Interview

James Baker Hall also has a Reader's Guide for Praeder's Letters.

There's a poem in this book entitled "Brother Prayer" that sounds the two notes you mentioned loud and clear, I think.

with all the help
I've been able to muster
I can see three bodies drop
any minute now from one of those darkening trees
on the vast lawn the man first
he takes the fall with his knees is running
when he hits the ground
for the big house
next the two children as the twilight fireflies appear
the older girl followed by the faster boy
both reach the stone steps
at the same moment and stop
under the awning one step up
you'd think they'd close ranks
you yearn for them to hold hands
as they peer through the screen door
into the shadows sounds
come back dishes
being washed and put away
someone walks across the big hall upstairs
fireflies take up the evening under the trees
cricket-lace surrounds these events
and the blond children
opening the door

In 1988, when I was fifty-three years old, after having avoided doing it way too many times, I embarked on a concerted effort to recover my vanished childhood and catch sight of my sources. My father's adultery, and my mother's suicide when I was seven, had caused me to forget myself, the way you would jettison baggage to keep a lifeboat afloat. "You had a mother, Jim," my wife and dear friend Mary Ann Taylor-Hall kept saying, "whether you remember her or not." I didn't have enough information about that period of my life to write prose, so I started with the few things I did remember, like watching her die, dropping them into language like bait, fishing for the deep feeders. I wrote question-asking poetry, trying to gain access to my night-time mind, achieving it sometimes. Through the agency of language I could remember without the aid of much memory, again and again, and know what to trust and what not, if I was patient and kept its faith, if I didn't lose my nerve, or flinch more than was neurologically necessary.

I brought art photography skills to bear on rephotographing the Hall family albums, searching for confirmation of the sightings my words brought me to, and for whatever else I could trust. After a couple of years a coherent story began to emerge, and the poetry evolved into a meditative day-time prose, a language that I worked with for another seven-plus years, trying to find what lay on the other side of my anger and grudges and prosecutions. All the while I kept photographing; the plain tabletop of the early shoots evolved into a big plastic box, open at one end. I entered with my camera and came to position on my padded elbows, like a tripod come to wait for the oracular vapors; photographs of photographs of photographs, cut out and moved around like paper dolls and hung by scotch tape from the top like Tarot figures, eight-second handheld exposures from the gut, and from a lifelong love of certain painters: Gauguin, Degas, Rothko. I would come out from behind the camera while the shutter was open and create colored shapes with wands, I’d blow on certain figures so that I could record the way they moved, and the way I moved in their presence, and the traces we left. The reanimations, erasures, fragmentations, the great camaraderie of appearance and disappearance. Throughout, I was interested in one thing only, recognition—only the familiar was real. It seemed at times as though memory itself was being constituted and enacted, not just its holdings revealed.

I visited Aunt Peggy, the only person on Mother's side I still knew, who'd been waiting all those years for me to come around and ask about Lurlene, and I visited Mother's best friend for the first time, a woman then in her eighties, and I had the forever-postponed confrontation with my older sister, who could have helped me a lot early on and didn't, and I did other such research as I could to stimulate my memory and sharpen my comprehension.

Cave paintings, that's what the images were most like. You could see that clearly in the photographs, but it was also true, I think, with the words. Verbal language and visual, they played a big spin up to high speeds, drilling me inside the buried recesses of my mind. First words and then the camera served as my miner's lamp to see what had been left on the darkness of those walls. Some of it, maybe I should say a lot of it, was hard for me to look at, and hard for me to bring out, and scary—though I was rarely less than exhilarated, never less than compelled.

At one point I had a seizure, and something within me tried to bite off my loosened tongue. I had other such visitations, including a conversation with my grandfather's ghost that lasted several months. It was in his big house in the country, a quarter of a mile down the pike from the country club, that my mother and sister and I lived, while his eldest son, my handsome father, a Captain in the Air Force, lived elsewhere with another woman. And it was on his old L.C. Smith—the typewriter I'd used to punch out my first words, with his help (my name, which was his also)—that I recorded my transactions with him, and his plea for understanding and forgiveness. Had it not been for him and my grandmother, Lurlene could have escaped with her children.
I began with no trace of Mother's voice, and it never came to me. I had to go to it, my language had to search it out, I had to find it within myself, my mother's voice in her absence, and if I wanted to keep it I had to find it again and again in everything. Often there was the feeling that this was the work I'd become an artist to do.

What I've got at the end of this ten-year forced march is an exhibition of photographs called "Orphan in the Attic" and a book by the same name published by the UK Art Museum; a book-length prose memoir entitled Within the Missing Body of the Fox; and the Sarabande book of poems, The Mother on the Other Side of the World. The autobiographical poems here are pieces from the memoir that refused to be day-timed. That's the long and the short of it, if you want to pretend that things like this can be sized up. The mystery of them comes, I guess you could say, partly from the job of work they were performing in my psyche, digging down to where the light gave out, and then pushing back the darkness, testing each new-found step; and partly from the great mystery at the core of what was revealed. Such originality as the poems have comes from their steadfast pursuit of my origins.

My beautiful, popular, young mother died in my bed—prisoner to a way of life, in one view, in another, to life itself. Stunned, watching from across the room as her fate became mine, I was taken out to the farthest vanishing point, where the world as we have always known it never did exist, where life and death aren't different faces but the same one body, and joy and terror, nurture and devastation, aren't separate, as they seem to be. And all along the way out to those grand erasures and revelations, there was great mystery within mystery.

What does it mean to be an orphan of a scandal turned tragic?

I can say that my life is the answer to that question, but only as long as I keep in mind that I don't know who I am or where I came from and where I'm going, and only as long as I do what I'm able not to oversimplify. As the child in me watched what our lives had brought us to that day in 1943, unqualified love was being replaced by intractable shame, which is what happened to Adam and Eve, isn't it? Whenever I'm tempted to believe, that on that fateful day, at the appointed hour, my mother and I were what some call God, I think no, we were only closer to that God than usual. Paralyzed in my bedroom doorway, awaiting the return of my legendary body, I was talking to God from within a cave, as surely she was, we were asking which limb would move next, and which way.

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