Public Burning (54 page)

Thus, debating uneasily with himself, less self-assured than his readers might suspect or hope, he threads his way through the masses in Times Square, alert to his task, but reflective in mood, worried that he's got off the track somehow, fearful of his powers even as he fears their diminishment, and conscious, a young man at the pinnacle of success and in the full bloom of life, of his own mortality—didn't Mother Luce predict his death as long ago as 1936? He and his brothers must surely die, she said then: “I don't suppose we can establish the date for the euthanasia… But one way to look at them, at this date, might be to say that they have twenty more years of life….” He was only thirteen years old when she said that, and it had frightened him to think that, like Jesus Christ, he might have only thirty-three years to walk this earth. And it was possible, it was all too possible. Not only were the actuarial tables dismal enough for poets like himself, but hadn't his own father died prematurely at the age of thirty-one? A sudden and sordid death on the night of young T
IME'S
sixth birthday, he's never quite got over it. Almost like his Dad was trying to tell him something. The hard way. Though T
IME
loves his mother and is often inspired by her, it's the ghost of his unhappy father, he knows, that he carries in his poet's heart. And now thirty of his allotted thirty-three years have washed away, he has just three of them left, three short years to sort things out, find some way of rejuvenating himself, of overmastering the world's entropie attack on him before it's too late. And in this, he knows, his fate and America's are linked: he and America both seem to have lost, as his mother says, “that feeling for the future, the confidence in the bigger and the better, the spirit of you-ain't-seen-nothin'-yet”—but perhaps tonight…?

Twice before, he thought he'd found the secret: once, just before World War II, with his dream of “The American Century” (“We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world…the dynamic leader of world trade…the powerhouse from which the ideals [of Western Civilization] spread throughout the world…”), and again three years ago, at the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, with his vision of perpetual War: “One of the great perennial themes along with Love and Death.” His mother's vision, actually, but as always he had been inspired by her: “In the next few years Americans will have to live with War as they have not since the days of the settler and the Minute Man…. War always has been, is and always will be part of man's fate until Kingdom come.… In any case,
we
are not going to end War without practicing it some more—and living with it…. If ‘coexistence' with the present Soviet Communist system is impossible, is total War ‘inevitable'? Maybe so, maybe not, but what no man has a right to say is that we can live peaceably and happily
with
this prodigious evil…. The Soviet Empire will continue to expand unless it is opposed with all our strength and that includes the steady, calm and constant acceptance of the risk of all-out War….
The truth will be made plain by wrath if not by reason!”

But both dreams have soured. The other Free Nations, misunderstanding his charitable intentions, took unnecessary offense at his laying claim to all of the Twentieth Century, and even his fellow Americans seemed to lack the imagination to “accept the thrust of destiny,” to go out and take over the world and “create the first great American Century.” Didn't they care? What has gone wrong? “I think this country, far from having a George-Washingtonian belief in the Tightness of its cause at home and abroad, is actually very uncertain of itself, very divided and confused in its ‘soul,' and almost totally lacking in basic realistic notions as to its ‘objectives' in the world situation!” The War in Korea looked more promising, as War always does, especially when, largely through T
IME'S
inspired advocacy, General Eisenhower was elected Commander-in-Chief—it brought back the halcyon days of World War II (the naming of wars like kings was T
IME'S
own conceit), which saw, almost overnight, the transformation of this young
enfant terrible
and adolescent American hustler into a powerful and serious poet and—even before the War had ended—the Poet Laureate of the Nation. How could he not love War? Indeed, he even loved the Japanese for making it possible. As Mother Luce wrote to his brother
LIFE
following the attack on Pearl Harbor: “This is the day of wrath. It is also the day of hope…. For this hour America was made!” He felt suddenly ashamed of his “pusillanimous” youth, which he identified with that of his country: “It is not even possible to call these years tragic, for tragedy implies at least the dignity of fate. And there was no dignity in these years, and nothing of fate that we did not bring upon ourselves. The epoch that is closing was much less tragic than it was shameful….” He felt like Paul struck down on the road to Damascus, like Dwight Eisenhower hit by a bolt of lightning in Texas: he was a new man, a new poet, purged of his supercilious past. Of course, his readers might not notice the difference, but inside, he knew it was true. An era ended for T
IME
in 1941 and a new one began. Then, three years ago, he felt like the same thing was happening all over again, a resurgence of the old hope and joy, the glorious struggle—he might even become Poet Laureate of the World! Calling for “an unambiguous defeat” of the Reds, forecasting the imminent advent of World War III, and whooping it up like a drunken cowboy, he rushed off to the Korean front, pen in hand.

But now, what? it's all come to nothing. A meaningless stalemate. And every sign of a disastrous truce about to be consummated. He had loved and defended General Mac Arthur, remains even tonight absolutely convinced of the need to carry the War to the Chinese mainland, and has these past months been struggling to keep General Van Fleet's “total victory” appeals before the people, but he knows it's a lost cause. He can feel it. He can't even get a decent poem out of it any more. His “Night on Old Harry” last week with its “ugly sausage / shaped ridge,” its “littered slopes” and “crumbling trenches,” is about the best he's done since the earliest lyrics of the War, and that's probably because all it's about is holding on desperately to something useless, his present unhappy condition. Might better have called it “Night
in
Old Harry”…

And though it's all right, even that one's a far cry from, say, his account of the assault on No Name Ridge, or the taking of Pyongyang (“…the end of the war loomed as plain / as the moustache on Stalin's face…”), or his classic cables of World War II. Ah, where's it all gone? he wonders, pushing through the Square, pressed in upon all sides by people from whom he feels increasingly alienated. The Gentleman from Indiana, he laments, is dead. For thirty years he has shared his dreams with him, and now the old boy has taken them with him to the grave. And yet, at some deep unexamined level, though they've failed him, he still has faith in both dreams. He still believes that “America alone can provide the pattern for the future…[and] must be the elder brother of the nations in the brotherhood of men.” And he still believes in War.

This great poetic affinity for War is perhaps inborn, a consequence of his having been conceived in a World War I Army camp back in 1918 by two underaged but passionately eager shavetails named Brit and Luce, a pair of Yale romantics who longed, as Luce said, “to be officers of the Army of the United States, go to the front and fire at the enemy.” Though she never had that pleasure, she did manage a kind of vicarious experience of the War, and if not exactly heroic, it was at least a contribution. As it happened, she came on a group of enlisted men one night who were having some doubts about just what the devil they were fighting for, and, in what she called “one of the greatest successes of my life,” she roused them to high patriotic fervor with her account of the sinking of the
Lusitania
, marched them off to the railroad station singing “Over There,” and saw them off with a “Good-bye and good luck!”; the train took them, cheering wildly, to the docks, where they boarded the transport, the
Ticonderoga
, and halfway across the Atlantic got sunk by a German torpedo. Brit shared Luce's zeal. As he wrote his Mom: “I long to be sent overseas as a Battery Commander or Major General or something, and there to take part in the great 1919 drive, the one that will end the war and smash Kaiser Will!” Instead they both got sent back to Yale. But not before one “sickeningly hot” night out behind the barracks, which T
IME'S
mother recalled many years later at her son's twentieth-birthday party: “One night Brit and I were walking back to our barracks through the vast, sprawling camp. At each step, our feet sank ankle-deep in mud. I think it was in that walk that T
IME
began. At the center of our lives, at that point, everything we had belonged to each other. We ploughed on for hours…”

Inception was prolonged—nearly five years. But this is not uncommon among geniuses. After a stormy but loving on-again off-again romance, Brit playing the restless Odysseus, Luce the patient but busy-fingered Penelope, both parents were at last reunited, and pregnancy, if doubted before, was now assured. T
IME
was born in an old remodeled house of vaguely Italianate style not far from here at 141 East Seventeenth Street. As midwife Culbreth Sudler once described it: “You thumped one step down from the street into the windowless dining room on the ground floor and then mounted to the living room which ran across the front of the house. The paint on the woodwork was so thick it was like cheese. Here we set up loft-type tables.” And it was on those tables, one wintry February night just after midnight in 1923, that Mother Luce, drenched in a cold sweat, stretched out and spread her thighs and—with the father assisting in his green eyeshade—gave birth to baby T
IME
(
SO
named because his mother had been frightened by an advertising headline: “Time to Retire”—or was it “Time for a Change”? she never could remember after, the riddle perplexes her still). He was thin, pale, unhealthy, attractive like all babies, but less appealing than his parents had hoped. Folks said he looked a lot like Uncle Joe Cannon. Few thought he'd last long.

But, though poor and sickly, T
IME
was born with a great will to survive, and by the time he was four, after a couple of convalescent years out in Cleveland (which nearly killed his fun-loving father and threatened to break up the marriage), he began to get a little color in his cheeks. Though his early verse was often cocky, strained, flippant and superficial, derivative, and of course childish, he was already showing signs of that prodigious talent that would one day set him above all his rivals, even the powerful Franklinesque
Saturday Evening Post
, Poet Laureate of the day….

The seeming discrepancy of a black rat with a grey face created considerable literary controversy, needless to say, and raised the hackles on the backs of academic purists, but the controversy itself attested to the spreading recognition that here was a young poet to be reckoned with. His verse was fresh, penetrating, epigrammatic, candid even to the point of insult, sometimes startling, always provocative. No poet ever became great by being, in his young days, overly polite: his father taught him that. And he rarely was. Anything too physical or too spiritual alike aroused his wrath. Zealots as well as shirkers suffered from his “one-finger type, two-finger brain, / six sneers and one suggestion.” He hated pomposity and timidity, yesterday's ideas and tomorrow's fashions, partyboys and doomcriers, Babbitry and Bolshevism. And he struck them down with style. When Leon Trotsky fell ill, he wrote gleefully:

Yes, a frankly acknowledged above-the-board package of prejudices, essential to his genius. As his mother recently warned the hired help with regard to the “Aloha Shirt Set,” who just this afternoon have at last been found guilty of Communist plotting to overthrow the Government under the Smith Act:

“Business,” his mother always liked to say, “is, essentially, our civilization.” She called it “the smartest, most universal of all American occupations…the largest of the planets which make up our system.” In the past, T
IME'S
business bias has been bruisingly attacked, but few would dare challenge it today. They still call him an opportunistic thief, a pastepot-poet who steals from everybody, but that only means he's squarely in the mainstream of American poets, most of whom have been great eclectics, gatherers and enhancers of the detritus from the passing flux, collage-shapers—and as for being opportunistic, so what? As he himself wrote when T. S. Eliot's
Waste Land
was being “revealed” as a hoax: it's immaterial, “literature being concerned not with intentions but results.” And who can doubt his own results? T
IME'S
number one, “not only at the box office but…in the opinions of a large part of mankind.”