Archibald MacLeish: An American Life

By Scott Donaldson

“Poet, lawyer, Librarian of Congress, statesman, and professor, MacLeish (1892–1982) revived the Homeric ideal of a poet as “a man in the world.” In this authorized and idealized biography, his only flaws are a demanding nature, many discreet infidelities, and lack of interest in his children. Fortunately, Donaldson . . . is as successful in celebrating MacLeish’s strengths as he has been in tracing the demons that destroyed Cheever . . . Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Born into a wealthy Illinois family, MacLeish attended Yale and Harvard Law, married his childhood sweetheart, and moved to Paris, where he joined the circle around Joyce and Hemingway (his lifelong friend) and, sustained by family resources, devoted himself to poetry. Returning to N.Y.C., he spent the 30’s editing and writing for Fortune magazine while producing radio and stage plays (starring the young Orson Welles) that expressed his liberal politics. In the 40’s, MacLeish served as the first Librarian of Congress, then as Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs, and, after helping to write the preamble to the UN Charter, worked for UNESCO. Even after accepting a Harvard professorship in 1946, he remained a mediator between the worlds of art and of public life, urging the release of Ezra Pound from his mental asylum and publishing, the day after the first moon landing, a celebratory poem on the front page of The New York Times. MacLeish’s last years were spent lecturing, traveling, gathering prizes, entertaining friends (including Richard Burton and Liz Taylor), and writing dramas, as well as private but unrevealing poems about old age, his various affairs, and the bliss he found in his marriage. For such a long and spectacular life, this is a spare and unpretentious biography, like MacLeish’s verse. Donaldson is informed, respectful, and comfortable with the many different roles his subject played. He tastefully draws on unpublished verse to illuminate the shadows—but mostly, like MacLeish himself, stays in the light.” —Library Journal
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504029940

Scott Donaldson

Scott Donaldson is a former triathlete, Coast-to-Coast competitor, Ironman coach, mentor and competitor in a myriad of sports. He began as a swimmer to strengthen his lungs, after having life-threatening asthma as a child. Scott's son also has asthma, and his father died aged 42 from a heart attack, and so Scott has made fitness a life priority. Formerly from Rotorua, Donaldson moved to Coffs Harbour in Australia to organise the campaign to cross the Tasman solo in a kayak.

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Preface

Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) was one of the most remarkable Americans of his time. The essence of the man was his multiplicity. Even in this heyday of second and third careers, it is daunting to consider that MacLeish undertook, and mastered, half a dozen: lawyer, journalist, librarian of Congress, assistant secretary of state and spokesman for the republic, teacher, playwright, and above all poet. MacLeish won three Pulitzer Prizes, and is the only American to have been awarded both the National Medal for Literature and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His life was driven by two powerful and sometimes competing goals: he wanted to write great poetry, and he wanted to advance great causes. The dichotomy was exemplified in MacLeish’s two longest friendships—with Ernest Hemingway, arguably the nation’s preeminent literary stylist of the twentieth century, and with Dean Acheson, arguably the leading contributor to American foreign policy in the same period.

From the beginning of my more or less adult life, MacLeish wrote Felix Frankfurter in May 1939, I have been plagued by the fact that I seem to be able to do more or less well things which don’t commonly go together. At Yale, for example, he played on the football team and edited the Yale Lit. Whatever he set his mind to, he succeeded at. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He led his class at Harvard Law. Archie didn’t know how to do anything poorly, historian John Conway said.

Behind his accomplishments lay the genetic and environmental influence of MacLeish’s heritage. His remote and forbidding father, Andrew, was a native Scotsman who fashioned a highly successful career in merchandising. Andrew MacLeish was in his mid-fifties when Archie, the second child of his third marriage, was born. He did not pay much attention to the lad. Like his siblings, Archie was brought up by his mother, Martha Hillard MacLeish, an educator who had been president of Rockford Seminary before her marriage, and a woman of principle whose American roots stretched back to Puritan times. At his mother’s knee, the boy learned that it was his duty to make a difference, to serve the public good. If he had followed his inclinations, he might have become a poet only. Instead he rushed to confront life’s challenges in order to present another glittering prize to his father’s notice and to fulfill the sense of responsibility his mother instilled in him. Among the assets Archie brought to his endeavors were a quick mind, an extraordinary felicity of language, and a forward-looking turn-of-the-century middle-western optimism.

With his characteristic buoyancy, it did not seem right to MacLeish that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. There was plenty of good to be done on this earth, never mind heaven. In his notebooks for 1923, the year in which he gave up the law and sailed to Paris to make himself a poet, he recorded George Santayana’s observation that the mainspring of human activity lay in the discrepancy between the ideal and the real. Since the discrepancy could not be obliterated, Santayana felt, the ideal itself was nothing and the process of trying to reach it everything. This, MacLeish commented, is to attach supreme importance to the precipitate of action in the nature of man and to make the fulfillment of the individual life infinitely superior to the reform of evil, the conquest of nature, or the salvation of society. MacLeish did not share Santayana’s philosophical pessimism, but he believed with all his heart in the life of action he espoused. In fact he was determined to be both a poet and a man of action, and this joint ambition sometimes rubbed against the grain of public opinion.

One problem was that in the United States there was no traditional career path combining literature with the commonweal. There were a few precedents, of course, but among those who practiced letters first and statecraft second, only James Russell Lowell, who was ambassador to Great Britain, comes immediately to mind as succeeding in both fields. Certainly no other well-known American writer rose as high in service to his country as did MacLeish. In other countries such writer-statesmen were far more common. Among them were some of the poets MacLeish most admired: William Butler Yeats, St.-John Perse, and George Seferis.

Sitting on the beach of Bermuda’s south shore in 1979, MacLeish came across a passage in book 11 of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey—the description of Homer as a poet, a man who knows the world—which summed up his objectives as a poet and public man. He had been everywhere: Europe, Persia, Mexico, Japan, South America. He had fought in one war, prepared the nation for the next, and assisted in making the peace. He numbered among his friends such men as Hemingway, Acheson, Frankfurter, Henry Luce, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Mark Van Doren. Who else knew the world as well as he?

From the 1930s on, MacLeish’s career led him to make public pronouncements on the principal issues of the time. Invariably, and often stridently, he spoke out on the side of human liberty, and he made enemies into the bargain. From the right, Senator Joseph McCarthy attacked him on nationwide television, and his FBI file ran to over six hundred pages. From the left, literary critics attacked him for selling out to the establishment. In the most honorable way possible, it was true. During 1939–1945, while he was in Washington, MacLeish invested almost all of his energies in public causes—restructuring the Library of Congress, making the case for a war against fascism, directing the flow of information during the conflict, and building a consensus for the United Nations and for UNESCO, all of these tasks assigned to him by President Roosevelt. Often in those years he felt himself to be speaking for the nation, never more so than when he composed the brief and eloquent message to the American people after Roosevelt’s death.

Fifty years ago, so renowned a critic as Cleanth Brooks included MacLeish in a triumvirate of poets—Frost, MacLeish, and Auden—whose work in the modern tradition promised to last. Some, at the time, thought him the most important American poet alive. That has changed, drastically. Now he is remembered only for a few widely anthologized poems and as the author of J.B., his reworking of the story of Job for the Broadway stage. In the laudable effort to widen and diversify the canon of American literature, the fact is sometimes overlooked that anthologies still tend to have the same number of pages and courses in literature the same number of weeks, so that for each writer admitted to the canon, another is liable to be dismissed. MacLeish is conspicuous among those who have been decanonized, often for the wrong reasons. His ease of movement in the corridors of power has worked against him, as has his position as fortune’s darling, spoiled by the accidental good luck of birth and education and connections. The critic William Barrett began his 1947 article on MacLeish with these words: ‘It is a difficult thing to be an American,’ said Archibald MacLeish, somewhere around 1929 if I remember rightly, a good while before he had discovered how easy it is to be an Under-Secretary of State. Barrett did not remember rightly, except about the date of American Letter, the 1929 poem dedicated to Gerald Murphy, in which MacLeish utters his ambivalent farewell to Europe. But what the poem says is, It is a strange thing to be an American, not a difficult one. The change of adjective conveniently enables the critic to belittle MacLeish’s service in the Department of State—though not as undersecretary—as easy. The sentence reeks with the odor of sour grapes, as do many of the diatribes against his work during and after World War II.

Another handicap MacLeish labored under was that he did not at all fit the conventional image of the poet. Poets in our society are supposed to be poor, lonely, and alienated. MacLeish was none of these. Even when he most bitterly fought the forces of repression—and he was never loath to fight—he did so not as an outsider but from within the context of the nation’s guiding principles. He proved that a poet did not have to be wild, and that discipline was as efficacious in that career as in any other. He showed that a poet could participate in the world’s work, and even write about it.

Moreover, in a field notorious for backbiting, MacLeish was generous to other poets, whether established or in the early stages of their development. More than anyone else, he was responsible for securing the release of Ezra Pound from confinement in Saint Elizabeths Hospital, despite the fact that Pound regularly denigrated both him and his poetry. As instructor of Harvard’s English S class for the best and brightest of its young writers, he was instrumental in launching, and later in advancing, the careers of many talented aftercomers. Nor did rivalrous feelings prevent him from forming close friendships with poets such as Carl Sandburg, Mark Van Doren, and Richard Wilbur. It was not that Archie was untouched by the lust for fame. He yearned for recognition and enjoyed his share of it during his ninety years. Yet in the long run he knew that personal fame was fleeting. What will our reputations be? he asks rhetorically in Poetical Remains, and a few lines later answers the question:

We leave behind

An anthological rubble:

Mind mingled with mind,

Odd and even coupled.

With Frost, he was willing to rest content in the hope that some of his poems might prove hard to get rid of and so take their place in the company—the rubble—of what other writers had left behind. Joining that company was what mattered, and the judgment would be long in coming. Meanwhile, why begrudge anyone else an opportunity to submit his or her best to the bar?

MacLeish did not lead his life with an eye cocked on posterity, however. He was too busily involved with his own time for that. As he declared in Sentiments for a Dedication, I speak to my own time, / To no time after. It is in this sense that his life takes on a significance beyond the scope of his accomplishments, for MacLeish was not only an extraordinary but also a representative man, who repeatedly emerged at history’s crisis points. It is supposed to be true that simply showing up is at least half of success. Archie showed up. He was in Paris in the twenties, during the artistic ferment of that decade. He was in New York in the thirties on the front lines of political discontent, a star at Luce’s Fortune while deploring the greed and incompetence of capitalists in his poetry. He was in Washington in the forties, working long and hard in the battle for the survival and spread of democracy. He was at Harvard in the fifties, defending the academy against the witch-hunting of demagogues. As his daughter, Mimi, observed, much of her father’s success could be traced to his knack for turning up in the right place at the right time.

Along the way he was assailed for changing his coloration to suit the climate of the period. Archibald MacLeish is our poetic weathercock, Hyatt Waggoner wrote of him. A glance at his work in any decade will tell us which way the wind of thought and feeling and poetic fashion was blowing. He was an Aeolian harp, a friend remarked, sounding enchanting notes but with a melody ever changing. There was much truth in these metaphors. MacLeish’s poetry did change tremendously over time, from the early musical lyricism he is best known for to the polemical verse of the thirties to the postwar philosophical considerations on to the moving simplicity of the badly undervalued late poems. Similarly, his political position shifted from the far left to a more conventional liberalism, so that he came under fire both from the communists, who had once courted him as a potential figurehead, and from the communist-hunters, who thought they detected in his associations the telltale signs of disloyalty to, or at least disagreement with, the American way as they conceived of it. Yet Archie’s underlying convictions never altered. He held to the end his faith in the individual human being and his insistence that freedom of thought and expression should not be compromised for any purpose.

In a letter to Iris Origo, MacLeish summarized the challenge of all biographers. We can set down, he wrote, "a record of happenings which seem to have a shape or meaning: expectation, achievement, defeat, death; a drama with a beginning, a middle and an end; a drama often interesting, fascinating, moving; but is that a life or only a Life?" Trying to capture MacLeish’s life has proved especially difficult, for several reasons. He pursued so many different activities that an ideal chronicler should understand in depth the law, literary modernism, magazine journalism, librarianship, presidential politics, foreign policy, the theater, and higher education. Furthermore, to write of MacLeish’s career, one should possess a solid comprehension of twentieth-century American history, for he reflected the current of history as he ran his course. He came out of a world whose attitudes about what amounted to a good and useful life and how children should be raised, for example, sound overly rigorous and demanding a hundred years later. He grew up with the prejudices of his class, and fought them down with the aid of the counterinfluence exerted by a mother far in advance of her time. A consummate biographer should also have command of the ambience of those places that meant most to MacLeish: not only the public Paris and Washington and New York and Boston but the manor house above Lake Michigan in the Glencoe of his childhood and Uphill Farm in the beloved Conway of his mature years. To do justice to MacLeish, one would have to be as much a polymath as the man himself. Obviously no such creature exists. You do the best you can.

Then, too, MacLeish was a circumspect man, reluctant to discuss the dynamics of his family life, other than to celebrate in general terms his sixty-five-year marriage to Ada Hitchcock, and careful to paper over his occasional love affairs. Some things were not to be spoken of. Two of his friends at Harvard, W. Jackson Bate and John Finley, both characterized him as having an unusually rounded personality, hard to get hold of. He was genial Archie to almost everyone who knew him, yet revealing of himself to almost no one.

And yet MacLeish left behind a wealth of material. The paper trail is so deep, in fact, that the major decisions in writing this book have had to do with what to keep in among the many scraps of evidence that had to be left out. R. H. Winnick, who completed Lawrance Thompson’s biography of Robert Frost in 1976 and worked on an authorized MacLeish biography from 1978 into the mid-1980s (when growing professional responsibilities forced him to put it aside), recorded more than a hundred hours of taped interviews with Archie, members of his family, friends, and associates. Several of the people he interviewed are no longer alive. Winnick also located more than a thousand letters, the best of them collected in his 1983 book, Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907–1982. Independently, Bernard A. Drabeck and Helen E. Ellis of Greenfield Community College interviewed MacLeish over a period of five years, from 1976 to 1981, and published the results in Archibald MacLeish: Reflections (1986). In 1987 I contracted with Houghton Mifflin to put these fragments in order and reconstruct a life as best I could. Naturally I continued to conduct interviews and to unearth letters and other writings of MacLeish, but without the Winnick archive to build upon, this book would not have been possible, and his advice has been invaluable during my five-year labor of research and writing.

The single greatest resource, of course, consisted of MacLeish’s writing, published and unpublished. The kernel of his emotional life lies embedded in his poems, which is why this biography is both a life story and a selective anthology. Facts any diligent biographer can assemble and present; but the poems give coherence to those facts. And in his unpublished poems, particularly, Archie makes revelations and confessions that as a gentleman of the old school he could not bring himself to speak of publicly. These poems, though unpublished, were preserved in notebooks, as if Archie wanted to be found out in those moments of love and anger and resentment when he was most nakedly himself. The poetry, in short, puts flesh on the skeleton of an otherwise routine Life.

SCOTT DONALDSON

Williamsburg, Virginia

1

BEGINNINGS

A Foreign Potentate

The boy Archie idled the summer day away. Drifting between daydream and sensation, he lay on his back for hours of the morning, staring up into the stillness of the tall oak trees until it seemed that everything—the little white butterflies, the insects in the grass—was drawn into and subsumed by that stillness. The boy did not think; he remembered nothing. He felt at the beginning of things, at the center of the universe. He felt, almost, as if he did not exist. With the afternoon came the hot west wind, parching the lawn, parching the glistening metallic oak leaves, plunging over the clay bluff to Lake Michigan below, dragging its green and purple shadows out to the deep blue of the horizon. The wind came from thousands of miles away, Archie’s father had told him; over the prairies, over the grass and the corn and the deserts where the skulls of buffalo shone white by the dry creeks. The boy—he must have been six, and so it was 1898—watched from the bluff as a high-shouldered congregation of sandpipers huddled to scavenge what washed ashore. He chewed the tender spears of the stiff grass. He climbed out on the tree the Indians had bent low a hundred years before. Then the jays began to riot in anticipation of the thunderstorm, and he went inside.

The great house—his father had named it Craigie Lea, after a Scottish ballad—was a mansion by the standards of Glencoe, but Archie knew nothing of that yet. What he did know was that the couch cover from Persia smelled of strange smoke and that the leather seat of his chair had a bitter smell at prayers and the table knives were silver with smooth handles and that he could easily turn the brass knob of the side door. On the wall was a picture of an empty boat pulled up on the beach of a lake among birch trees. The oars were in the boat, and it seemed to the boy that the people no longer in the boat were far away and sad like the old letters in the drawer of the cedar room desk.

And then it was evening, for the storm had come and gone and his father had come home from the store in Chicago on the 5:15 train and the coachman had picked him up and Archie could hear the carriage with its two bouncing bays coming down the road and—he did not know why—he went out the side door and his father put his head out of the window of the carriage, beamed down at the boy, the second son of his third marriage, and said, Hello, Brownie, for Archie had his mother’s deep brown eyes.

It was not much of a memory, but Archie—Archibald MacLeish, for that is who he was to become—carried it with him all his days. Brownie, he recalled in his eighties. I’ll never forget being called that. It was the one time, the first and last and only time, that he got from his father a really spontaneous gesture of affection. At that moment, as never else, he felt sure of his father’s love.

A native Scotsman, Andrew MacLeish was sixty on that summer evening, and in part it was his age that kept a barrier between father and son. My father came from a very old country in the north and far away, Archie remembered, and he belonged to an old strange race, the race older than any other. He did not talk of his country but he sang bits of songs with words he said no one could understand any more. When he spoke to his collies they crawled with bellies on the ground. Andrew was a vigorous sixty-year-old; he was to live, like his son, into his ninetieth year. He was impressive, too: six feet tall, well built, and handsome, with a full but neatly trimmed beard that made kissing him at Christmas—according to one grandchild—like kissing shredded wheat. Such ceremonial displays were infrequent, for the most distinctive thing about Andrew MacLeish was his extraordinary reserve. Scots don’t come shouting at you, as Archie observed, but even among the Scottish, Andrew MacLeish must have been a special case.

When he spoke, it was softly with a pronounced Scottish burr. But he spoke very little, and kept himself and his emotions under severe control. I fear a man of frugal speech, Emily Dickinson writes, and his children did fear Andrew MacLeish. Archie’s older brother Norman, a sensitive and artistically talented lad, was terrified by his father. Norman developed a stammer, which was exacerbated by his father’s conviction that it would go away if only the boy would try harder. Archie regarded his father more with awe than with terror. In the long run he came to admire his hard-won success as a businessman and to respect him for his self-discipline. Father was more of a man than I am or ever have been, he allowed half a century after his father’s death in 1928. Yet in his youth and young manhood Archie resented and rebelled against the distance between them. Some of these feelings are articulated in a rare confessional poem of 1923 which Archie, with his own characteristic reserve, declined to publish in his lifetime.

My father was a solid man

And he was made of flesh and bone.

I have the planet in my span

And in my veins the stars are sown.

My father walked upon the earth

And with him would his shadow pass.

I was rebellious at my birth.

The sun strikes through me like a glass.

My father knew Jehovah’s face

And would converse with him apart.

I think he fears me for his place

Is empty when I search my heart.

God was father’s father, as Archie put it in his notes, and he called Andrew sir whenever they conversed. His father left for the Chicago & North Western train into the city before the children were up, and in the evening he had dinner—the adult dinner, for the children were fed apart—and immediately retired to his den on the landing between the first and second stories. That den was inviolate territory, as the youngsters of the neighborhood discovered one antic weekend when they marched the family goat inside the house and on up the stairs, only to retreat hurriedly before Andrew’s disapproving glare as he emerged from his den to investigate the uproar. Invited to a family picnic on the beach, Andrew declined with an aphorism: I prefer my chop on a plate. As that remark suggests, he had a certain laconic wit. One steamy day he initiated a conversation in Yankee dialect with Norman. T’weren’t for one thing we’d have a thaw, he said. What’s that, father? Norman asked. T’ain’t nothin’ frizz.

That humor was a saving grace, or nearly so. And no one could deny Andrew MacLeish’s generosity where his children’s education and future were concerned. He was openhanded where it must have pained him most as a constitutionally closefisted Scot: in the pocketbook. This was small consolation, though, for his absence even when present: he simply was not there for the children of Craigie Lea. To Archie, looking back across the decades, Andrew MacLeish seemed more like a foreign potentate than a father.

Andrew and Patty

Born in Glasgow in June 1838, Andrew MacLeish was the second son of an Archibald MacLeish who was the third son of another Archibald MacLeish driven from his trade as a hand-loom weaver in Loch-winnoch, Scotland, by the introduction of steam power. Of the four sons of Archibald the elder, two eventually became educators, a third a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, and the fourth, Andrew’s father, a draper—dry-goods merchant—in Glasgow. Andrew’s older brother, yet another Archibald, first sought his fortune in the gold mines of Australia, and failing there, returned to become a partner in his father’s business. Although the family was far from prosperous, they determined that Andrew should be educated for the ministry, to wag his paw in the pu’pit. Andrew, who had other ideas, left school at fourteen and persuaded his father to apprentice him to Robert Webster and Sons, a retail drapery house in Argyle Street, Glasgow. While he was so employed, his mother died, a victim of illness compounded by financial and family stress.

It was assumed that at the end of his two-year apprenticeship in the fall of 1855, Andrew would join his father’s firm, but again the boy disappointed expectations. In the company of Edward Couper, a youth who had earlier completed his apprenticeship at Webster’s, Andrew set out for London to seek his fortune. Times were hard even in London, the drapery capital of the world, though less so than Archie later made them sound. Perhaps his father did sleep under the counter like Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, but at least he found employment. Before long he wrote home asking his father’s forgiveness. That was kindly granted, and Andrew was once more encouraged to return to work at his father’s side.

When Andrew did return to Glasgow in August 1856, though, it was only long enough to pack and set sail for America. Couper had told him tales of the prosperous new land across the ocean, and Andrew decided to pursue his opportunities there. Still more important, he decided to pursue Lilias Young, another former Webster’s employee to whom he had lost his heart. Lilias had emigrated with her family to a rude frontier town called Chicago, and in September 1856 Andrew embarked on the City of New York to follow her there, his friend Couper accompanying him. Andrew was still a youth, only eighteen, and it must have taken courage to strike out for an unknown country. His departure effectively cut him off from family ties. He never saw his father again.

The land of milk and honey did not immediately live up to its notices. Luckily it was the season when you could get out of the train and pick apples, and so the two young Scotsmen had enough to eat on the three-day trip from New York to Chicago. Although bustling with growth, Chicago in 1856 was far from prepossessing. Wooden planks in the streets often gave way to deep mud holes. In one a wag had stuck a long pole with a hat on top and a sign reading No Bottom. Still, that first evening Andrew and his friend Couper located the Youngs, he and Lilias went walking out to the boundless prairie at Union Park, and that made the long journey worthwhile.

Andrew worked for one Chicago dry-goods store and another without much success. In the spring of 1858, on the mend after a bout of tuberculosis, he accepted an invitation from the Young family to stay on the farm they had just bought in Golconda, Illinois, in Pope County. That summer the local farmers prevailed on him to serve a six-month appointment as schoolmaster. Andrew knew he was ill prepared for the work, but he needed the job. On Christmas Day he and Lilias were married, and then—with his health restored and his teaching completed—he and his bride moved back to Chicago.

The twenty years of marriage allotted to Andrew and Lilias MacLeish were happy and prosperous ones, by and large. They had two daughters: Lily, born in 1860, and Blanche, two years later. They moved to a pleasant apartment on the city’s North Side and joined the North Baptist Church, where Andrew, raised a Presbyterian but converted to his wife’s faith, soon became the leading layman. He resumed his dry-goods career, and in 1867 found what was to be his life’s work when Samuel Carson, a fellow Scot, invited him to join Carson and Pirie, dry-goods wholesalers, as a junior partner. Specifically, Andrew’s job was to open and develop a retail store in Chicago. A shrewd, honest, and hardworking businessman, Andrew carried out his assignment with notable success, aided by the city’s rapid growth in population. Even the disastrous Chicago fire of 1871 barely slowed the store’s progress. By the mid-1870s Carson Pirie Scott and Company (as it was by then named) had become one of Chicago’s leading department stores, and Andrew MacLeish—as founder and manager—one of its leading merchants.

Unfortunately, Lilias then fell ill, and after several years of invalidism she died, in September 1878. Shortly before her death, she asked her husband to send their two daughters to Vassar, one of the first American colleges for women. In this way the dying wish of Andrew MacLeish’s first wife led to his marriage to his third.

In the interim, Andrew was married a second time, in March 1881, to M. (for Martha) Louise Little, the daughter of a Union general in the Civil War. In February of the following year she gave birth to a son, Bruce (who was eventually to follow his father’s trade and become president of Carson Pirie Scott). Then Louise MacLeish too was carried off by an illness. In January 1883, at forty-four, Andrew was left a widower for a second time.

It fell to Lily MacLeish, as the elder daughter, to leave Vassar, come home, and take care of the family. After her father’s first bereavement, she had briefly fulfilled a similar function while at home on vacations, but by 1883 hers was a full-time occupation. She had to manage the rather large house on Chicago’s West Side that the family now occupied, to serve as her father’s companion and sometime hostess, and—most important of all—to act as surrogate mother to young Bruce, who was not yet one year old when his own mother died. According to Archie, his half-sister Lily—thirty-two years his senior—was a congenital spinster (though eventually she did marry). In any event, she grew accustomed to her role and was reluctant to give it up when, five years later, her father married for a third time.

Ironically, Andrew MacLeish would not have met Martha Hillard at all but for the agency of his daughter Lily. While at Vassar she and her sister, Blanche, had grown particularly fond of Miss Hillard, who functioned both as an instructor of mathematics and as a corridor teacher: resident adviser, friend, chaperone, and slightly older role model for Vassar students. An 1878 graduate of Vassar herself, she had taught public school for three years in Plymouth, Connecticut, before returning to her alma mater in 1881. Energetic, good-natured, pragmatic in her idealism, Martha Hillard was called away from Vassar in 1884 to become—at only twenty-eight years of age—principal of Rockford (Illinois) Seminary, and to oversee its transformation into a full-fledged women’s college.

Fund raising was part of her job, and family legend has it that on one occasion she called on John D. Rockefeller to seek his support for the school. The meeting went well, and at its conclusion Rockefeller asked what train she was leaving on. That night she had just finished brushing her hair, secreting her purse beneath her pillow, and saying her prayers, when a male hand stole into the privacy of her sleeper. When she called the porter, the intruder turned out to be not the burglar she had feared but a most apologetic Mr. Rockefeller, who maintained that he had, somehow, mistaken her berth for his.

It was at the end of another trip, in the spring of 1887, that Martha Hillard decided to accept Lily MacLeish’s often-extended invitation to stop and spend a night with her family in Chicago. Blanche was now married, to Cornelius Kingsley Garrison (Ben) Billings, scion of one of Chicago’s wealthiest and most distinguished families, and a dinner party was arranged. Martha Hillard was then thirty, a tiny woman with the small dark eyes, high cheekbones, and strikingly mellifluous voice she was to bequeath to her son Archie. Warm and witty, she was obviously a person of unusual energy, sharp intelligence, and deep convictions. Andrew MacLeish was immediately smitten. My father saw the light when he saw her, as Archie later put it. After dinner he took her aside and showed her some photographs from the trip to Europe he and Lily had recently completed. Reticent though he may have been, Andrew was not a man to let the grass grow under his feet. A few days later he wrote Martha Hillard at Rockford and asked her to consider becoming his wife.

The young principal of Rockford Seminary hardly knew what to think. She had very nearly concluded that marriage was not for her. Andrew MacLeish was obviously much older than she—eighteen years older, in fact—and his proposal had come after the shortest possible acquaintance. Yet she felt an initial attraction as well—Andrew was such a manly man, she thought—and did not reject him lightly. Instead she wrote that his letter had come as a total surprise, that she appreciated the honor he had paid her, and that she would write further when she’d given the matter the serious thought it deserved. Her second letter contained the rejection the first one had prepared him for, but it was made on the grounds of her calling and with no prejudice to Andrew.

Providence had guided her into the life of an educator, she explained. She was happy in her work and felt it her duty to continue. Besides, she pointed out by way of opening the door a crack, she hardly knew him, whereas he had the advantage of having heard a good deal about her from his daughters. Andrew’s letter of response was so understanding and so generous that she came dangerously near beginning to fall in love with him. So she carried on her tasks at Rockford during the spring term with Mr. MacLeish very much on her mind, and finally found a pretext to write him. Back came a reply that he was going to Block Island in August and would like to call on her at her home in Plymouth at that time.

The August visit sealed the bargain, though not without difficulty. The Hillards were a sizable clan, and in residence when Andrew came to call on August 26 were Martha’s father, her grandmother, and siblings Helen, Emily, Fanny, and John. According to Emily’s letter of that date, Andrew arrived on the evening train and we have all lost our hearts to him. But she did not see how Patty (Martha’s invariable nickname) would manage to see her caller alone, for her father and grandmother were dominating his time and conversation. Patty found a way. After fixing a fine breakfast of bacon and popovers, she remembered an errand she had to run in Thomaston, and took Andrew with her. Then, as she wrote in her memoirs, we came home by a back road through the woods, and the matter was settled.

Since it was then the end of August, Martha Hillard could not in good conscience abandon her post at Rockford. Under a veil of secrecy about her impending marriage, she got through the 1887–88 school year before tendering her resignation. She left knowing that she had fulfilled her mission. During her time at Rockford, she installed an honor system, broadened student opportunities for physical exercise and social life, strengthened the curriculum, and brought in outstanding teachers from Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, and Radcliffe. The student body grew from fifty to one hundred, and by 1888 the institution was ready to become the full-fledged college the trustees had hoped for when they hired her four years before. Meanwhile, Andrew let Lily know that she was to be supplanted after five years as woman of the house. He took her out for a carriage ride and presented her with a nice piece of jewelry, whereupon Lily burst into tears. Without a word spoken, she knew what that meant, for once before he had taken her out riding, given her a bauble, and announced that he was going to marry Louise Little. On August 22, 1888, Martha Hillard and Andrew MacLeish were married in the old Plymouth church by its pastor, her father, Elias Brewster Hillard.

Half Puritan, Half Scot

Archibald MacLeish was proud of his mother, and of the Puritan heritage that came down to him from her side of the family. All four of her grandparents—Hillard, Brewster, Whittlesey, and Burrell—were descendants of early American settlers. The most notable among these ancestors was undoubtedly Elder William Brewster (1567–1644), the English separatist who came across on the Mayflower and served as spiritual adviser to the Plymouth (Massachusetts) Colony. Yet it was the Hillards who most interested Archie, and particularly his grandfather, Elias, and great-grandfather, Moses Hillard.

Most of the Hillards were carpenters and wheelwrights and farmers, and Moses himself spent many years wresting a living from a hundred and thirty of the most ungrateful acres on earth. But in the vigor of early manhood he lived a remarkably adventurous life. Born at Preston, Connecticut, in 1780, Moses went to sea at eighteen, became a sea captain at twenty-two and one of the foremost shipmasters of his day before he was thirty. Captain Moses hated governments—all governments—and he had reasons. In June 1800 he was aboard the brig Caroline on a trip to the West Indies when a French privateer captured and scuttled the ship, robbed the crew of their money and their clothes, put them in irons, and set them naked and helpless ashore in Basseterre. It took months for the young sailor to get away from his French prison and work his way home to his father’s farm in Preston. Ill served as he was by the French, the British treated Moses Hillard still worse. On three different occasions—in 1804, 1808, and 1812—British seamen boarded and plundered vessels under his command. As for his own government, Moses detested the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, whose embargoes kept him at home for fear of risking disaster at sea.

For all his misfortunes, Moses was an unusually successful sea captain whose expertise at business and ability to converse with equal skill in the galley of his ship and the salons of Europe made shipowners eager to employ him. In January 1813, racing back from Archangel, he brought to the United States the first news of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. And on yet another occasion, just before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, he was approached with a proposition to bring the emperor himself to the United States should the battle go against him. Hating the British still more than the French, he agreed to the proposal and prepared to hide Napoleon in a false-bottomed water tank on deck. It was no fault of his that the emperor lingered too long and did not escape. The greatest sorrow of Moses’s seagoing days occurred in February 1817, when he lost his ship Oneida, one of the queens of the Atlantic, in a dreadful storm at sea. He vowed then never to sail again, and, though the vow was broken a time or two, retired soon thereafter to work his hard-scrabble farm in Preston.

Moses was a man of iron will and fixed convictions, traits that descended to his great-grandson Archie. In Preston he was accused of assault and battery by a busybody named John Starkweather, who so infuriated Moses with his prying and troublemaking that the sea captain bloodied him with two violent blows … on the right side of his nose, as Starkweather alleged, or merely told Starkweather to mind his own business, at which point he scratched his own nose and produced blood from a pimple thereon, as Hillard argued in defense. It was said of Captain Moses that when he returned from his voyages he immediately took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and gave his sons a sound thrashing each, because he ‘knew they deserved it.’

Among those sons was Elias Brewster Hillard, born September 6, 1825. The boy suffered no ill effects from paternal thrashings, but did rebel against the religion of fear preached by his mother, Martha Brewster Hillard. She taught her children that they, like all mortals, were wicked, that God was always angry with the wicked, and that he might take his vengeance at any hour. As a lad Elias often went to bed in terror that he might die before morning, since he was certain that however much he wanted to do right, he committed sins every day. Those Puritan beliefs he repudiated when, after graduating from Yale, teaching for a time, and studying for the ministry, he was ordained in March 1855. That September Elias married Julia Whittlesey, who had been his pupil at Southington (Connecticut) Academy. In August 1856 the first of their nine children was born: Archie’s mother, Martha (Patty) Hillard. Nearly a century later, Archie summed up his mother’s heritage this way: If Martha MacLeish inherited courage and force of character from Captain Moses, and a deeply religious nature from her father Elias and his mother, Martha Brewster, it was from Julia Whittlesey Hillard that she had the sweet selflessness which was the peculiar genius of her being. Daughter of a Cleveland lawyer and granddaughter of a judge, both of whom were Phi Beta Kappa graduates of Yale, Julia was the sort of person who made others happy to be near her. Even now, Archie wrote in 1949, it is impossible to read my grandmother’s letters without loving her.

Elias Brewster Hillard ministered to a series of four different Congregational churches in Connecticut and a last one in Conway, Massachusetts, the picturesque farming community in the Hoosac Hills of western Massachusetts, where his grandson was eventually to settle. Successively, Elias was pastor at Hadlyme (1855–60), Berlin (1860–67), South Glastonbury (1867–69), for twenty years in Plymouth (1869–89), and finally Conway (1889–93). As a pastor he repudiated the Calvinism of his ancestors and adopted a liberal progressive outlook. Influenced by the writing of men such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Greenleaf Whittier, he offered his children and his congregation a concept of God that inspired confidence, not dread. But he was no Pollyanna. Elias understood that this world was not nearly as good a place as it could be, and always stood in the forefront of any move to make [his community] a better place in which to live. The business of the church, he believed, was to dedicate itself just as zealously to the improvement of this life as to salvation in the next.

Like his father before him, Elias Hillard had a charismatic nature. When he entered a room, one of his relatives observed, it set off a small electric shock: everyone brightened up and became alert. And, like Captain Moses on the quarterdeck, Reverend Elias in the pulpit did not hesitate to speak his mind. Usually he moved from one pastorate to another to improve his financial standing and support his growing family, but at South Glastonbury that was not the case. The community’s principal business involved some large woolen mills. During the Civil War the mill owners had reaped a bonanza by manufacturing and selling uniforms made of shoddy cloth. For Elias Hillard, who had encouraged young men to enlist and otherwise done everything he could to aid the cause of the North, that behavior was morally reprehensible, and he said so from the pulpit, even though his deacon was one of the profiteers. In the summer of 1869, while the Hillards were vacationing, the church board called a meeting to consider dismissing the pastor. Word reached Elias in time for him to return the following Sunday, tender his resignation, and at his farewell sermon preach to the text And now do they thrust us out privily? Nay, verily; but let them come themselves and fetch us out. As they were leaving the church, a parishioner took his wife, Julia, aside and said, "Mrs. Hillard, whatever happens to you, know that you’ve got a man for a husband."

Elias Hillard also possessed some literary skill. In 1864 he brought out a small book called The Last Men of the Revolution. As research he located six men who had fought in the Revolutionary War, then visited, photographed, and interviewed each of them. The spryest of the survivors was Sam Downing, 102, who lived in the first frame house in Edinburg, New York, in the valley of the Sacandaga. Downing characterized Benedict Arnold as a fighting general who wasn’t given due recognition and remarked that the men would sell their lives for George Washington. When peace was declared, he recalled, we burnt thirteen candles in every hut, one for each State. But Downing did not understand—Elias interviewed him in 1864—how able-bodied men could stay at home and so aid the enemy in the great ongoing Civil War. Apparently, Elias’s only other surviving written document is a twenty-eight-page temperance pamphlet of 1883, Drunkenness a Curse, Not a Blessing, which he published anonymously as the work of a Connecticut pastor.

Misfortune sometimes invaded the felicity of the Hillard family. Elias and Julia lost two of their nine children in infancy, and a third, their son John, died just as he was about to embark on a promising career in the law. In their later years they brought into their home Elias’s half-sister Ann, who was afflicted with depression and mental illness. Caring for her was difficult, and added one more onerous task to Julia Hillard’s burden of cooking and cleaning and raising children and attending to the social and spiritual work of a pastor’s wife. Small and delicately made, Julia became ill in the mid-1880s. She recovered after the move to Conway in 1889, however, and attributed her improvement to the community’s hill-town air, its hill-town sun, and its northwest wind out of Vermont and the Adirondacks. For her, Conway and their parsonage were Arcadia. Come there along with me, Julia invited a friend in a letter, in at the large gateway and up the rising, slightly winding path to the little house with its porches and vines and flowers—past that and past the garden on its high terrace to your right, and past the dull red barn on your left, and up a grassy path through a shady orchard with all the time such lovely views opening before and around you that you pay no heed to the way by which you came but feel, when here, that you have been translated and know a new heaven and a new earth. Unhappily, as her health improved, her husband’s began to fail: Elias had to resign his pastorate in 1893, and he died in 1895. Yet they were never happier than in this hill town among earnest, intelligent, warmhearted neighbors. Our life and work here are more a labor of love than in any of the homes yet, Julia wrote. And I do believe we were never loved as we are here.

More than thirty years later, when Archibald and Ada MacLeish and their young family moved into their house up Conway’s Church Hill, not far from his grandparents’ old parsonage, Archie went to introduce himself to the Boydens, who occupied the only other house on their road. As he was about to knock on the door, it was opened by a big, tall, gray old man. His wife came up behind him and stuck her head out around his arm. You’re not a stranger to me, she told Archie. Your grandfather married us. He felt at home then, a Yankee among his kind.

But of course Archie MacLeish was a Yankee on his mother’s side alone. His very name, given him in honor of his father’s brother, father, and grandfather, bespoke his Scottish origins. The alloy had its effects, good and bad. In his youth Archie was beset by feelings of guilt. If you’re one half pure Puritan and the other half very dour Scot, he drily remarked, you’ve got a pretty good chance to feel sin. It was not a combination he’d recommend for pleasure. Both strains regarded life as a serious matter, to be undertaken with all the vigor and ability at one’s command, an expectation that Archie eternally strove to live up to. In later years he came to venerate his Scottish ancestry as much as the Yankee heritage constantly on view in Conway. On special occasions he and his sons would wear the kilts of Clan Macpherson, and the boys learned to play the bagpipe. He was proud of the contributions that leading Americans of Scottish descent had made to the strength, character, and well-being of the United States.

It was an observation that his Hillard grandparents, and his mother, Patty, would certainly have endorsed, because for them accomplishment meant service to one’s fellow man and one’s country. In a 1948 memorial to his mother, Archie wrote that there was no greater tribute he could pay her than to say that she was her mother’s daughter and her father’s daughter and worthy of them both. Her children and grandchildren, he added, might do well to consider, earnestly and humbly, whether we are worthy, in any sense, of her. Perhaps the comment, given its context, exaggerated his attempts to live up to her standard, but perhaps not, for Patty Hillard MacLeish did not give up her dedication to good works after marrying her husband. Far from it: she became active in advancing religious and educational causes on a local, national, and even international basis, and forcefully advocated a liberalism on issues of racial and religious tolerance that ran far ahead of her time. My mother was one of the great North American women, no question about that, Archie said of her.

Born on May 7, 1892, Archibald MacLeish was the product of parents of unusual and very different attainments. His father was an extremely successful man of business, his mother a woman devoted to public service. In his childhood, his mother was everything to him, his father merely a shadowy figure who slept in the same house at night. Yet both shaped their son: the father he wanted terribly to please, since it was so hard to attract his attention, the mother who instilled in him the conviction that he must leave the world a better place than he found it.

Archibald MacLeish’s true vocation, surely, was that of a poet, and yet he was called away time and again to other careers, and particularly to the fields of government and education toward which his mother’s example beckoned him. Each of his parents would have had him pursue a career he rejected. Yet if he could not or would not follow the ministry, as his mother initially wished, at least he could satisfy her by working for the benefit of others. And if he could not or would not become a businessman like his father, at least he could bring home a series of straight-A report cards from school and college and law school, and place in his hands copies of his first books, in quest of one more expansive smile, one more Hello, Brownie.

2

GROWING UP

A Difficult Child

Andrew and Patty MacLeish got a late start on building a family (he was fifty and she thirty-two when they were married), but within nine years they produced five children. The first was blue-eyed, golden-haired Martha Louise, named for Andrew’s departed second wife. Born in July 1889, she died of meningitis the following summer. Then came Norman Hillard in August 1890, Archibald in May 1892, Kenneth in September 1894, and Ishbel in March 1897. The children were very different from one another, and it soon became clear that among them was a prodigy. This was Norman.

Patty MacLeish took her child-rearing duties every bit as seriously as one might have anticipated from a woman who had spent the previous decade as an educator. To prepare herself, she attended Elizabeth Harrison’s Kindergarten Training School once a week for two years. There she was introduced to Friedrich Froebel’s philosophy of child education. According to the teachings of Froebel (1782–1852), the child was assumed to be inherently good, and human evil the product of the wrong educational methods. The inventor of the term kindergarten, Froebel believed that play was central to learning in the early years and to helping each child develop his or her innate potential. He was strongly opposed to the use of force in disciplining children. His ideas worked beautifully with Norman, who in his mother’s words was from the first a little philosopher, a gentle soul, very sensitive to beauty, full of imagination and keen interest: all the qualities one associates with an artist in the making. The German philosopher’s methods were much less effective with Archie, a boy (as his mother described him) of tremendous force and will power, a high-strung nervous system, easily disturbed, a sensitivity and imagination more inhibited than Norman’s. When Archie’s temper flared up, as it often did, she found that he could normally be restored to equanimity through quiet and seclusion. But at least once she was driven in despair to administer a good old-fashioned spanking. The effect, she recalled, was magical. Archie’s yells of rage turned suddenly to a sharp cry of surprise, and when the spanking was over, he threw his arms around her neck and cried, Oh, Mama, I do love you.

As the family dynamics worked out, Norman and Archie—born barely twenty months apart—were co-beneficiaries of their mother’s course of home instruction, while Kenny and Ishbel formed another slightly younger pair of students. It was clear to everyone that Norman was gifted. With his beautiful dark-gold hair, he was trotted out to show off his precocity for his mother’s friends, many of them educators. He wrote stories and even a little operetta for the children of Glencoe to perform. He demonstrated an early knack for the visual arts, and some musical ability as well. Ethel de Lang, a neighbor born in 1891 who attended Glencoe School in Archie’s class, remembered Norman well and Archie almost not at all. Archie was very quiet, she said, while Norman was always stirring things up. Norman acted out Narcissus in the pool between their houses. Norman made up plays using characters from the advertising world: he was the Quaker Oats man, for example, while Ethel and her sister were the Golddust Twins. Archie did not participate in those plays, she recalled. He was, however, included in the mock funeral of an unfortunate bird who flew into a window of the MacLeishes’ house and was killed. Norman led the funeral march, playing a mouth organ. Archie carried the bier.

Locked in unequal competition with his talented older brother, Archie asserted himself through misbehavior. He was a difficult child, in the language of popular psychology, or a thoroughly nasty little boy, as he later described himself. If you could get into a scrape, he observed with some pride, I got into it! Sometimes these scrapes involved physical violence. In this respect Archie, who was wiry, tough, and athletic, more than held his own. As a fighter, at least, he was clearly superior to the docile, gentle Norman. Such combativeness earned him no rewards at home—quite the contrary—but it did enable him to work off his frustration. More important, it established a habit that was to remain with him all his life. Whatever the field of endeavor, Archibald MacLeish was always a fierce competitor, one who did not shy away from conflict and often seemed to court it. It may even be that he turned to poetry, at least in part, as a form of rivalry with the precocious Norman.

For all his initial promise, Norman did not achieve the successful career expected of him. He became in due course a professional architect and an amateur painter of considerable ability but limited accomplishment. Somehow he seemed to lack drive and self-confidence. Norman’s greatest gift, according to his son Rod, the writer and PBS commentator, was for painting, but he used to refer to himself disparagingly, when drinking, as a near-great, and he produced much less than he might have. His father’s troubles began, Rod is convinced, with his grandfather Andrew, who sometimes ridiculed the boy’s stuttering. (Escaped to the realm of childhood play, Ethel de Lang remembers, Norman hardly stuttered at all.) Families have a way of developing catchphrases or euphemisms, Rod believes. The MacLeish family expression for his dour Scottish grandfather was that he was stern but fair. That phrase, in Rod’s view, could best be translated as a son of a bitch.

In a long 1924 letter to his mother, Archie proposed a different view. Norman was going through an unproductive period, and Patty MacLeish—in a rare critical comment about her husband—wrote Archie that perhaps Andrew’s lack of sympathy for Norman was at fault. Although he agreed about his father’s lack of sympathy—which of us in childhood has his sympathy?—Archie maintained in reply that his brother’s real handicap was that he had been singled out as a child prodigy, his powers of expression with words or paint or music facile and marked. Norman was so much the artist, in fact, that until Archie began to have a reputation as a writer, he "was not seriously considered as an artist at home. (This is not complaint. I thank God for it.) What happened, Archie concluded, was that Norman’s artistic mechanism developed rapidly while he himself did not, and so he became a misfit. The result was almost inevitable: Once in a million times the talented child arrives. The rest of the time his talents remain unrooted because they devour his life as fast as he lives it. The very fact that he can express himself as he goes along prevents his having a life rich enough to express importantly."

Here Archie clearly argues against too much recognition too soon, and in favor of a certain benign neglect. But the context counts. When he wrote these words Archie was in his middle thirties, with a pattern of success behind him to give him confidence for the future as he philosophized on the relative failure of the promising older brother. In childhood he must have felt very differently. And of course he was not neglected, at least not by his mother. For it was her nightly reading to Norman and Archie, begun when they were five and three, that opened up the world of literature to him. At Elizabeth Harrison’s school she had heard a series of lectures by Denton J. Snyder on the Literary Bibles of the world—Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s plays—and she was inspired to expose her two boys to such works as early as possible. Most children’s books, she felt, were mawkishly sentimental and entirely too easy to read. To do its full part in the training of a child, she was convinced, literature must make demands on the mind and serve as a moral touchstone.

Following these standards, she began a custom of reading to the boys for half an hour every day, just after their supper. The first book she read them, in her deeply resonant voice,