Mike
Hazard just posted “In Memory of Senator Eugene McCarthy”
on the League of Minnesota Poets page,
written by Louise Klas, in whose home McCarthy stayed many times over the years:
“Nicknamed Lulu, Louise celebrates the centennial of the late politician and poet
with a lulu of a poem which she read after she said, “I’m not a poet.”
A lovely, apt tribute to a man I never met.
McCarthy was a year younger than my dad, whose centennial was last year, 2015.
Impossible for me not to think of Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night,
one of whose main characters is Robert Lowell, who worked for McCarthy,
and who in Mailer's novel compliments Mailer as “our greatest journalist”—
“No, our greatest writer,” Mailer counters.
Mailer disgraces himself by bringing a tumblerful of bourbon along to his speech,
having to go on late and annoyed because it took him half an hour wandering around the Ambassador Theater
to find the bathroom. That was the night before he took part in the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
At least, he got to see Ed Sanders’s and Tuli Kupferberg’s performance there in The Fugs,
before he had to get himself arrested quick so he’d be processed in time
to go to a party in New Jersey (he didn’t make it). I wish
I could determine that Eugene McCarthy spoke at the 1967 March on the Pentagon,
or that he’s mentioned in Armies of the Night, but so far I have not,
and the tenuous Robert Lowell connection is all I’ve got.
McCarthy loomed up for me in 1968.
There was a Time article about his poetry, which didn’t seem very good to me.
I never thought he had a chance of becoming the Democratic nominee—
a cold presence among all those cracked heads in Chicago,
and then Martin and then Bobby shot.
The disillusionment of 1968 rocks me when I think of it.
I never really forgave McCarthy for just sputtering out,
a big narcissistic windbag who didn’t really care (it seemed to me,
though, as I said, I didn’t know him, to be fair)—
as we all had to make way for Nixon.
And my father died a sad man, all the euphoria of his youth dried up,
his ambition to be a recognized writer.
It’s Lowell who should get the last word, though.
Before he died in 1977 in the back of a cab in New York City,
Lowell wrote that, somehow, after all his prodigious writing and rewriting,
nothing seemed to stick, nothing remained
to really hold onto.
“All’s misalliance,” he famously said in Epilogue, “but why not say what happened?”
Still, I think
the line that comes later about Vermeer’s
“girl solid with longing”
is awful.
on the League of Minnesota Poets page,
written by Louise Klas, in whose home McCarthy stayed many times over the years:
“Nicknamed Lulu, Louise celebrates the centennial of the late politician and poet
with a lulu of a poem which she read after she said, “I’m not a poet.”
A lovely, apt tribute to a man I never met.
McCarthy was a year younger than my dad, whose centennial was last year, 2015.
Impossible for me not to think of Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night,
one of whose main characters is Robert Lowell, who worked for McCarthy,
and who in Mailer's novel compliments Mailer as “our greatest journalist”—
“No, our greatest writer,” Mailer counters.
Mailer disgraces himself by bringing a tumblerful of bourbon along to his speech,
having to go on late and annoyed because it took him half an hour wandering around the Ambassador Theater
to find the bathroom. That was the night before he took part in the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
At least, he got to see Ed Sanders’s and Tuli Kupferberg’s performance there in The Fugs,
before he had to get himself arrested quick so he’d be processed in time
to go to a party in New Jersey (he didn’t make it). I wish
I could determine that Eugene McCarthy spoke at the 1967 March on the Pentagon,
or that he’s mentioned in Armies of the Night, but so far I have not,
and the tenuous Robert Lowell connection is all I’ve got.
McCarthy loomed up for me in 1968.
There was a Time article about his poetry, which didn’t seem very good to me.
I never thought he had a chance of becoming the Democratic nominee—
a cold presence among all those cracked heads in Chicago,
and then Martin and then Bobby shot.
The disillusionment of 1968 rocks me when I think of it.
I never really forgave McCarthy for just sputtering out,
a big narcissistic windbag who didn’t really care (it seemed to me,
though, as I said, I didn’t know him, to be fair)—
as we all had to make way for Nixon.
And my father died a sad man, all the euphoria of his youth dried up,
his ambition to be a recognized writer.
It’s Lowell who should get the last word, though.
Before he died in 1977 in the back of a cab in New York City,
Lowell wrote that, somehow, after all his prodigious writing and rewriting,
nothing seemed to stick, nothing remained
to really hold onto.
“All’s misalliance,” he famously said in Epilogue, “but why not say what happened?”
Still, I think
the line that comes later about Vermeer’s
“girl solid with longing”
is awful.
