4
PARTISAN REVIEW
service, and to crown his labors with the f arne of a public man, a
patriotic orator, a defender of Democracy, an officer of the state,
and a recognized spokesman of his nation, is a feat-a whole sys–
tem of feats-for whose like one gropes vainl} among the records
of modern art. Yet Mr. MacLeish, at the age of forty-eight, has
done all these things.
He has lamented the disappearance of Miltons and Voltaires
from public life and is fully aware of his dazzling opportunity.
He realizes how much latent American hostility to art and literature
has been defeated by his own success. By an extraordinary case
of the felicity of tragic events, the violent straits in which European
humanity found itself plunged in the fall of 1939 materialized at
precisely the right moment to give him his chance to impress on
his fellow-citizens the fact that a Milton not only should be living
in this hour but by miraculous good fortune
is.
In fact, it's hard to keep
~p
with him these days. He has
always been a man of many parts but now we begin to understand
why his favorite Greek myth is that of Proteus.
6
He has addressed
audiences and banquet tables in many parts of the republic. The
Pan-American Union, the Cranbrook Foundation, the Adult Edu–
cation Council, the Stockbridge Musical Festival, and the Congress
of American Writers in the heydey of the
People'~
Front have all
heard his voice.
It
has sounded at the laying of cornerstones, the
unveiling of plaques, the dedication of libraries, at commencement
exercises, and before many clubs and forums. He has been a Bones
man at Yale, a student of law at Harvard, a Left Bank emigre ·in
post-War Paris, an editor of
Fortune,
a curator of the Nieman
Fund at Harvard University, an endorser of books and of Henry
B.
Luce's
March of Time
movie,
The Ramparts We Watch
(a
paste-up job of old news-reels and amateur acting that will doubt–
less figure to future historians of the present crisis much as the
war-scare films of J. Stuart Blackton and similar propagandists
figured in the public hysteria that culminated in the War of 1917).
The Luce papers have told how he has even found time to become
a ghost-writer for our national political leaders, Secretary Ickes's
Fourth of July speech on the big razzberry laugh of the Americans
having shown traces of his hand and accent. From the part he
played among the esthetic exiles of Paris during the 'Twenties he
passed without embarrassment to his share in the work of the
