What makes a successful life? Whether we think about it or not, every day, we live out our answer to that question. Our choices become a story about what we value. Together, they make us who we are. In today’s episode, one poet’s iconoclastic answer to that question, and what you and I might learn from it about what it takes to live a good life. You’re listening to “I Heart This.” I’m Ben Lord. Let’s talk about what we love. 

Hook

Several times during my years as a high school science teacher, I walked into class, all fired up to teach mitosis, only to find a student in tears. She would see me come in and start wiping tears away A friend would put a reassuring hand on their shoulder, look at me seriously, and say, “She might need a minute Mr. Lord. Dartmouth just turned down her application.”

It can be easy for adults to roll their eyes at what seems like melodrama. But that’s only because they have forgotten just how monumental those rejection letters were. That student had lived half of her life working late into the evening to prove to some admissions committee that she was okay, that she was smart, that she was worth it. 

She’d lived the last few years in a fierce, usually unspoken, competition. Her friends all knew her class rank. Her parents had pushed her in subtle, or not so subtle, ways, until the idea that anything other than engineering or medicine or law would be a disappointment. All around her was a simple, high-stakes story. You either worked hard, got good grades, got into a “good” college, got a “good” job, and were set up with a nice house and a successful life OR you fell off the path somewhere and ended up flipping burgers. 

Struggle

If my tearful student was dramatic, it was because she was living a high-stakes drama. Life had confronted her with profound questions: What makes a successful life? And would she get to live one? They are questions worth asking. Each life has its own version of a rejection from Dartmouth.  

The cultural water in which we swim provides a kind of subliminal answer. In the small town in Montana, success is getting out. In the suburbs of New York and Boston, success is a lawn like a golf courses and a gleaming SUVs parked in front of a sprawling house with a pool and a hot tub in the backyard. On the internet, success is a certain number of Instagram followers. In science, success is a Nobel. 

Part of us knows that these external measures of success are often hollow. We’re supposed to say things like, “What really matters is that you’re happy.” or “that you’re making a difference to the world” or “What really matters is love.” But we don’t always act as if we believe that. And even if we do, then what do we make of ourselves when we are unhappy or stymied or lonely? Are we failures? 

The Turn 

By almost every conventional measure of success, the writer, Elizabeth Gilbert, was successful even before her blockbuster, Eat, Pray, Love. 

By her 35th birthday, her stories and articles had appeared in Esquire, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine. She’d published three books, each of which had been nominated for or won awards like the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award. She’d been so successful that when she pitched the idea of the travel memoir to Viking Press, they gave her a $200,000 advance to go eat, pray, and love her way around the world. Not bad for someone who hadn’t taken so much as an undergraduate writing class. 

After her travels, Elizabeth accepted a residency at the University of Tennessee to teach some undergraduate writing classes of her own and write the book that would become her most recognized bestseller. 

It was there that she learned about another, unrelated Gilbert, who had held the same residency just before her. Her students spoke reverently of Jack Gilbert, an old poet who had taught his undergraduate proteges almost nothing about literary agents or publication. Instead, he’d inspired them to lives of authenticity. He treated them with warmth and interest and care. He made them believe that the most beautiful poem they could write was a beautiful life. As he reportedly asked a graduate student, “Do you have the courage to be a poet?” He taught them to, as he says in his poem, “have the stubbornness to accept their gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.” 

Elizabeth had never heard of this enigmatic writer before. And as she began to read his poetry, she was so profoundly moved, that she had the words “stubborn gladness” tattooed on her arm. 

Jack Gilbert

Jack’s life was as surprising as his poetry. 

He flunked out of a Pittsburg high school and worked odd jobs until the University of Pittsburgh admitted him, seemingly by oversight. After graduation, Jack worked in Paris then Italy. He fell in love with an Italian girl, but her family sent him packing, convinced that he would never be able to provide for their daughter. In San Francisco, Jack hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac but considered himself too romantic to be a beat. It was there that he published his first book of poems at thirty-seven, to near instant acclaim. A kind of celebrity that just doesn’t happen in poetry. He was nominated for prizes and fellowships. He had a photo shoot in Vogue for Christ’s sake! That happens to no poets ever! And then Jack accepted a Guggenheim and went to Europe again … and disappeared. He wouldn’t publish another book for twenty year. “Fame is a lot of fun,” he later said, “but it’s not interesting … After about six months, I found it boring. There were so many things to do, to live.” 

Jack spent much of his life as a cash-strapped wanderer in Europe, writing poems that celebrated the places he visited and his passionate love affairs. He was never quite homeless, but seemed to care little for the comforts money could buy. He seldom gave readings, and in his 87 years he gave only two interviews and published only five books of poetry. 

Which is why Elizabeth Gilbert had no idea who he was until her students whispered to her about her iconoclastic predecessor as the writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee. When he died a few years later, even the publishers of some of the biggest literary journals in America had no idea who he was. 

Linda Gregg, one of Jack’s lovers, a fellow poet, and a lifelong friend said of him, “All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake—that the trees in bloom were almond trees—and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench.”

The Deep Dive

I learned about the life and poetry of Jack Gilbert from an essay by Elizabeth Gilbert wrote as a kind of ode to him and his work.

And I think there is something to learn from it about the nature of success. 

By any conventional standards, Jack Gilbert’s life was a failure. He had thrown away his shot at fame. He had no children. His romances all ended. The only woman he married died of cancer in her 30s. He lived most of his life in obscurity. When, the Paris Review’s Gordon Lish asked how his self-imposed exile had affected his career, Jack laughed and answered, “I suppose it’s been fatal, but I don’t really care!” 

And yet here is one of the most celebrated writers of our time extending to him a kind of breathless salute of gratitude. 

What would Jack Gilbert have to say to my students, wringing her hands over college admissions. Or to those of us chasing dreams of comfortable houses or high-paying jobs or likes and followers. What would he consider to be a successful life? 

Here are his own words. 

He says, 

I imagine the gods saying, We will

make it up to you. We will give you

three wishes, they say. 

Let me see

the squirrels again, I tell them.

Let me eat some of the great hog

stuffed and roasted on its giant spit

and put out, steaming, into the winter

of my neighborhood when I was usually

too broke to afford even the hundred grams

I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,

past the Street of the Moon

and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,

the Street of Silence and the Street

of the Little Pissing. 

We can give you

wisdom, they say in their rich voices.

Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,

the Algerian student with her huge eyes

who timidly invited me to her room

when I was too young and bewildered

that first year in Paris.

Let me at least fail at my life.

Think, they say patiently, we could

make you famous again. 

Let me fall

in love one last time, I beg them.

Teach me mortality, frighten me

into the present. Help me to find

the heft of these days. That the nights

will be full enough and my heart feral.

I fret about failure. And Jack, asks the gods, “Let me at least fail at my life.” I worry that I might squander an afternoon, Jack blows his one wish on squirrels. I get the sense that, for Jack, the only wasted life is the one that hasn’t been squandered. “Teach me mortality. Frighten me into the present.” 

In the 1987 film Wall Street, Michael Sheen plays an up-and-coming, high-powered day trader named Bud Fox. Bud is a man frantically chasing dollar signs. But to what end? In one scene, Bud confides in his girlfriend “I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I’m thirty and get out of this racket, I’ll be able to ride my motorcycle across China.” 

I am Bud. My student crushed by a Dartmouth rejection is Bud. This kind of tragedy is so common that it’s invisible. Kids tell themselves that if they just get through college, they can finally live their lives. Their parents tell themselves that if they can just max out their pension, they can travel when they retire. We need more stuff to make our lives comfortable. Then we buy a new security system to keep our stuff safe. We get up to the same routine day-after-day because we just have so many things to get done. We would let go on the dance floor, except that all those people are watching. We don’t let ourselves fall in love because of how much it would hurt in the end.

Jack knew that it hurt too. He wasn’t naive. He was no stranger to loss. 

When his wife, Michiko, died

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment crying hard,

searching for my wife’s hair.

For two months got them from  the drain,

the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after other Japanese women came

there was no way to be sure which were

hers and I stopped.  A year later,

repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find

this long black hair tangled in the dirt.

And, yet, what does Jack beg the gods? Let me fall in love one last time. 

Bud Fox says, “If I can make a bundle and get out of this racket …” and  Jack says, “What are you waiting for, man? Go now!” 

Do you know what success is? I think Jack would ask if that was even the right question. I think that if he were in my classroom the day rejection came raining down on one student’s broken heart he wouldn’t ask whether she wanted a pass to the guidance counselor, like I did. I think he’d ask instead, “Do you have the courage to live all the misery and the joy–to take in your only and all-too-brief life. Or as one commentator summed up Jack’s attitude, “The world is terrible AND wonderful, and our obligation is to joy.”

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Thank you, Jack, for your poems, your example, and your stubborn gladness.