Word: macleish
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Most of all, there were one's tears. David Halberstam was pursuing then-Dean McGeorge Bundy with the same instructive ferocity he displayed a little later in bringing the war home from Vietnam. Archibald MacLeish was the Faculty post-in-residence, but Gregory Corso was holding forth on the street. Joan Bacz was finding her voice in a coffee house on Plympton St. And there was a graduate student named John Beebe, a tall, looking man from rural Indians who had alarmed his family by giving up a secure to seek a PhD in Slavie when it came to language...
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...
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...
...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...
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...