Yours Ever, Archie

READING THROUGH Harvard classical Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey, Archibald MecLeish was struck by this passage:

You speak with art but your intent is honest.

The Argive troubles, and your own troubles,

you told as a poet would, a man who know the world.

Wrote MacLeish, "The last line was like the bursting of a sun...Of course, I said. What else is a great poet! A man who knows the world." In his long and tremendously varied life (he died last spring just short of his ninetieth birthday) MacLeish knew as much of the world as anyone. He was a lawyer, soldier, outspoken journalist, and Harvard professor, a public servant whose posts included Librarian of Congress and Assistant Secretary of State, an advisor to Adlai Stevenson and F.D.R., and above all a playwright and a poet.

R.H. Winnick has collected an extensive selection of the letters of this extraordinary man. The impressive range of correspondents reflects MacLeish's wide-ranging interests and his knack for getting involved with the public of his time. He was particularly close to Amy Lowell, Dean Acheson, and Ernest Hemingway. He wrote often to Henry Luce, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot '10, and occasionally to Felix Frankfurter. J. Robert Oppenheimer and F.D.R. And the letters are full of MacLeish's articulate and often beautifully phrased observations on everything from political campaign strategies to the function of poetry. What emerges is a cohesive portrait of a powerful and flexible mind, of a man with human weaknesses and blind spots but also considerable generosity, wit, judgment and brilliance.

Winnick's introduction includes a brief but adequate summary biography of MacLeish, providing a necessary framework for the letters themselves. Arranged chronologically, they constitute a flowing narrative with only occasional gaps or seams. The story begins as young Archive leaves Glencoe, Illinois, to prep at Hotchkiss; a few letters from MacLeish's parents to the school's headmaster, the only ones in the collection not written by the poet himself, bear witness to their son's homesickness and general unhappiness there. In the letters he wrote at Yale and as a field artillery officer in France in 1918, a somewhat romantic earnestness begins to mingle with Ivy League wit. Though a little grating in tone, these letters provide some striking glimpses of nineteenth-century consciousness trying to make sense of the monstrous twentieth. "The thunderbolts of the King of Olympus were not more terrible." MacLeish writes, than his first view of modern warfare.

The major concern of MacLeish's young life was the incompatibility of his longing to write poetry with the necessity of eventually supporting himself and his future wife, Ada Hitchcock. He agonized over whether business, journalism, teaching, or law would be the best compromise, finally deciding to go to Harvard Law School, from which he graduated first in his class. But three years of promising law practice and lecturing in constitutional law at Harvard College left him unsatisfied; in a letter to his family he calls the law "a mockery of human ambition for reality." And as he wrote Yale and Harvard Law classmate Dean Acheson, law and poetry were for him "eternal irritant." So he set off for Europe to become a poet, reading and reeducating himself before starting to write, supported principally by his generous father.

It was a courageous and risky decision, for he had two children by this time, and the choice drew opposition and scorn from friends and family. Many years later he wrote Felix Frankfurter, "I think I was made to suffer as acutely over my decision to quit the law for poetry as it possible to make a man suffer over any decision it is that I gave up a career as a first-rate lawyer to become a third-rate poet."

MacLeish himself never regretted the decision, though there certainly were--and are--many who would call him a less than first-rate poet. His early work was justly criticized as overly derivative of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, a weakness MacLeish himself partially acknowledges. And though his voice became more distinctive in his poetry of the 1930s, even his best work was criticized as unoriginal. But the observations on poetry and criticism scattered through these letters indicate a coherent and convincing defense against such charges.

MacLeish took a more workmanlike view of the art of writing poetry than most of his contemporary poets and critics. He questioned what he saw as romantic and modernist assumptions that all art must be subjective and original, writing 1932 that the task of contemporary poets was to "fix momentarily or for many generations the aspect of the world we see. It is enough to do that and to do it with self-forgetfulness and humanity,"

MacLeish saw the work of the individual poet as part of a tradition of similar explorations into the same basic problems of human experience. Accordingly, his poetry reflects little of the stylistic experimentation prevalent in the work of contemporaries like Marianne Moore or e.e, cummings. He expresses this philosophy in a letter to Hemingway, arguing

that this business of trying to learn to write the somebody nobody had initiated yet in order not to write like anybody else is crap--that why in hell should we let ourselves get chased up into the reviews just because other people had farmed the good land before us--that the really great boys have been interested in writing poems not in writing poems differently--that why are we so scared of a cliche anyway.

SUCH REVEALING and useful statements of MacLeish's literary convictions are one great advantage of such a collection. Another is the consistent political stance that emerges. A staunch believer in representative democracy, MacLeish quickly identified threats to the ideals of the Republic he believed in, whether from the left or the right. In the early thirties he was one of the first to attack the Marxist positions fashionable among writers and critics. An early objector to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he drew McCarthy's public condemnation, though he never actually had to testify. He detested Communism as "rotten with the diseases from which all established police state suffer," but thought it should be combatted not through the reactionary defensiveness of the Eisenhower Administration, but by offering something better than communism to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, the nuggets are spread through an expanse of correspondence that sometimes becomes tedious. Winnick had access to all letters in MacLeish's possession (except those to and from his wife Ada) and he lists two pages of additional sources. No doubt he wanted to make a thorough and scholarly compilation, but the nearly 400 letters probably could have been cut by about a third without losing much. Nevertheless, it is well worth skimming through the housekeeping details, travel plans, and mundane dealings with editors to get to the plentiful meat.

The problem of editing is handled well through the section on MacLeish's years as a public servant in the forties. Just enough is given so that we get a sense of the scope of his massive re-organization of the Library of Congress, and of the variety of other duties he fulfilled in the Roosevelt administration, such as Assistant Secretary of State and director of the Office of Facts and Figures. There also comes some explanation of the convictions that motivated him to give up poetry for a time to serve his president and his country. He writes gratefully to Frankfurter. "You and you alone--and this is not the least of my reasons for loving you--have dared to believe that men do enter government...because they believe in the Republic and wish to serve it."

THE MOST DRAMATIC series of letters involves MacLeish's efforts to free Ezra Pound. In 1955 he visited Pound in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, where Pound had been held since the war as unfit to stand trial for treason. He writes to Hemingway, "What I saw made me sick and I made up my mind I wouldn't rest till he got out. Not only for his sake but for the good name of the country: after ten years it was beginning to look like persecution." For the next few years, MacLeish worked through his contacts in the Justice and State Departments and coordinated a successful joint request by Eliot, Hemingway, and Frost to drop the charges against Pound.

Pound had helped and advised MacLeish in his early years as a poet, and MacLeish remained loyal to him despite an apparently continuous stream of insults and attacks from Pound. Hemingway, too, tested his loyalty. A letter full of praise for Hemingway but with a few criticisms will be followed by another trying to assuage an apparently enraged and resentful Pappy. He writes to Pound after years of insults. "I send you my affectionate regards and to hell with you if you won't accept them." And to Hemingway. "So you go & compose a long letter full of various ways of saying that I'm a turd and all filled with expert blocks for undelivered blows. What the Hell! I never meant none of them things you say I couldn't have meant." The letters to Hemingway and Pound show the variety of MacLeish's voices. With Pound, he uses a crisp, precise telegraphese. Hemingway brings out a sporting and earthy bravado not fully expressed to anyone else.

From 1949 to 1962 MacLeish was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, where we see him inviting the likes of Acheson, James Reston, Frankfurter, and Oppenheimer to come chat with the students in Eliot House, where he served as master. During these years he wrote J. B., the work for which he is best remembered, a verse play based on the story of Job. And in one concurrent letter he states the problem J. B. addresses, an ancient human quandary made even more pressing by the painful events of the twentieth century--"the problem of making sense, making 'justice,' of a world in which men and women and children suffer and die by the millions in holocausts which seemingly take no account of humanity." MacLeish finds the resolution for the play and for himself neither in reason nor in religion. He writes that "the play's resolution is the only one humanity has ever found which I can accept for myself: the resolution in and through love...by loving life in spite of life."

The letters in this book deepen our understanding of that resolution. We see that MacLeish knew senseless suffering at first hand. He saw the agony of humanity in the World Wars, and the events of his personal life were often painful. His younger brother Kenneth, with whom he was very close, was killed in World War I, and MacLeish lost two sons, one as an infant and the other as a young man to cancer. But everything in these letters bears witness that he was nevertheless a great knower and lover of life, and that he believed this to be the root of his art. He writes his student Ilona Karmel that "heart alone has never made an artist as the sugary wrecks of millions upon millions of poems and paintings and works of music testify. But without heart, without the love of life, the hunger for life, was never anything that lived."

More vividly than a biography could, MacLeish's words show that unlike the tangled personal lives of so many artists, his own life was one of his works of art. To his friend Robert Frost he wrote this letter, one of the last Frost would have received:

Crossing the square this morning something made me remember that it is more than a year since I've seen you & therefore more than a year since I've had a chance to tell you with what delight & pride all of us who follow you so far behind watch your tremendous progress through time and place. Also to tell you with what gratitude I think of your unfailing generosity "and friendship to me. A good part of whatever confidence I have rests on that. This needs, of course, no answer. yours ever Archie