’’And what became of him?” MacLeish asked of Hemingway in his 1948 poem “Years of the Dog,” and answered: “Fame became of him.” Whether it was Hemingway’s meteoric rise to fame while MacLeish’s own career as a poet was having some difficulty getting off the ground, or Hemingway’s disapproving response when, in October 1929, MacLeish accepted a job as a writer on Fortune, Henry Luce’s new business magazine, or the natural antagonism of two strong and competitive egos, it is difficult to say. The letters they exchanged, beginning in the spring of 1926, suggest a relationship that was robust, unguarded, deeply affectionate-and doomed. MacLeish told Carlos Baker that from their first meeting in the summer of 1924 until the MacLeishes returned to the States in 1928, Hemingway was as close to Archie (and Ada) Macleish as he was to any other friend. MacLeish did not meet Pound until 1939 and saw him, I believe, only once thereafter and though they exchanged dozens of letters during the fifties, they could not be called friends, nor, I think, could MacLeish and Eliot. It was, as these letters show, an often thankless-if ultimately rewarding-job. But the stage manager of the behind-the-scenes drama that resulted in Pound’s release was MacLeish. Pound had other champions-including Ernest Hemingway, T.S. As Librarian of Congress, as a Roosevelt insider, and as a former practicing lawyer, MacLeish was in a good position to help Pound, and help him he did, beginning the day after Pound’s 1943 indictment for treason.
Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, where-who does not know the story?-Pound was confined thirteen years for his propaganda broadcasts over Radio Rome during World War U. Later, as several of these letters indicate, MacLeish was instrumental in obtaining Pound’s release from St. Pound, had used Persia in the Cantos he advised, in all seriousness, that MacLeish find a culture to write about that no one else had taken. Another of the poems Pound rejected became one of MacLeish’s best known: “You, Andrew Marvell.” Pound complained, in rejecting it, that he. He sent Pound ’’Bleheris,” “Broken Promise, ” and several other poems, all of which Pound rejected on the grounds that they were too self-consciously poetic and, in some instances, too obviously derivative-of Ezra Pound. With Ezra Pound, who, as of late 1926, was just starting The Exile, MacLeish had less success. MacLeish ) -but he did accept and publish, in April 1926, MacLeish’s poem beginning “No lamp has ever shown us where to look,” and, the following year, “Land’s End/For Adrienne Monnier. ”) Eliot, who was editingThe New Criterion, did not take the long poem MacLeish enclosed with his letter-which may have been ’ ’Einstein” or perhaps ’ ’Bleheris” (a section of The Hamlet of A. When they had called at the bank where Eliot was employed, they had been informed by a bank manager that Mr. (In May 1924 MacLeish and his poet-friend Phelps Putnam had journeyed to London from France in hopes of seeing the reclusive Eliot. Eliot, whose poems-especially The Waste Land (1922) -had made, as MacLeish knew only too well, a rather too deep impression on his own work. In the first of these letters, written some two-and-a-half years after their arrival abroad, MacLeish is try-ing-not for the first time-to make the acquaintance of T.S.
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There, MacLeish planned to master the art of poetry, while Ada, a talented con-cert soprano, undertook a serious, if less than full-time, career as a professional singer. In the fall of 1923 Macleish took his wife, Ada, and their two children to France, where, in those days, American dollars enabled one to live on next to nothing. The excerpt is a good introduction to the volume of letters and the latter (if, as its editor, I may be permitted to say so) is an even better introduction to MacLeish’s long and extraordinarily varied life. The letters in this excerpt span forty-two years those in the book, seventy-five. The letters that follow, twenty-five or so in all, have been selected from Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 to 1982, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Company later this year. In his poems, essays, speeches, interviews, and letters, as well as in the minds of generations of colleagues, students, and friends, he had left a presence that will also be hard to get rid of. He had left his mark on the world in countless ways-as a lawyer, a journalist, a public servant, a teacher-but chiefly as a poet. He had accomplished what Robert Frost once said it was his hope to accomplish: he had written a few poems it will be hard to get rid of. Archibald MacLeish died just two-and-a-half weeks before May 7, 1982, when he would have celebrated his ninetieth birthday.
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