The Gamut of A. MacLeish
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry THE GAMUT OF A. MACLEISH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In the decade since his death, Archibald MacLeish's poetic reputation has been in limbo. During the 1920shewas regarded by many...
...More important, he argued, was that the ideas and emotions were his...
...But it does explain what forces drove its subject to rack up a multitude of accomplishments in as many fields .MacLeish frequently referred to himself as "one half Puritan and the other half very dour Scot...
...Following Germany's defeat, Roosevelt rewarded MacLeish by naming him the Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural and Public Affairs...
...MacLeish's bravest act was his 1923 decision, in the face of parental disapproval, to abandon his flourishing law career and pursue his poetic interests full-time...
...MacLeish en-joyed the ambience of faculty life, and remained at the university for nearly 15 years, until age and health made it necessary for him to finally retire from the public scene...
...By putting his inner self-doubts on display in a long, Modernist poem, he hoped readers would deem him as serious and innovative as T.S...
...Although Ada had just achieved her American professional breakthrough, he forced her to abandon her singing to minister to his bruised ego...
...In the end, this American Life is the tragedy of a man too busy to suffer, or to know himself...
...Another part longed to serve the public and, admittedly, enjoy the eclat and political influence he saw fellow ''Bonesmen" from Yale achieving...
...Black-mur accused him of emotional striptease...
...Eliot or Ezra Pound...
...He became a prime mover, too, in the Office of Facts and Figures, a short-lived propaganda bureau, and in its successor, the Office of War Information...
...It is not simply as a poet that Archibald MacLeish deserves to be remembered," Donaldson insists...
...He was a devoted worker, a skillful exhorter and made good use of his gift for pastiche...
...Ada MacLeish, a talented musician, sang starring roles in contemporaries' operas...
...His bright, high-minded mother, in contrast, stressed cultural values...
...Contemporary verse ought to serve humankind, he decided, and he began to pal around with another Midwesterner, Carl Sandburg...
...By this stage, though, it is unlikely MacLeish knew how to be sincere anymore...
...MacLeish turned the other cheek: While he was Librarian of Congress, he appointed her Poetry Consultant...
...And it isn't for you...
...MacLeish had long ago resolved that a poem should indeed mean...
...Louise Bogan, unsympathetic to his dilemma, vituperatively denounced the compromise she perceived him as having made: "Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true blue,/Get the hell out of the way of the laurel...
...Robert Frost tartly pointed out that the sentiment pandered to the prevailing heresy of the late '50s and early '60s...
...Moreover, he appears never to have compromised his principles...
...In 1928, however, when the MacLeishes returned to win over the States, Archibald found success to be elusive...
...Whatever the case, in many respects the final career in Cambridge turned out to be the most gratifying...
...Scott Donaldson's Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (Houghton Mifflin, 622 pp., $35.00) cannot resolve the matter of literary merit...
...reestablished him in the public eye as a writer...
...MacLeish proved singularly effective at devising ways to boost the country's morale...
...Once again, his mother's concerns about being a good person triumphed over artistic integrity...
...frightened of the A-bomb, worried that God was dead...
...He left Washington upon the President's death, but continued to use his political connections to combat the rise of McCarthyism, to see to it that his old nemesis Pound was not convicted of treason and, in 1958, to ensure Pound's release from a psychiatric hospital...
...In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the advice of Felix Frankfurter and asked MacLeish to be the new Librarian of Congress...
...In addition, he puffed Sandburg's The People, Yes for New Masses, penned populist epics of his own, and dashed off antifascist radio plays, operas and ballets...
...Then he took up additional careers over the next 20 years and his verse began to seem subordinate to his new endeavors...
...He elevated the recently established position of Poetry Consultant from a fusty joke to a post distinguished poets could use to encourage and preserve the works of their colleagues...
...Former students...
...This only provoked salvos from every direction...
...Forced by the conventions of the period to give up her position as head of a women's college after her marriage, she concentrated on instilling her ideals in her children...
...The play harmonized with the tone of Cold War America...
...Edmund Wilson scored the most devastating broadside with "The Omelet of A. MacLeish," a cruel parody that incorporated all previous charges and ultimately damned its victim as "A clean and clever lad/who is doing/his best/to get on...
...Ostensibly, J.B...
...During the 1920shewas regarded by many anthologists and some critics as one of the rising stars of Modernism...
...After his government service in World War II, the press nevertheless hailed him as the U.S.' only poet-statesman, and by the late '50s his Broadway hit J.B...
...Now, as an elder statesman, he recast himself as a Biblical figure, a modern Job...
...The poet accepted...
...It is deathless...
...many of them now notable poets and novelists???recall his dignity, kindness and enthusiasm in assisting them...
...From France, conquering the poetry world looked as easy to him as winning football games for Yale, or graduating at the top of his class at Harvard Law School...
...it tends to view him as a hollow man, more dedicated to the limelight than to the arduous craft of composition...
...Maybe he never did...
...After reading Donaldson's explanation of what made MacLeish tick, I understand why I've always found the verse-play embarrassing...
...The literary community, though, has remained wary...
...questions the meaning of life in a universe where the controlling deity seems indifferent, and bad things happen to good people...
...She considered herself religious, but, in common with most American higher Protestants of the day, she associated spirituality primarily with ethics...
...These blows crippled MacLeish's self-confidence for a while...
...Other critics sneered that evidently he thought poems were meant to mean after all...
...the equivalent of Sunday painting...
...Certainly MacLeish encouraged his betters...
...They soon made a host of friends, including Sylvia Beach of the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and Ernest Hemingway...
...This mix of Pilgrim and pioneer immigrant, Donaldson believes, helped MacLeish become an archetypal success story, yet at the same time aroused in him equally archetypal anxieties...
...Eliot, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams...
...Yet for all his flirtation with socialism, his heart was really with the New Deal...
...Once the stock market crashed in 1929, dividends from Carson Pirie Scott could no longer support him and his family, so he began to write and edit for Henry Luce's Fortune (Luce, too, was a "Bonesman...
...But in J.B...
...Archie wrote the poems that continue to be anthologized, such as "The End of the World," "You, Andrew Marvell" and "Ars poetica," with its aphoristic conclusion, "A poem should not mean/but be...
...Fortunately, not long after he left Washington, Harvard invited him to teach creative writing...
...the business instinct MacLeish inherited from his paternal side was right on target...
...In the days when he considered himself a rising young Modernist, MacLeish had adopted the persona of a Shakespearean character...
...he wanted to express his ideas in a universal form...
...It was there that he wrote J.B...
...When he died in 1982, just short of his 90th birthday, obituaries spoke of him as the last survivor of a great generation, a peer of his contemporaries T.S...
...Instead, Conrad Aiken excoriated the work as mere pastiche...
...It is thus the agon the biographer explores...
...His drama's big message was (as he stated elsewhere), "Man is the animal who loves," and only that emotion can make living worthwhile...
...He truly felt he was serving Jeffersonian democracy, and his propaganda writings made millions think it a goal worth fighting and dying for...
...He could no longer feel satisfied merely sitting at home, tinkering with poetry...
...But the book's analysis of character precludes us from seeing this as a demonstration of selflessness, for we understand the compulsions...
...The spectacle of a man who led the charmed life he did posturing as the great sufferer is difficult to swallow...
...had trained him to crave activity, excitement, the stimulation of important associates...
...Despite the "warts and all" portrait, the biographer still wants us to admire a talented, generous man, committed to serving society and to aiding fellow writers...
...During the War, he provided safe harbor at the Library for such notable exiles as Thomas Mann and St.-John Perse...
...From his father, the wealthy founder of a prestigious Chicago department store chain, Carson Pirie Scott, Archibald learned to respect financial reward...
...His duties there forced him to cross swords with Ezra Pound, who was beginning his traitorous broadcasts from Italy on behalf of the Mussolini government...
...He brought with him "The Hamlet of A. MacLeish," a work written to prove himself more than an engaging lyricist...
...MacLeish was not a trained librarian, but he overhauled what had become an archaic institution...
...Soon, guilt over "not doing good" set in...
...That moral code would always war on some level with MacLeish's love of literature, also acquired from his mother...
...He and his wife chose to establish themselves among the expatriate colony of artists, musicians and writers in Paris...
...The "fear of God" transmuted itself into the guilt-ridden question: Do my actions benefit humanity...
...MacLeish tried to charm the opposition by confessing to an ear that picked up everything "like a tweed coat in November...
...Part of him wanted nothing so much as to be a first-rate Modernist poet...
...He temporarily convinced himself that the private voice of poetry represented bourgeois self-indulgence...
...My personal suspicion is that, in the course of his research, he realized his subject never quite cut it as a writer...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 7
