Muses' Choice

While the Republicans were gathering in Miami Beach and Hubert Humphrey was campaigning in the Midwest, Eugene McCarthy was incommunicado at week's end on an island off Maine, relaxing and visiting with his good friend, Poet Robert Lowell. An odd combination? Not exactly, for if Eugene McCarthy is a very cool politician, he is also an ardent versifier. If elected, he would be the first dedicated President-poet since John Quincy Adams--and one of the few rhymemakers in the contemporary world to double as head of government.*

Though he has always been a poetry buff, McCarthy only began writing his own about four years ago, as a "kind of escape." He will scribble a few lines in longhand at odd moments in planes or hotel rooms, then type them out at home and file them away in a looseleaf notebook. Knocking on McCarthy's door during this year's presidential campaign, Paul Gorman, one of his speechwriters, found that the candidate was too busy to talk. With a book entitled Mammals of North America in front of him, the Senator was writing a poem called Wolverines. "I was afraid," confesses Gorman, "that the next day he'd get up and say 'Ladies and gentlemen . . . wolverines.' "

McCarthy's stanzas often blend poetic reflection with political undertones. Typical is Communions, which describes the shooting of deer at the L.B.J. ranch in Texas:

Gentle the deer with solicitude Solace them with salt Comfort them with apples Prepare them for the rectitude Of Man who will come A stranger with the unfamiliar gun . . .

The deer would be so "gentled," McCarthy explained to Louis Simpson, a Pulitzer prizewinning poet who wrote about McCarthy's poetry in this week's New York Times Book Review, that they would almost lick out of the President's hand. Then they would be shot, their heads mounted for famous guests, such as John F. Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey.

Perhaps the most quoted McCarthy work, Lament of an Aging Politician, ends with the lines:

I have left Act I, for involution and Act II. There mired in complexity

I cannot write Act III.

"Act I," says McCarthy, "states the problem. Act II deals with the complications, and Act III resolves them. I'm an Act II man. That's where I live--involution and complexity." Franklin Roosevelt, he adds, was another Act II man. Lyndon Johnson is all Act III. "What does history say about the Great Society? What will the future think of Lyndon Johnson?"

Smuggler of Truth. The poet whom McCarthy would most like to emulate is William Butler Yeats. But probably his closest direct influence is Lowell, whom he calls a "poet of purity and of parsimony" and a "double agent of doubt, smuggler of truth."

His prosody is still somewhat imitative, and his rhymes are occasionally a little flat. Nonetheless, McCarthy must be reckoned a talented poet. Like Benjamin Disraeli, who titillated England with a long series of romantic novels, his art takes added interest from his position. And like Disraeli, who continued to write fiction even while he was Prime Minister, a President McCarthy might find that power would necessarily lead him into Act III.

* Others: Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh, who also authored a play, The Bamboo Dragon, which flopped in Paris in 1923.

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