Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  However, President Kennedy had taken him up, and in the last year or two he became a sort of unofficial Poet Laureate more honored, I suspect, for his connection with the White House than for any spontaneous response of the American people to the body of his work. At any rate, when he died, either eighty-seven or eighty-eight years of age (no one is quite sure), his last days were full of honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, as his early days had been full of menial farm chores, odd jobs that never paid off, and easygoing obscurity.

  He was born in San Francisco of a New Hampshire journalist and a Scottish mother. His father died when he was ten, and his mother took him back East to settle in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and he became and remained a New Englander. From his nineteenth year to his thirty-eighth he managed to get only fourteen poems in print. In the meantime, he had tried and failed to be a student at Dartmouth College, but he did later stick out two years at Harvard. In the five years between these two grim efforts to be formally educated he was a bobbin boy in the mills, a cobbler, a small-town editor, a schoolteacher, and at last a farmer. But the soil of New England, as he came to reflect later, is a glacial relic, for most of the year the victim of alternating fire and ice. For this reason, or possibly because he was too obsessed with the natural objects of the countryside to be a good farmer, he had to eke out a living; which he did by going from his chores to teach English at one country school and to try teaching “psychology” (a new fetish discovered by William James) at another.

  So in his thirty-seventh year he was neither a prosperous farmer nor an accepted poet. From his long meditations on the country life and landscape of New England he had shored up two small books of poems: A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Neither of them found a publisher until he moved to England in 1912 with the set intention “to write and be poor without further scandal in the family.” There he lived and walked in the West Country and was befriended and admired by Wilfrid Gibson and Edward Thomas, two early Georgians with whom he seemed at the time to have a lot in common. He had left America with a family reputation as a dilettante, but when he came back he was greeted, by a small audience, as a pro. He had no more trouble making a modest living, and for nearly thirty years, on and off, he lived on another farm, was the so-called poet in residence at Amherst, and did other agreeable stretches as a teacher at the University of Michigan, at Harvard, but mostly at Middlebury College in Vermont, and then again at Dartmouth. He put out his books of poetry at about five-year intervals until the 1940s saw him at the peak of his productivity and his authority, bustling around “collecting sticks”—as he used to put it—for what he would ignite as annual “poetic bonfires.”

  From 1924 on he took the Pulitzer Prize for poetry at regular—about six-year—intervals. This habit, because it set him up as a solid Establishment poet, made his more intellectual admirers begin to think that there must be less in his work than met the eye. Indeed, Frost suffered for a long time from the incapacity of the critics to overcome certain stock responses to various schools of poetry that were then in fashion. Because he had been a friend of the English Georgians, he was for too long taken by some people to be an oversimple rebel against the developing technology of modern life, an expatriate cricket-and-ale rustic. And because, when he got back to America, he met the high tide of the “new” poetry of the Chicago school, he had to be looked on as a New England Sandburg. And because, in the 1930s, he maintained his lifelong lack of interest in politics, the socially conscious writers of the New Deal dismissed him as a cranky escapist. We never seem to learn—though the evidence is stacked high in any library—that contemporary prejudices about a writer very rarely seem relevant in the long view. Frost was, in fact, as absorbed, and in some ways as difficult, a poet as Emily Dickinson, whose entire meditations on life were conducted inside the house in Amherst, Massachusetts, from which she barred all visitors and rarely stirred in more than twenty years. Frost was, let us say, an outdoor Emily Dickinson, which is a curiosity almost too bizarre to bear thinking about. Even when he was writing what later was admitted to be his finest poetry, his admirers were again of the wrong sort to satisfy the literary lawmakers. The people who called him “our classic New England poet” also tended to see Will Rogers as the Mark Twain of the 1920s, and Pearl Buck as the traveling George Eliot of the 1930s. This is a kind of reverse sentimentality and a usual reflex of highbrows, who are often more concerned to validate a man’s reputation than to enjoy him. It never troubled Frost much, and it would be a mistake to think of him at any time as a martyr. But for many years it made good men back away from him.

  Other people, who were willing to be impressed, were put off by more honest reasons. They turned with pleasurable anticipation to his work, and what did they find? They found verses as limp and bare, and frequently as limp with bathos, as the verses on a country calendar. But if you persisted with him, you found that he persisted ahead of you. Sometimes he reads like a man with no poetical gift whatsoever who is determined to slog his way through some simple fact of nature and discover, at all costs, some universal truth. But what ought to give pause to the unwary is that there is always a mind at work, a wriggling, probing, and in the end a tragic mind. The very titles of his poems are deceptively ordinary. “The Cow in Apple Time,” about a cow drooling cider, sounds like a humdrum thing. But it is not. Listen.

  … Having tasted fruit,

  She scorns a pasture withering to the root.

  She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten

  The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.

  She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

  She bellows on a knoll against the sky.

  Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

  It was not until after the Second War, when the flame of the Harriet Monroe revolution had died down, and left so many of its fiery figures mere cinders along the way, that another generation of critics noticed Frost still there, still writing his knotty monosyllables. They began to be excited by the suspicion that here possibly was an American Donne, or a Yankee Theocritus, or—a harder thing to grapple with—Robert Frost, an original. The idea that a huckleberry or a birch tree, or the games a boy played—with that birch tree—who was “too far from town to learn baseball”; the idea that these things could bear the most unsentimental and profound contemplation was at first frightening, until the reader inched his way through the roughness of the underbrush and, like “A Soldier”—in Frost’s poem—discovered that

  … the obstacle that checked

  and tripped the body, shot the spirit on

  Further than target ever showed or shone.

  By the time that he was being accepted as a pure and gritty-minded pastoral poet, about as far removed from the Georgians as Thomas Hardy or Brer Rabbit, he himself was rejecting the physical world as a tremendous harbinger of winter and sickness. You could say more simply that he was a genuine poet and the oncoming of old age stirred him:

  Petals I may have once pursued

  Leaves are all my darker mood.

  At the age of seventy he was ready to upbraid God for the fate of Job and for His general cruelty to the human race. This challenge, in “The Masque of Reason,” was too much for him, but by now the critics were ready to grant that unlike any poet before or since, Frost had used the ordinary vernacular of a New England farmer to probe a few fundamental doubts. In poetry that is subtler in structure even than most vernacular, he transmuted rocks and flowers, wind and berries and hired men, and striking mill workers, and boys swinging on trees, into the purest symbols of what is most hardy but most perishable in the human condition.

  To the great mass of Americans, I suppose, he was simply a noble old man, said to be a great poet, who had come to be a colorful human adjunct to the refurbishing of the White House, rather like one of those plain hooked rugs, woven by a grandmother, with which wealthy New Englanders or Virginians living in exquisite Colonial houses will sometimes pay a small tribute to their origins. He
must have learned to live with the knowledge that to most of his countrymen he was known only by a couple of lines from one poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” just as John Donne must groan in his grave at all the twentieth-century people who know him only by the thought that “No man is an island.” In our time, which is the age of mass marketing, we have to package our great men as quickly and simply as possible to make them acceptable to the family trade.

  At the end, though, there was a lucky occasion on which his true readers and his uncomprehending large public could see him alike for what he was. In the icicle brilliance of Kennedy’s inauguration he stood in twelve degrees of frost and tried to read aloud a poem specifically written for the great occasion. The sun stabbed at his failing eyes, the wind slapped at him, the white light from the snow was too much for him, and he finally gave up and spoke out, stumblingly, what he knew, his fingers kneading his palms in a secret fury and his white hair blowing in sloppy waves against his forehead. It was an embarrassing moment for the president and the officials who had brought him, and for the huge crowd. But it was as good an end as any he might have imagined: an old farmer stripped down at last to a blinded oak of a man, tangled in his own branches, made foolish by the sun and the cold and the wind, by the simple elements he had once rejoiced in but which now he had come to mistrust as the mockers of humankind from Eden to Washington, D.C.

  13

  Goldwater:

  Jefferson in the Desert

  (1998)

  They call it, always called it since the white man came there, the Salt River Valley.

  The trouble with the word “valley” for those of us who live in temperate climates is: it calls up a picture of a cozy plain lying between the hills. But what I have in mind is a semitropical stretch of pure desert, forty miles east and west, twenty north and south, a vast silent plain of yellow, brown land: what Balzac called “God, with Man left out.” The only upright things that interrupt the forty-mile flats are saguaro cactus trees, which look like spiky giants with their arms upraised in the act of surrender. Here the cold month is January, getting down as low as fifty degrees Fahrenheit—in midsummer, it’s mostly over a hundred degrees, in any discoverable shade. Here, for how many centuries nobody can truly guess, an Indian tribe built adobe houses, dug canals, prospered at farming and disappeared. The only name they are known by is unlikely to be their true name: Hohokam—meaning “the people who have gone.”

  Flash forward to the late 1860s. Bang in the middle of this desert a white man, a prospector, pitched a tent, saw there was water from the nearby Salt River, and old canals to run through. He set up a hay camp, then grew other crops. (Contrary to the popular city folks’ belief, the desert is wonderfully fertile—they always say “Spit on the desert and a flower will grow.”)

  Within a year, along came a young man who would help the prospector build new canals and mount eight-mule teams to haul supplies forty miles to the nearest army camp. This pioneer was an Englishman with the improbable name of Darrel Duppa. As always in the West, an Englishman, on account of his fancy accent, was given a title. He was known in Arizona as “Lord” Darrel Duppa. He is described—in the only book I can find a mention of him—as “an adventurer, scholar, inebriate and all-around regular fella.” He comes into the story here for one memorable reason. Once settled in this primitive village, he looked around at the prehistoric mounds and the ancient canals—thought of the once-prospering tribe and thought to call this place after the mythical bird that was consumed by fire but always rose from the ashes. “From this village,” he said, “will arise a city, Phoenix-like from the ashes of the past” They called it Phoenix. It is so today, and it is the capital city of Arizona.

  In no time, the village acquired the primitive necessities: adobe houses, a store or two, butcher shop, a rude hotel, half a dozen saloons and—though it didn’t yet have paved streets, it manufactured ice and delivered it in wheelbarrows. And once the railroad came through, bearing new westbound Americans, many of them stayed and baited the natives who, by then (a few hundred) were mostly Mexicans. There was not much rejoicing in those days in the prospect of multiculturalism, and weekend brawls between newcomer Americans and the Mexicans, to the accompaniment of random gunfire, soon compelled the necessity of a courthouse and a jail.

  There were 1,800 inhabitants when the place was incorporated as a city and, after a boisterous election, got itself a city council to replace a vigilante band that had handled the frequent murders with straightforward lynchings. Now Phoenix had a legal government and legislators, who loved to call themselves Solons. First thing a western town official did once he got elected (this is a detail that the movies have always got right) was to go off and buy himself a silk hat. In the desert? He repaired at once to the shop of a recently arrived Pole—a Jewish immigrant, name of Goldwasser. Mr. Goldwasser was— when he wagoned into Arizona—a traveling tailor. He traveled no more. He settled in Phoenix and eventually started a chain of clothing stores and, in time, Arizona’s first department store: with a large painted sign proclaiming Mr. Goldwasser’s new—English—name: Gold-water.

  This tailor was the grandfather of Barry Goldwater, former United States senator from Arizona, once Republican candidate for president—a thoroughly defeated candidate who had more historic influence on his party’s future than any other defeated presidential candidate you can name. Who now, except professional historians, remembers William Crawford, Lewis Cass, Alton B. Parker, even Michael Dukakis?

  But Barry Goldwater. The present senator from Arizona, who succeeded Goldwater when he resigned, said at the funeral on Wednesday: “In all the histories of American politics, Barry Goldwater will remain a chapter unto himself. The rest of us will have to make do as footnotes.”

  Barry Goldwater died last week in his ranch house overlooking the Salt River Valley. He was eighty-nine. And I have gone into the history of the place his grandfather came to, because it explains why Barry Goldwater was a new American type as a presidential candidate. He was a frontier westerner. It was as if John Wayne or Gary Cooper had come to take over a New York gents’ club. Before him, the Republican party had drawn its presidential runners from the Eastern cities and the farming Midwest. The people who ran the party were upper- and middle-class Eastern Establishment.

  For thirty years, the Democratic party had seen itself captured and overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and his introduction of Lloyd George’s (more accurately, Bismarck’s) Welfare State, administered by a strong central government. The force of this policy on a depressed nation, and its eager acceptance by the voters, compelled successive Republican candidates to bemoan the New Deal but accept its methods and beg to be reelected so they could perform it better. It looked, for a time, as if the Republican party and its old beliefs would never rise again. Roosevelt’s successor was a shrewd and boisterous midwestern disciple: Harry S. Truman. Then there was—in Goldwater’s version—a lamentable blip: General Eisenhower, who had decided to be a Republican and ran as such. Goldwater called him “a dime store New Dealer.”

  Suddenly, at the Republican Convention in San Francisco in 1964, out of the desert sprang this straight-backed, immensely handsome Barry Goldwater. “Immensely” was carefully chosen—he looked like one of the presidential figures carved in rock on that western mountain.

  At that convention, which spurned the Eastern Establishment and its leader, and nominated Goldwater, he shouted: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” I don’t suppose many of the millions listening to it figured out what it meant, but it sounded manly and downright and the convention hall shook under the roaring applause. The word “extremism” was just what the Democrats wanted to hear.

  The Democrats had only to remind the voters that Goldwater had backed the malodorous Senator McCarthy in finding Communists everywhere, and they had him whipped before the vote. Add, on election eve, the note that the senator had voted against the first Civil Rights act, which abolished the segregation of the
races. In truth, Goldwater abhorred segregation, had long ago integrated the Arizona National Guard and many years before brought blacks into the running of his family department store. But Goldwater felt, and said, “It’s not the government’s part to make men moral. Integration should be left to the states.” If they don’t do it, he implied, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. It was a little too idealistic for most people, who knew that left to themselves many states would have stayed segregated forever.

  In truth, Goldwater’s flaw as a practicing politician of high principle was a streak of naïveté which allowed him to embrace as allies shabby people and malicious people who simply said aloud they were against the things he was against. He assumed they shared his principles when all they shared was a gross prejudice. Senator Joseph McCarthy even the hysterical Birch Society, were acceptable as fellow warriors. (“They’re against Communism, aren’t they? Nothing wrong in that.”) When sixty-seven senators voted to censure McCarthy and dismiss his career into oblivion, Goldwater did not join them. When the House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment against President Nixon, Goldwater was crushed. He had trusted Nixon absolutely. But once he pondered the notorious tapes, and watched Nixon’s subsequent writings of self justification, Goldwater was appalled. Nixon, he now discovered, “lied to the Congress, lied to the people, lied to his own men. He was the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.”