Issue 58, Summer 1974
Archibald MacLeish winters in Antigua, but the bearable portion of the year finds him at Uphill Farm, a country place in Conway, Massachusetts, bought in the twenties on the MacLeishes’ return from Europe. The region has meaning for him because his Connecticut Yankee mother’s family, the Hillards, “knew these hills well.” His Hillard grandfather was a Congregational minister who worked his way north up the Connecticut River in the years of the Civil War, fighting with his deacons—many of whom were Copperheads—and finally ending his journey in the 1880s when he crossed the Massachusetts state line and eventually settled in Conway itself. The poet greets his guests in countryman clothes—fine confident head, a manner of kindly command—and leads the way to the pool. The impression everywhere—sharpest in MacLeish’s style of talk, but no less evident in the domestic arrangements—is of a world well managed. MacLeish is a short man with bearing—powerful shoulders give good drive to his crawl in the pool. There are drinks outside, soufflé, salad, and Riesling in a dining room with a mountain view, and some jokes with Mrs. MacLeish, whose voice Joyce praised, about certain of her husband’s poems making her out to be U.S. Champion Homemaker and Breadbaker and omitting she sings Poulenc. MacLeish laughs hardest at himself and his wife takes back her complaint charmingly: “I never minded at all.” Thereafter a descent down stone stairs to the music room—past a wall of framed honorary degrees, pictures of treasured friends (Felix Frankfurter, for one), a huge photo of the moon. The poet speaks graciously of his hope that someday there’ll be a conversation, not just a tape, and then it’s time to work.
INTERVIEWER
Can we start outside the gates and work in? You’re seen as a writer with unusual experience of the public world—perhaps as a “public man.” Is A. MacLeish as a public man recognizable to you?
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
No, but I’ve had him pointed out to me. I suppose all writers have that experience sooner or later—the double personality—the “other” you’re supposed to be and can’t remember ever having met. Except that in this case the problem is complicated by the fact that those who see me as a “public man” don’t always mean it kindly. There are those on the fringes of the art who think that poetry and the public world should be mutually exclusive—as though poets were the internists of the profession and should stick to their bowels. I’ve been hearing from them for some time. After my tour of public duty during the Second World War, I published a poem called “Actfive,” which was a kind of report on the look and feel of things “out there.” Random House published it, and before it appeared Bob Linscott, then an editor at Random House, warned me that I was to be disciplined as a renegade. I didn’t believe him, but so it turned out. There were no reviews. There were even letters to the Times about there being no reviews.
INTERVIEWER
The silence meant somebody thought the “public man” thing had violated the poet?
MACLEISH
Something like that. Though the poem itself, if they had read it, wouldn’t have given them much comfort. I suppose it is now the most frequently reprinted—quoted from—of my books. No, it was the usual ideological nonsense: the usual nonsense to which ideology leads unthinking men—even unthinking critics. I don’t know how it was with Terence, to whom nothing human was indifferent, but I do know how it is with the practice of the art of poetry. You can’t cut off a part of human life by critical fiat and expect your poets to be whole. Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive and a poet isn’t alive by quarter-acres or front feet. He’s alive as a man. With a world to live in. No poet down to very recent times—not even the privatest, the most confessional—ever doubted that. And the greatest of recent poets is the most convincing proof that the old poets were right. It was when Yeats broke through the fences around the Lake Isle of Innisfree and took to ranging the public world of Ireland that he became what he became. Discovering his time he discovered himself. And what was true for Yeats in 1914 is even truer for us in the angry and bewildered world we live in. Take away a poet’s public life by critical edict in a time like ours and what do you leave him? Not, certainly, himself.
INTERVIEWER
But staying in touch with the whole self is tough work, isn’t it, if you’re trying to make reasonable words in the media about Apollo 8 or the Pentagon Papers? You don’t feel squeezed?
MACLEISH
Tougher, you mean, than keeping in touch with the whole self when you’re writing about a private part of your experience? It isn’t the subject that betrays a writer, but the way he takes the subject. Rhetoric, in the bad sense of that abused word, is just as bad in confessional writing as it is out in the open air. What matters in either case is the truth of the feeling—the feel of the truth. If you can break through the confusion of words about a political crisis like the Pentagon Papers to the human fact—such as the human reality of an attorney general’s behavior—you have written the experience. And the fact that the writing appears in The New York Times won’t change that fact for better or worse. Journalism also has its uses—and to poets as well as to journalists. You spoke of the Apollo flight—the first circumnavigation of the moon—the one that produced that now familiar, but still miraculous, photograph of the earth seen off beyond the threshold of the moon . . . “small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.” This was one of the great revolutionary moments of the human consciousness, but the moment was not explicit in the photograph nor in the newspaper accounts of the voyage. Only the imagination could recognize it—make imaginative sense of it. Are we seriously to be told that the imagination has no role to play here because the event is in the newspapers? Or is it the publication in the newspapers of the imaginative labor which offends?
INTERVIEWER
The way the writer “takes the subject”—that depends a lot on what the writer knows about it, right? How far around and in he’s been? Can I ask about the uses of public range, social reference, all that? Is there a way of getting beyond the cliché about “the value of the experience,” saying something true about how general knowledge ought to sit in a writer?
MACLEISH
I don’t know that anything as essential as experience can ever be a cliché, even when parroted in the way you mean. You have to live to write in more senses than one, and no one can ever live enough—there will always be cracks in the knowledge and they will always show. But we have been talking about this rather factitious distinction between the public world and the private world, and that does raise the question of knowledge of the public world. Well, there is one thing you can say about that, because poetry has said it over and over from the first beginnings. One of the dimensions of great poetry—one of the dimensions by which poetry becomes great—is precisely the public dimension: that vast landscape off beyond—the human background, total human background—what we call “the world.” It is there in Shakespeare: Even in Hamlet, the most inward of the great plays, Denmark is behind the scene—beyond the garden where the king is murdered. And so too, obviously, of Dante: Dante’s Hell is under Italy—actual Italy, historic Italy. As Homer’s Troy, Homer’s Aegean, contains the poems. So Tu Fu’s China. So the Thebes of Oedipus. Oedipus Rex is, I suppose, by common agreement one of the keys to the secret human heart, but what would the play be without Thebes?
The Greeks regarded what we call “public” experience as part of human experience. That’s what a man was: He was a member of his city. And if he was a poet he was a poet who was a member of his city. This is what gives such ground and scope and humanity to Greek poetry at its greatest. The Greek poets knew what a city was to them—what a war was, a people. They knew. Compare them with Pound. I have great admiration for Pound: He is aware of the city, of the well-ordered state, of the long tradition—the enduring ethic. But he doesn’t know. He hasn’t been there. And it shows. Carl Sandburg was one of the few contemporary poets who was able to take the state in his stride. Perhaps he took it in too easy a stride: Edmund Wilson thought so—you remember his contemptuous dismissal. But Carl will have the last word there. This is perhaps one way of answering the question: that a man who excludes, who really—not perhaps willfully or explicitly but by subconscious habit, by conforming unthinkingly to the current fashion—excludes the public part of his experience is apt to end up finding himself excluded. We talk about the play within the play: there is also a play without the play—which contains everything.
INTERVIEWER
What about the question of work life and art life—say in Stevens? Poetry here, business there. Aren’t we headed into a time when there’s a demand that a writer get himself wholly together—mean it across the board? He’ll be hung for fraud if he finds a condition of marginality acceptable for poetry.
MACLEISH
Wallace Stevens “meant it”: the fact that he had a living to earn affected that no more than it affected Shakespeare. Stevens was the head, as I understood it, of the whole trial operation of the Hartford Accident, with lawyers all over the country trying cases for him. He tried very few cases himself, but he oversaw the trying of cases and was helpful and very intelligent, a good lawyer and useful and a well-paid officer of the Hartford Accident. I think very well paid. In other words, his life, his professional life, what you called his work-life, was successful. His poetry was something else. The trying of cases, the defending of who ran over a child and so forth, never, as such, enters his poetry. It might have if he had had a little streak of Masters in him. It might have, but it didn’t. His metaphysical mind escaped—and escaped is the right word—escaped out of Hartford Accident into those deeper and deeper examinations of the metaphysical universe. So that the question with Stevens isn’t really a question of public against private because his business life was private also. I don’t think he was ever interested in a political question in his life. I never heard him mention one. But he is perfect example—perhaps the most successful and admirable example—of a man who made a go of poetry and business. Your word is the right one. Poetry and business in the modern world. I never made a go of it. I tried everything from the law through journalism and government service to teaching at Harvard, and for each one I had to pay a price. Stevens made the art and the work go together. He fitted them together. He had, as you say, carefully planned work habits. Does this have anything to do with the “marginality” of poetry in contemporary life? I don’t think so. I think it has to do with the “marginality” of poetry in Stevens’s life. In terms of the hours of his life, poetry was necessarily pushed to the margin. But in the margin it was his life. And it was superb poetry. Not in a relative sense: superb as poetry. Nothing else matters. Nothing matters with any man but the work. The rest is biography.