Larry Berkove, the late authority on these journalist-humorists.) They enrolled in fencing club. “It is said to be highly amusing to witness a set-to between these two ‘roosters,’ they sometimes get so terribly in earnest,” reported the Gold Hill Daily News, which often trafficked in their antics. “Dan De Quille and Mark Twain are to be married shortly,” the paper kidded in April 1864. However, the next month, Twain hotfooted it to San Francisco. The bromance had lasted less than two years. “Nevertheless, their association was more intense and long-lasting than has been appreciated, for their sharing of ideas and stories must have been so extensive as to constitute a common pool,” Berkove reflected. He was unsurprised “that minds which were once so familiar and in tune with each other should continue to produce, even after the interval of many years, thoughts and compositions which bear the impress of the former partner.”

Ten years later, in October 1874, the motherlode was unearthed in Virginia City. The vein, which De Quille called the Big Bonanza, was the richest silver strike in American history and would pay out north of a billion dollars in bullion. De Quille was then the Enterprise’s mining expert (“with a love for the lode”) and a group of the mining magnates wished him to chronicle their Silverado. De Quille, a dipsomaniac who labored crazy hours for moderate moola, had other manuscripts on the stove, but he resolved to ask his former friend, the now-famous Twain, for advice on how to “turn clown.”

And, eureka! As De Quille was writing to him, Twain was reckoning that “the market was ready” for “The Story of the Comstock Lode, with all the strange & romantic fortunes & incidents connected with it,” and the person to pull off such a history, obviously, was “dandy quill.” Twain outlined the book he envisioned, hooked De Quille up with his publisher, and welcomed him to Hartford to “grind literature all day long in the same room,” blued by cigar smoke.

THE BIG BONANZA (1876) IS STILL THE DEFINITIVE, IF INCHOATE, HISTORY OF NEVADA’S COMSTOCK LODE AND THE FRONTIER’S BONANZA CAMPS.

In 1878, Twain wrote about mental telegraphy in A Tramp Abroad. And before going to press, he blotted all of it out. “I feared the public would treat the thing as a joke and throw it aside,” he said, “whereas I was in earnest.” About a decade later: “I tried to creep in under shelter of an authority grave enough to protect the article from ridicule—the North American Review.” The chief, Lorettus Metcalf, insisted on Twain’s byline, but Twain understood that his forked tongue had saddled him with a believability problem, and people would not take him seriously, dammit. “So I pigeonholed the Ms., because I could not get it published anonymously.” Finally, for Harper’s, sixteen years after he received De Quille’s letter, in December 1891, Twain trotted out his surety that egg salad incidents like ours were not accidents.

“That is the puzzling part of it,” he wrote in “Mental telegraphy. A manuscript with a history.” “We are always talking about letters ‘crossing’ each other, for that is one of the very commonest accidents of this life. We call it ‘accident,’ but perhaps we misname it.” Elsewhere, Twain had proposed the “rapport between two minds” operated on “a finer and subtler form of electricity,” which inventors must harness for a thought-sending device, called the “phrenophone.” We’d be able to say, “‘Connect me with the brain of the chief of police at Peking.’”

A few years later, Twain returned to the subject of mental telegraphy in Harper’s with a fresh roll of examples. They were intricate. One day, for instance, he and his friend Joseph Twichell were going to visit Twichell’s daughter—to whom Twain was like an uncle—at her boarding school. As they journeyed, Twain told Twitchell of an encounter a while back: He was in Milan, when a soldier on leave approached him. Lieutenant H. explained that they’d met when he was a cadet and Twain and Twitchell had come to West Point. The soldier mentioned that he’d recently misplaced his letter of credit, and that an American couple with daughters—strangers—had lent him the money to settle his hotel bill. He was headed to repay them, and Twain went along. “I was introduced to the parents and the young ladies; then we separated, and I never saw him or them any m—.” Twain was interrupted as the trolley arrived at their stop. At Miss Porter’s School, lasses streamed by. A girl came up and shook Twichell’s hand—she was, she explained, a friend of his daughter. Then she turned to Twain: “And I wish to shake hands with you too, Mr. Clemens. You don’t remember me, but you were introduced to me in the arcade in Milan two years and a half ago by Lieutenant H.”

THE END PAGE IN A COPY OF THE BIG BONANZA. ITS ORIGINAL OWNER SENT THE BOOK TO TWAIN WITH THE QUESTION, “IS THERE ANY TRUTH IN THE NEWSPAPER STORY THAT YOU PLANNED THIS BOOK FOR THE AUTHOR BEFORE YOU KNEW HE HAD WRITTEN IT?” TWAIN RETURNED THE BOOK WITH AN ANSWER. “YES, IT IS TRUE.” COURTESY OF KEVIN MAC DONNELL, AUSTIN, TEXAS.

“I don’t exactly know what to do with Twain’s psychic claims,” Scharnhorst responded, when I asked him if Twain’s notion of mental telegraphy was another leg-pull, the same brand of jest he undertook in the West. “I don’t think it was.”

“But it’s basically coincidence,” Kevin Mac Donnell, a rare book dealer and Mark Twain scholar who owns the largest private collection of Twain material, including nine thousand first editions, letters, and manuscripts, told me by phone. “Twain dispatched fifty thousand letters in his lifetime, easily, and was a social butterfly, ever traveling. Of course his letters crossed and he ran into people in the street.”

Some of the Bonanza business as Twain narrated it does not prove out. A copy of the letter Twain sent in reply to De Quille’s letter survives. His dates are off. He tells De Quille his wife, Livy, was there when the mail came; in the magazine piece, Twain’s witness is another relative. Those are peccadillos. Less so the pretense that he “had not seen and had hardly thought of [De Quille] for eleven years” and did not even know if De Quille was alive. “That’s fudged,” said Mac Donnell. “He knew how to create buzz; how to quicken plot.” In March 1869, Twain wrote to De Quille that he intended to marry. Afterward, Twain sent a wedding announcement personalized with ancient in-jokes: “Old Dan, my abused roommate—{but who stole old Mrs. Fitch’s pies, nevertheless—& Daggett’s wood.}”

Still, ben trovato exaggeration does not contradict sincerity. “As a mental exercise, as a literary device,” Mac Donnell said, “you can see how mental telegraphy works for Twain and connects to his overall open-mindedness.” Mac Donnell referred to Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Twain’s last novel. “He doesn’t question her visions,” Mac Donnell said.

In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research formed in London to investigate paranormal human experiences “without prejudice or prepossession.” The society did, however, want to prove thought transference, and that year one of its members coined the term “telepathy.” When Twain joined two years later, he told SPR’s cofounder that, ever since Bonanza, he had known the tête-à-têtes were real. When the notion to contact someone hit him, Twain confessed to feeling “like a mere amanuensis.” He assumed the other person had just cabled him. For the rest of his life, Twain continued to note the freakiness of telepathy.

Three years before his heart attack, in 1907, he wrote that “inventions, ideas, phrases, paragraphs, chapters, and even entire books” could all flow brain to brain. He said, resigned, “I often originate ideas in my mind but get almost all of them out of somebody else’s.” The inevitability of unintentional plagiarism bothered him. In November of 1907, Twain heard about a new story by George Bernard Shaw. It echoed in both style and substance one he’d composed seventeen years earlier—“hilarious and extravagant to the verge of impropriety,” and unread by anyone, because Livy would not let it print. 

Twain concluded that “Mr. Shaw must have gotten those incidents out of my head…”

Twain was serious, and not way off. He anticipated brain–computer interface, for one thing. Last fall, the system dubbed BrainNet—a kind of phrenophone—allowed three people in different rooms to play a game of Tetris together with their minds. “I’m telling you about something so sci-fi,” Chantel Prat, one of the neuroscientists who developed BrainNet, said on a call. BrainNet uses a machine to decode brain activity from a sender brain, an electroencephalography (EEG) cap to record that activity, and computer software to translate it for a receiver brain. “It’s very much like a microphone,” Prat explained. “This electrode sits on the scalp and picks up the electrical activity that’s happening inside the head. The signal extends outside the head. We can—we do—record outside the head what’s happening on the inside of it.” I asked how far brainwaves can travel: Were we talking centimeters? Inches, feet—football fields? Prat could not say. But it was not across mountains, deserts, or oceans.

© ELLIS ROSEN

“Most of our thoughts transmit at 40-200 hertz. They can’t go very far,” she said. “But the brain is like a radio. Brainwaves come in different frequencies; some happen at 2-7 hertz, and those lower frequencies have a farther range.” Researchers studying neurosemantics at Carnegie Mellon are able to decode words and even sentences in our brainwaves, but Prat wanted to emphasize that we can decode much more than we can encode. “When we put info in the brain,” she said, “it’s a lot like a sledgehammer coming down: We cannot put an idea in the brain. We can make somebody’s finger twitch.” She appreciated Mark Twain’s cast of mind, though.

In a socially distanced world, disconnected from Dustin, I’m left remembering his capacious imagination for human contact. People get into our heads. And when we know they are out there, thinking of us, us thinking of them, that signal is so clear. What Twain told De Quille is true: “human sympathies can stretch.”

(Source: The Paris Review)

'It's terrifying': can anyone stop China's vast armada of fishing boats?

Ecuador stood up for the Galápagos, but other countries don’t stand a chance against the 17,000-strong distant-water fleet

The recent discovery by the Ecuadorean navy of a vast fishing armada of 340 Chinese vessels just off the biodiverse Galápagos Islands stirred outrage both in Ecuador and overseas.

Under pressure after Ecuador’s strident response, China has given mixed signals that it could begin to reel in its vast international fishing fleet. Its embassy in Ecuador declared a “zero tolerance” policy towards illegal fishing, and this week it announced it was tightening the rules for its enormous flotilla with a series of new regulations.

An Ecuadorian navy vessels challenges a fishing boat on 7 August after a fleet of mostly Chinese-flagged ships were detected in the Pacific Ocean. Photograph: Santiago Arcos/Reuters

But with 325 of those 340 ships remaining off Ecuador, and local navy commander Darwin Jarrín saying last week that nearly half of those vessels had intermittently switched off their satellite communications – breaching the rules of the regional fisheries management organisation – the episode has shown how difficult it is for small nations to stand up to China’s distant fleet even when it descends on the archipelago that inspired Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

China’s vast fishing fleet, by far the world’s largest, has been overfishing seas much further from the world’s gaze than the islands known for their giant tortoises and iguanas. From West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea to the Korean peninsula, the fleet has moved into the waters of other countries – switching off transponders to avoid detection, depleting fish stocks and threatening food security for often poor coastal communities. In east Asia, fishing vessels may act as the vanguard of an aggressive geopolitical strategy aimed at asserting territorial claims.

China’s new regulations this week include harsher penalties for companies and captains involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated – or IUU – fishing. But conservationists monitoring the Galápagos episode are sceptical.

“Beyond this one-sided announcement, the problem remains the same,” says Pablo Guerrero, marine conservation director for WWF Ecuador. “These boats operate without observers on board, they do not return to port, they transship their catch to mother vessels, which land the catch at ports. So, in a nutshell, they are fishing all the time, the fishing operation doesn’t stop.”

The fleet is a vast and complex network. Among the hundreds of vessels are fuel providers, fishing boats, tender boats and reefers, some of which camouflage unregistered boats, Guerrero says. Many ships spend long periods at sea where shocking human rights violations have been reported.

NGO Global Fishing Watch and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank have used cutting-edge technology and data analysis to reveal that the size and scope of China’s distant-water fleet has been hugely underreported.

An Ecuadorian navy officer looks at a radar on 7 August after the mostly Chinese-flagged fleet was detected in an international corridor that borders the Galápagos Islands. Photograph: Santiago Arcos/Reuters

The ODI found the fleet had 16,966 vessels, five times more than previous estimates. By contrast, the US distant-water fleet comprises 300 boats.

In 2017, as part of its 13th fisheries five-year plan, China announced plans to cap the size of the fleet to 3,000 vessels by 2020.

“We were shocked by the results because we were expecting 4,000 or 5,000 vessels,” says Miren Gutiérrez, the lead author of the ODI report.

The research, which took more than a year, also found nearly 1,000 of the boats were using “flags of convenience” and at least 183 vessels were involved in suspected IUU fishing, for which China ranked the worst-performing nation in a 2019 global index.

“On the surface, it looks like a very fragmented fleet, but we suspect the core of it is probably in the hands of a few companies,” says Gutiérrez. Recent research shows the Chinese government heavily subsidises fishing through tax exemptions, mostly on fuel, to the value of $16.6bn (£12.6bn) per year, or 47% of total global fishing subsidies.

“Most of this overfishing is not illegal, that’s the problem,” Gutiérrez says, as most of it goes on in international waters. 

Most of the fleet’s vessels are trawlers – banned within China’s territorial waters and notorious for damaging ecosystems by dragging nets along the seafloor. Other common boats are longliners, for larger fish such as tuna or shark, and squid-jiggers, which usually operate in deeper waters.

“To shift the dynamic there needs to be radical transparency,” says Philip Chou, an expert on distant-water fishing at Oceana, a marine conservation group. “So far, the evidence has not shown that [the Chinese government] has taken it further than rhetoric.”

China would need to open up about its catch, the real-time location of its fleets, the ownership of fishing vessels, and the opaque bilateral or regional agreements it has made with low-income coastal nations, Chou says. In west Africa, for example, a 2018 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation found 90% of Ghanaian-flagged vessels had Chinese involvement.

China’s self-declared shake-up proposes changes to high-seas transshipment rules – the movement of cargo from one vessel to another – along with reforms to distant-water fishing. It also announced two three-month fishing moratoriums: one west of the Galápagos, between September and November, and another beginning in July in the south Atlantic near Argentina.

The world’s biggest seafood exporter is also mooted to be planning to ratify the Port State Measures Agreement, the first internationally binding accord in which ports around the world pledge not to allow illegal or unregulated fishing boats to land catches.

Protesters outside the Chinese embassy in Quito, Ecuador, earlier this month call for fisheries control. Photograph: José Jácome/EPA

“It’s a significant concession,” says Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation. “But in the context of global fisheries it’s not enough, it’s not nearly enough.”

China hauled up about 15% of the world’s reported fishing catch in 2018, according to the UN fisheries agency, more than twice the second- and third-ranking countries. But the lack of transparency means it is impossible to truly know how much seafood humans take from the ocean amid an alarming drop in marine life in the past half-century.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that illegal fishing has an annual cost of up to $23bn. The FAO also calculatesd that nearly 60 million people worked in fishing or aquaculture in 2016, 85% of them in Asia.

Ecuador is one of a few small nation states that have pushed back against the Chinese flotillas. In the hotly disputed South China Sea, Indonesia sent F-16 fighter jets along with navy, coastguard and fishing boats to repel 63 Chinese fishing boats and four coastguard vessels from its waters in January.

Ecuador’s defence minister, Oswaldo Jarrin, flanked by navy admirals, at a press conference, in the port city of Guayaquil, about the Chinese fleet operating near the Galápagos Islands. Photograph: Reuters

But North Korean fishing boats may have come off worse from exchanges with China’s “dark fleets”, amid reports of “ghost boats” washing up on Japanese shores containing the bodies of North Korean fishermen. In its backyard, the Chinese fleet has a fearsome reputation for systemic illegal fishing and aggressive tactics when faced with competitors or foreign patrol vessels.

China signed a key UN fish stocks agreement in 1996 but never ratified it. It is a member of seven regional fishery management organisations, or RFMOs, but its distant water fleet operates outside of those frameworks, says Mercedes Rosello, director of House of Ocean, a not-for-profit legal consultancy that monitors IUU fishing.

“When you are looking at thousands of vessels, the rules and mechanisms which that flag state adopts are of huge transcendence,” Rosello says.

The US, Japan, and the EU, which make up about 70% of the global seafood market, need to take proactive measures to disrupt IUU fish from Chinese vessels from entering international supply chains, says Trent.

“[Without] wholescale structural change by China and the system of global governance of the ocean to make sure the Chinese do abide by the law,” he says, the world’s fish stocks would continue their precipitous decline.

“The people who suffer first and worst are almost always the coastal communities who rely on those fisheries for their survival, wellbeing and food,” he says.

“Exactly what happens in the Galápagos [Islands] happens in locations around the world and it’s terrifying.”

(Source: The Guardian)

No plan for a return to the office for millions of staff

Fifty of the biggest UK employers questioned by BBC have said they have no plans to return all staff to the office full-time in the near future.

Some 24 firms said that they did not have any plans in place to return workers to the office.

However, 20 have opened their offices for staff unable to work from home.

It comes as many employees return to work from the summer holidays with the reality of a prolonged period of home working becoming increasingly likely.

The BBC questioned 50 big employers ranging from banks to retailers to get a sense of when they expected to ask employees to return to the office.

One of the main reasons given for the lack of a substantial return was that firms could not see a way of accommodating large numbers of staff while social distancing regulations were still in place.

Many companies said they were offering choice and flexibility to those who want to return, particularly in the banking and finance sectors.

A few firms have already announced they have no plans to return to the office until late autumn, and Facebook has said it does not plan a return of employees until July 2021.

Some smaller businesses are deciding to abandon their offices altogether. Tara Tomes runs a PR agency with an office in the heart of Birmingham's business district.

Her team of eight cannot fit in the space they have if they are to obey social distancing guidelines and she will not be renewing the office lease in September.

"I personally don't want to force my team back onto public transport," she told the BBC.

"Not having four walls around us won't change the dynamic or culture of the team. If anything it will make us more pioneering in the way the world of work is going."

She said that the money saved on rent and utilities and the time spent not commuting were other benefits to giving up the office.

Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street acknowledged that the challenges facing city centre businesses were grave but said he was hopeful the climate would gradually improve.

"This is undeniably a very difficult situation for businesses that thrive on the back of the big office occupiers being there. What we are trying to do is steadily build confidence that it is safe to return to the city centre."

He said Birmingham's transport system was currently carrying about 20% of pre-covid numbers but that he hoped this would rise to 50% over the autumn.

Still, that means that city centre footfall - which is the lifeblood of businesses that rely on office workers and commuters - would in the best case scenario be half of what it is in normal times.

Naomi says the pandemic has been 'devastating' for her business

That may be cold comfort to Naomi and her brother James who opened up a new coffee shop in the heart of Birmingham's business district earlier this year. They are now getting less than a fifth of the trade they were banking on.

"It's been devastating really," Naomi told the BBC. "Office workers are absolutely critical to us. We are hoping things improve in September but if they don't we will have to rethink the whole business."

It is, however, too soon to announce the death of the office, according to Rob Groves from office developer Argent, which has just completed the construction of 120,000 feet of office space in Birmingham's Chamberlain Square.

While he admitted that some would-be tenants were pressing the pause button, he also insisted there would always be a need for a workplace where people could congregate and collaborate.

"I'd like to challenge people saying they will never need an office and ask them in 12-18 months time whether that was the right decision or just a reaction to what's happening now."

Matthew Hammond, chairman of the Midlands region for PwC

One of Argent's blue chip tenants agrees. Accounting and consultancy firm PwC has just moved into the property next door. It is supposed to house 2,000 people but is currently catering to just 150 each day.

Nevertheless, Matthew Hammond, chairman of the Midlands region for PwC, said that the office was a must have, particularly for younger workers.

"We have colleagues who may be working at the end of their bed or on a return unit in their kitchen. That is not sustainable or healthy for the longer term. As employers we invest a huge amount in providing the right environment, the right seating, the right technology so people can be at their most productive."

Not everyone has deep enough pockets to afford such flexible working spaces. While many employees want the option of coming to the office, many now see home working as a right, according to Midlands recruitment specialist Kam Vara.

"For many candidates it's now a deal-breaker if there isn't an option for home working, and some are saying they want 100% home working with no physical contact with the office whatsoever."

The knock-on effects of these changes to the world of work could be enormous and long lasting. If people don't need to be in the office, they can be anywhere. And the cost of commuter season tickets and expensive suburban housing within commuting distance of big cities is an expense employers could deduct.

Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street is optimistic that what we are witnessing is simply an age old tale of urban evolution, with Covid-19 holding down the fast forward button.

"The calling of the death of the office is very premature. Cities have repurposed themselves before over decades... the coronavirus has just speeded it up."

That may be so, but the short term shock to the city business model feels more like a cardiac arrest than a gentle evolution. And the reluctance on the part of both workers and employers to return to the office poses a grave economic threat to the future of city centres.

(Source: BBC)

Donald Hall’s Amanuensis

he bond between author and assistant is often close. But in Donald Hall’s case, his decades-long relationship with his assistant proved to be a lifeline that extended his writing career.

When Donald Hall interviewed Kendel Currier for the part-time job of typing his correspondence in August of 1994, one of the first things he asked was, “Will you type curse words?” His earlier hire for the position, a woman active in a local church, backed out when she discovered curse words in a letter, and he wanted to make sure Currier wouldn’t quit, too.

Hall found Currier’s response reassuring: She would type whatever he dictated, she told him, and keep a dictionary nearby in case she was uncertain of a spelling. She was thirty-six at the time and, by her own description, a stay-at-home mom and housewife. But she’d done secretarial work in the past, and Hall—not quite twice Currier’s age at sixty-six—was impressed by her professionalism. So, he hired her on the spot, and turned up the next day at her house in Andover, New Hampshire, with a canvas bag that contained a model letter, a stack of stationery, and a transcriber for playing back the dictation on his tapes. “It was as if the universe offered me a gift,” Currier later said, “and I was smart enough to accept it.”

Currier obtained the typewriter she used, an IBM Selectric III, from Hall’s previous typist, Lois Fierro. Lois also offered Currier a couple of tips: Hall insisted on the British spelling “cheque” for a bank check, and spelled “anymore” as two words.

DONALD HALL IN 2014. PHOTO: HENRI COLE.

Soon Hall and his amanuensis fell into their daily rhythm: he drove ten miles to her home in Andover to drop off the tape she was to transcribe with a guide sheet, and she typed up letters for the next day, when he brought her another tape. Because they used two briefcases for their transactions, the two rarely spoke. She would leave her briefcase with its finished work between her storm and front doors, where he could easily exchange it with his briefcase containing new work. Hall came early in the morning, and often, when Currier opened the door, he’d have already come and gone. In a way, she says, “we took up our own correspondence, I typing notes to him, and he answering me on the daily tape.”

The voice she found on the tapes was hard to get used to at first. “He was a man I didn’t know, and I had to learn how to hear him,” she says. “And there was a lot of background noise, because he often dictated while he was watching a baseball game or driving his car.” But she was immediately impressed by the recipients of his letters. “The first letter I typed for him was to Robert Bly,” she says, “and there were all these other well-known writers.” She gradually realized that the man she was working for was at the center of the American literary scene. He was an enormously prolific correspondent, who dictated ten to twenty letters a day and never let a letter go unanswered.

A continual theme in Hall’s early dictated letters was his worry about his wife, Jane Kenyon, who was stricken with leukemia. When Currier began in her position in late August, he and Kenyon were waiting for a blood match for a bone-marrow transplant. It was a time of great anxiety. But three weeks after she was hired, they got a call that a match had been found, and they quickly made plans to travel to Seattle for the operation.

Before they left, Hall set up a system for delivering his daily tapes by mail. He supplied Currier with stationery, envelopes, and money for stamps so she could send his letters back to him for a final proofing. Now he could stay in touch with friends, readers, and professional contacts with only a slight delay in his responses. Currier gradually discovered that Hall’s letter writing had another benefit: it gave him ideas for his creative work. After he repeated the same story from his daily life from one letter to the next, she says, it would sometimes appear in a poem. “I don’t know that he ever spoke or wrote about this,” she reflects, “but I certainly noticed it.”

Much of the Seattle correspondence Currier typed was about the progress and results of Kenyon’s operation. Early signs showed the transplant had taken, lifting their hopes. But in the weeks after the couple flew home to New Hampshire, her leukemia returned. Hall’s letters were consumed by sorrow. When Kenyon died in late April 1995, friends and readers across the country wrote to share Hall’s grief. “The outpouring of condolence by mail afterward was enormous,” Currier remembers. Hall insisted on answering every correspondent. “It was one of the busiest times I’ve ever had with him,” she says, “typing many, many postcards, notes, and letters.”

“Don was such a letter writer,” says Currier, “that he went on writing to Jane even after she died.” Hall’s letter-poems to Kenyon appear in his 1998 collection Without and take up nearly half of the volume. Offering spontaneous, intimate news of daily events to a recipient who cannot read them, the poems take us closer to Hall’s heartbreak than any of the more deliberate entries that precede them. They bring a new tone to his work.

“His grief was all he wrote about in his letters for a year after Jane’s death,” Currier says. As in the past, those letters, too, helped him with his poetry, providing observations and stories he later used in poems. Sometimes, “it worked the other way,” that is, he included in his letters things he’d already written about, as if to test their effect.

Currier had good reason to know about the links between Hall’s letters and poems. In July of 1996, Sharon Broughton, who typed Hall’s poetry and prose, married and moved to California, and Currier took over her work. So in addition to typing his grief-filled correspondence, she was also typing the poems of Without, draft by draft.

Currier’s increased responsibilities came at exactly the right time: her son Tyler was about the enter the first grade, freeing her from childcare for a longer part of the day. But there were problems for her at home. “My marriage was pretty bumpy at that point,” she says, and sometimes, when Hall pulled into her driveway to drop off his briefcase of new work, the two of them talked about their personal difficulties, Currier with her husband and Hall with the women he was now dating. They were alike in some ways, both of them without—he having lost his life partner, and she sensing she would soon lose hers as well. And through these unguarded conversations, a bond formed and their relationship deepened.

In late winter 1998, as her divorce neared, Currier became concerned that she would no longer have a home office to work from and would have to give up her job. She was greatly relieved when Hall stepped in to offer the cottage that once belonged to his grandfather’s hired man.

The cottage was just seventy yards down the road from Hall’s farmhouse, a much more convenient location than Currier’s house, which required a car ride. With Hall’s blessing, she got a friend to build a desk in the living room large enough to hold a typewriter, a computer, and a copy machine. Over the next several weeks, after she had completed the day’s typing, Hall would meet her at the cottage to unpack and organize the boxes from his mother’s house that had been stored there, boxes of family photographs, mementos, and linens. The process became the impetus for his later memoir, Unpacking the Boxes. In October, after the unpacking was complete, Hall suggested that Currier move in and make the cottage her permanent home.

Because her new residence was so close to his house, a single briefcase was all the pair needed now for their daily exchanges. 

When Hall finished dictating in the evening, he left the briefcase outside his house in a porch chair. Next morning, before the sun came up, Currier collected the briefcase, and returned it in the late morning, full of letters and manuscripts. “I became known as ‘that woman who carries a briefcase on Route 4 in the dark,’ ” she says. Sometimes she checked the farmhouse through her north window just to make sure things were as they should be—the lights on or not on, depending on the time of day, the car in the driveway where it belonged. Like the hired man who had lived in the cottage before her, she began attending to the rhythms of the main house.

The essential rhythm between author and amanuensis, the exchange of the briefcase, altered as time went on, moving later into the day. They developed a visual code. Currier was to watch for the briefcase from her window, and when it appeared on its porch chair, she would know her day’s work awaited. When she finished the work, she carried the briefcase back to its chair and placed it on its side, so Hall would understand that its contents were ready for inspection.

By the middle of 1999, Hall had assigned Currier an assortment of new chores—she’d become a trusted partner. She helped clear away Jane Kenyon’s clothes. She alphabetically shelved the new poetry books he received and sorted family photographs. Then Hall turned over all his bookkeeping to her, and when he traveled, put her in charge of his house to deal with his mail, faxes, phone messages, and the care of his pets. She even drove him to poetry readings around New Hampshire and well outside the state. In his letters and prose, Hall took to calling her his assistant.

For years, Currier had happily conformed her life and schedule to Hall’s, but now there was something she needed to do for herself. She wanted to go to college. Back in high school, when she’d brought up the subject of college to her parents, they were puzzled. 

Why would she waste her money on that, her father asked, since she’d be following her husband’s lead wherever he went? Ultimately, her parents relented, but only if she agreed to take up something practical. She chose a program in business and science at the University of Rhode Island, but only made it through introductory courses before she dropped out from lack of interest. In the fall of 1999, she enrolled in the adult education program offered by the University of New Hampshire. Then she selected courses in the humanities and began to learn about the world of literature, art, and thought.

In hindsight, Currier sees how much Hall influenced the curriculum she chose. “Working for someone whose life was literature was an eye-opening experience,” she says. “I was exposed to new ideas through Don, and I got to expand them by going back to school.” When she had extra homework, Hall adjusted her schedule, occasionally giving her whole days off to catch up. “He believed in higher education,” Currier says, “and he wanted me to have it.”

By his example, Hall also taught her how to write. During her time as a student, he was working on The Best Day the Worst Day, his prose memoir about his life with Kenyon, and Currier was impressed by his discipline and his pursuit of perfection. “He wrote the entire book in longhand three times,” she recalls, and after she typed up the third version, he scribbled revisions for retyping in the margins. “He would change a passage twenty times, and I’d say to myself, Oh my God, Don, please don’t change that again! But the twentieth time it would be so much better.” Guided by Hall’s passion for revision, Currier won high praise for her own written work; one professor even asked to use her final paper as a model in future classes.

In the spring of 2003, when Currier crossed the stage in her cap and gown to receive her degree, she heard her son shout from the audience “Way to go, Mom!” That same year Hall asked if he could dedicate a book of essays to her, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, which she’d just finished typing. Currier was flattered, and surprised, too, though on reflection she surmised the reason for his dedication. As she typed the book, her admiration for it grew, and she told Hall that his essays about writing poetry would be helpful to anyone who wanted to write.

Still, she wasn’t sure about the book’s title, she told Hall, because she thought it had nothing to do with the content. He responded by editing his opening essay to explain the title. It was her college degree, she says, that gave her the confidence to tell him what didn’t sound right to her in his work, both in that manuscript and in others that came after. Her degree also gave her a different attitude when she sat in Hall’s audience after driving him to a poetry reading. She felt, she says, “more like I belonged there.”

Currier sent her question about the title of Breakfast Served Any Time All Day through their regular channel for communication: notes sent back and forth in the daily briefcase—he dictating his notes to her, and she typing a comment or question. In this way, Currier also told him about her multiple sclerosis. Since her disease had not interfered with her typing, she’d had no need to discuss it with him. 

But in the manuscript of a short story he was working on, one of his characters died of MS, and she was compelled to explain that people don’t generally die of MS. Then she had to explain how she knew.

In the first decade of the 2000s, Currier’s MS steadily progressed. First, she wore a brace on her left foot, then she began to use a cane. A few years later she graduated to a rollator walker. Today, she gets around on a disability scooter. In 2007, she began to type with voice recognition software because she was losing function in the little and ring fingers of her left hand— “a and s,” she says, “are very important letters.”

By that time, Hall had his own disabilities to deal with, the result of old age and a lifelong aversion to physical exercise. In his prose book, Essays After Eighty, he confesses his immobility: “I sit on my ass all day writing in longhand, which Kendel types up.” Five years earlier, in Unpacking the Boxes, he described how hard it was to raise himself out of his living room chair, a problem eventually solved by a mechanical lift.

Currier remembers how often Hall fell. One morning in winter, as she checked the farmhouse from her north window, she noticed his car had been warming up for a long time. When she went up to check, she found Hall lying in the driveway beside the car, unable to get up. Another day, as she entered the house, she heard him calling out in panic from the floor on the far side of his bed. Unable to lift him because of her own disability, she talked him into a position from which he could get himself up. On later falls, when he couldn’t manage to lift himself, she called the local fire department for assistance. Her list of responsibilities continued to grow; it now included the role of safeguard and protector.

In 2008, during the period of his falling, Hall got into his second car accident. Nobody was hurt, but he lost his license. This made it easier for Currier to keep an eye on him throughout each day, when she brought him his breakfast sandwich and Boston Globe and picked up the briefcase for work. Always the two of them talked a bit in the morning, and longer in the afternoon, when she brought her typed pages back to him and he’d finished his writing for the day. Sometimes the subject was their mutual disability. Currier told him about the benefits of getting around on a rollator, and once, after she began to use a scooter, Hall suggested she might one day want a grabber like the one his daughter Philippa bought him for grasping things beyond his reach.

Currier didn’t know about grabbers, and she appreciated the thought. Still, the most important way Hall helped her with her disability was simply by understanding. “He told me how horrible and unfair it was that I had MS,” she says, “and he was always very concerned about it.” For her part, she sympathized with him about the growing troubles of old age. Once, when he was depressed by his infirmities, she counseled him to try and see things differently, as she had learned to do with her MS, accepting life as it actually was, and finding the good in what might seem a hopeless situation. Hall was determined that people couldn’t change their feelings, and her advice never took. But the life she led by example did. He understood, she says, “that my sympathy was limited because I had my own disability. He knew he couldn’t play the disability card with me.”

Currier was not the only woman who looked after Hall in his eighties. There were several such women, and the locals had a nickname for them. Linda Kunhardt, the love of his life after Kenyon died, discovered the nickname when she dropped off some of Hall’s mail at the post office in Danbury, New Hampshire, and a clerk asked her if she was part of “Hall’s Harem.” The members of the group are listed in the dedication of Hall’s last book, A Carnival of Losses: his housekeeper, his personal trainer, two women who delivered his mail and his prescriptions, and, at the very top of the list, Currier, his all-purpose assistant, and by then, his dear and trusted friend.

Unlike the other helpers, Currier emerges in A Carnival of Losses and Essays After Eighty as a constant companion, a fully developed character who’s not afraid to pull rank when it comes to Hall’s best interests. She was especially worried by his smoking. In a passage from “No Smoking,” Hall relates that she once noticed “the carpet between my chair and a low bookshelf was burned away, as were the backs of some books.” When he explained that the damage came from a lost, burning cigarette, Currier was horrified and refused to leave the farmhouse until he promised to call her whenever he couldn’t locate a dropped cigarette. In the same essay, Hall describes the two of them on their way to New York City, Currier driving and he occasionally cracking his window to smoke. “Somewhere around Springfield, Massachusetts,” he writes, when he took out another cigarette, Currier parked the car and asked him to smoke outside. “I could not smoke in my own car,” Hall writes. “Kendel is kind, but Kendel is a hard case.”

The affection and respect Hall felt served Currier well in the period after he finished Essays after Eighty, when his mood turned dark. He was discouraged, not only because he didn’t have a subject to write about, but because even if he did, he wouldn’t have enough energy to manage the job. Watching him adrift, day after day, made Currier unhappy as well. She finally told him, “If you don’t work, I don’t work.” Those words “seemed to shock him a bit,” she says, “because I don’t think he’d ever thought about the impact he might be having on me.” Afterward she pleaded with him to “write anything, whether it was publishable or not, just to get writing again.” At her urging, he began the short essays of A Carnival of Losses—“notes,” as he called them, each tailored to fit his reduced periods of concentration.

The glaring exception to shortness is the essay “Necropoetics,” over twenty pages concerning Jane Kenyon’s influence on his poetry after her death. The essay was long enough and important enough for Hall that he gave it the prominence of its own section in the book. It was Currier who urged him to write the piece, first reading his thoughts about the theme of necropoetics in his letters, then prompting him, repeatedly, to explore them during afternoon chats. There’s little doubt that her encouragement was crucial not only to the creation of “Necropoetics,” but to Hall’s last volume itself.

Not long after he completed A Carnival of Losses, Donald Hall died. The memorial service, held in the South Danbury church, took place nearly two years ago.

Currier still lives in the small farmhand’s cottage, but the farmhouse, now empty, has been sold to a hastily formed group whose stated purpose is to preserve it. Currier now awaits the results of an application she has made to a nearby retirement community, and she has joined a counseling group to deal with the grief she feels. “I cannot look up there every day knowing that Don’s not there,” she says, “knowing there’s no reason to look anymore.”

But she has her memories. She recalls, for instance, the times she surprised Hall with results from her online research: biographies of poets he knew as a young man for his “Selected Poets of Donald Hall” section in A Carnival of Losses, or an early photograph of himself with an apple in his mouth, which she persuaded him to reprint with his essay “Dictating the Pig.” She remembers moments when he asked for her thoughts about a word or a piece he had written. She remembers especially how he honored her with his dedication for Breakfast Served Any Time All Day.

And of course Currier has the memory of her daily journeys with their shared briefcase, in all weather, from her cottage to Hall’s farmhouse and back again for more than twenty years, first in the dark on foot, sometimes in the winter on cross-country skis, and during her last years riding on her disability scooter, the briefcase tucked behind her legs under the seat. By that time the case showed signs of its continuous repair. “At first when the stitching at the seams came undone,” Currier says, “I would hand-sew it back together.” Later, as she lost the use of her left hand, she repaired the briefcase with duct tape. The record of its restorations honors the commitment of the two people who spent their life together, filling and emptying it.

Currier’s last official day as Hall’s amanuensis was in the fall of 2019. She closed down his email account. She deleted his emails from her private account, along with his remaining Word files. Then she sent in her final pay numbers to his accountant. With a few keystrokes, “I let go of what I’d continued to hold onto since Don died. It was far more emotional than I expected.”

Before Hall’s son, Andrew, and daughter, Philippa, dealt with the contents of their father’s farmhouse, they asked his housekeeper, his personal trainer, and Currier if there was anything each of them would like to have. Without hesitation, Kendel Currier requested Donald Hall’s grabber. He had told her there might come a day when she would need a way to grasp things beyond her reach. She needed it now. “Every time I use this grabber,” she says, “I find myself thanking him.”

Wesley McNair is the author of more than twenty books, including the recent poetry collections The Unfastening and The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, winner of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry. McNair served as Maine Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2016. Dwellers in the House of the Lord, his tenth book of poetry, was published April 7, 2020.

(Source: The Paris Review)