“In life, one must show character and kindness.” — Pablo Casals
My good buddy Taylor Stoehr just died and I’ve been leafing through the bulging file of his letters to me, reading passages at random and marveling at the clarity of his prose and the generosity of his spirit. He was eighty-two when he died, and we only knew each other for four years, yet he was immensely important to me—a thoughtful person who took the time to read my books and plays and articles, and then write lengthy responses that made me glad I wrote them.
I never met Taylor in-person or spoke to him, our friendship based entirely upon handwritten letters sent between California and Massachusetts, our knowing each other the result of my sending him a letter of praise about his book I Hear My Gate Slam, a collection of excellent translations of ancient Chinese poetry.
Late Spring
In the evening swallows
appear at the window;
on my doorstep sparrows
flutter in the dust.
At sundown a breeze stirs
and I hear my gate slam;
a few petals fall silently
but no one has come.
—Yüan Chen
I sent my adulatory letter to Taylor in care of the University of Massachusetts, having learned from his biography at the back of I Hear My Gate Slam that he was a professor in the English department there. In addition to his translations of Chinese poets, he was a translator of the poetry of François Villon and Bertolt Brecht. He received my letter just a few weeks after he retired from professing and in the midst of moving with his new wife Teri from Boston to Otis, a small town in western Massachusetts. Much to my surprise and delight, he replied to my missive and our correspondence took off like a shot.
Because he enjoyed my essays, Taylor subscribed to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, but the small print was hard on his eyes, so when his subscription lapsed I began making large print, double-spaced copies of my articles for him and came to feel that my weekly essay was not quite finished until I had slipped the fat envelope bound for Otis Massachusetts through the Out Of Town mail slot.
Here is a favorite passage from one of Taylor’s letters.
“Dear Todd—I won’t be able to get all I want to say on this card, but here I am in Boston to see doctors and friends and do a few errands. I brought this card with me so that I could write to you, not knowing until I stopped at the post office on the way out of Otis how much I would have to say. I did know that I wanted to respond to your letter which seems to me to inaugurate a new era in our friendship—as perhaps my last letter to you also evidenced. However it may be, I’m grateful to the spirits, or the great atman, for the good fortune of our meeting. I am ever more convinced that it was meant to be.
“Learning of your Huge Transitions—your move to the North, meeting and marrying Marcia, your confrontation with mortality—all these have their correspondence, though not precisely in the same order, to my moving to the West, only just effected, meeting and marrying Teri, in the last four years, my own still unresolved encounter with mortality in the form of atrial fibrillation and perhaps other heart problems as yet not understood. In short, though I’m almost twenty years older than you, we seem to have arrived at the same moment in our development (I was always a slow learner). But I would say that you’ve apparently come a good deal farther in some respects.
“I’m currently struggling to let go of fears and desires and self-delusions that have been making life a roller coaster these last months, as Teri and I endeavor to live in the same space for the first time, away from our usual respites and rituals, without blaming each other for the difficulties we bring on ourselves, trying instead to learn from suffering and confusion. I speak for myself, of course. Teri has her own demons, but I can testify to mine. To accept them and not cling to them has proved more than I’m capable of, especially in a climate of inevitable physical decline that comes with being seventy-nine years old.
“I was still playing basketball at 64, when my knee failed to respond to surgery and I had to give it up. Before that, like you, I loved to play at the local Y, or on the beach court in Manhattan Beach (LA), or at the gym at UC Santa Cruz, or anywhere there was someone with a ball ready for one-on-one. I think we share all the same feelings about the game—my passion.”
When I learned that Taylor was the literary executor of Paul Goodman, the writer most famous for his treatise Growing Up Absurd, a daring critique of American education first published in 1960, I wrote to Taylor that my one personal connection to Paul Goodman was that I started a commune in Santa Cruz in 1972 with the widow of Paul Goodman’s son, a woman named Epi. Here is part of Taylor’s reply.
“I don’t know which is the greater marvel, to find your new book Under the Table Books on my doorstep just when I was beginning to pine for it (having read Buddha In A Teacup more than once), or to find that you knew Epi! Indeed, it’s possible that you and I have met, not in a past life but in this one, back in 1971, for I was teaching at UC Santa Cruz from 1969 to 1971. When I rode my 450 Honda back to Buffalo in 1970 (June) I carried one provision for the road, a big bag I made of Epi’s granola recipe.”
As it happened, I was absent from Santa Cruz from 1969 to 1971, so Taylor and I did not tangle on the basketball court or eat vegetables and tofu with Epi or embark on our friendship forty years sooner.
“Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” — Henry James
Taylor began many of his letters to me with a response to my latest article or story, and I will sorely miss his insights and encouragement, as well as his matter-of-fact comparison of my stories and novels to the works of literary giants.
“I have to write again to tell you how much your story Balance affected me, and Teri, to whom I read it aloud. As you are well aware, it’s a kind of answer to Kafka—or, perhaps even more, to Camus, whose work I’ve gone back to recently. Of course Camus was not so despairing as Kafka, but I find him sometimes even more grim. Well, that’s neither here nor there, except to say that your story touches very deep themes of our times. What you add that Kafka and Camus seem never to have found is the way out of the maze. For all your hero’s abject acceptance off his meaningless life, he trusts the universe, and he surrenders to it. We see that happening—for his suffering and his discovery of meaning when all his anodynes are stripped away, activate what has been buried in him, call it his soul.”
“There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning.” — Christopher Morley
It was Taylor’s practice for many years to begin each day by writing an eight-line poem. Then at the end of the year he would select a handful of these morning musings to make into a volume of Morning Prayers to give as gifts to his many friends and family, including his five children and many grandchildren, each a joy to Taylor.
Some of my friends are sane
as a hammer, but they’re like me
and choose for their lovers someone
wild, solitary, plain crazy.
Why do we love these tortoises
and mountain deer bound to leave
us mad with grief sooner or later?
They’re the only ones still alive.
—Taylor Stoehr from Morning Prayers 2009
That poem proved prophetic, for Teri left Taylor when life in Otis proved too difficult for her, after which Taylor entered a time of profound grief and ill health that continued until his death. Yet despite his sorrow and anger about Teri leaving him when he most needed a loving helpmate, he continued to write letters full of insight and hope. Here is the end of one of the last letters I received from him.
“I continue to use my morning poems as lifeboat, and I got a boost from watching Groundhog Day on your recommendation. It was surprisingly inspiriting—I don’t quite know why. I think something about the rhythmic repetition rather than either plot or theme. Interesting how a form can get under one’s skin. I think that’s part of the power of your own writing—both Buddha and Under the Table. If I were going to write anything but poems the rest of my life, I’d imitate you in form. And maybe if I move to Maine I will do that. I wish I were already there!
“Meanwhile, I’ve returned to Joseph Campbell (Pathways to Bliss) and thinking about his effort to bring Eastern thought into some kind of alignment with both Christian thought and modern cultural eclecticism—our cultureless steam table. Here’s one result, today:
Despair is the other face of hope;
the loss of what might be
races ahead of what I want,
snatches it away from me.
Shall I therefore renounce desire
and settle for what is?
No! Let my heart burn in the fire,
I and hot be the ashes!
— Love Taylor”
Todd Walton’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.
Yes, this sounds a lot like the Taylor I knew. He will be missed.
Thanks for sharing this, Todd. Taylor had actually sent me copies of your newspapers a few years ago when I was embarking on freelance writing. He was a mentor and friend to me when I was in school and after I graduated. I wish I had known he was sick. It’s interesting to read his letters to you, same voice, but with me he always deflected from himself to hear ask about my life and my growth. Maybe it was my age. I can hear him in my head now, imagining what he would say about him dying. He was always playing intellectual matchmaker, which is one of the reasons he sent me your newspapers. “Email so and so and tell him Taylor sent you.” I first met him in an “American Romanticism” class, and later in his prison literature class, and finally a year of independent study my senior year (he was retiring, so I was one of his last projects I guess). He also introduced me to Ivan Illich, sensing my own view of the world, and he hit the nail on the head, Illich has since become a hero of mine. Here’s the “morning prayer” he sent me in his last letter a year ago:
Jesus said to the fishermen
drop your nets and follow me;
so in a trance that’s what I’ve done,
walking blind now that I see.
Or could this be the false messiah
that I am following?
Have I been climbing Mt. Moriah
with flashing knife and fire burning?
THE BINDING OF ISAAC
Here am I, says the patriarch
when his god speaks his name,
as if awakened in the dark
as was the first man, Adam.
And when on the mountainside
the boy breaks the silence,
again he answers Here am I,
the old man still in his trance.
Only when he has built the altar
and laid the sacrificial fire,
faggots his son has carried there,
does his mind begin to clear.
Almost too late, for the boy’s
throat lies under the knife
when from the thicket comes the noise,
the ram struggling for its life.
Todd – thank you so much for writing these reminiscences of Taylor, whom I knew and loved so deeply these past 20 years.
a question: I don’t understand the last lines of the poem above, “No! Let my heart burn in the fire,
I and hot be the ashes!
that is, I don’t follow the “I.” Is it “Aye”? a word missing? thanks very much for clarifying. And thanks again for what you’ve written here – gordon
Thank you for this, Todd. I was a friend of Taylor’s for decades, but because we communicated only by letter for many years, I didn’t know what happened in Otis and I thought I had offended him in some way with my last letter. So I am so sad to hear of his grief and loss, and also glad to know something about what his last months were like. It was a big mystery to me. He is a permanent fixture of my interior life.