Essays After Eighty (3 page)

After Ziegler left the table, doubtless to conceal plans for bombing Cambodia, Charles Waldo Bailey II walked to our table and was cordial.

 

I did not return until Jane and I flew to Jimmy Carter's poetry do, in January of 1980. The President himself had not yet published his book of poems, but it was known that he liked the stuff. A year before Reagan took over, the Carters decided to honor American poets. Jane and I circled the White House in a taxi looking for our entrance, and passed a bunch of tourists waiting to enter. “Look at the poets,” I said, laughing, “trying to get in.” When the taxi followed our directions, we joined the poets trying to get in.

The poetic crowd was huge. There must have been sixty poets, and each brought a guest. The line budged slowly through security toward its destination. I seemed to recognize the face in front of me, surely from a book jacket. Then I realized he was the best-selling poet of the era, Rod McKuen, who wrote
Listen to the Warm
. In every generation there is one poet whom high school boys read to high school girls in order to get into their pants. In my day it was Walter Benton, whose
This Is My Beloved
was endorsed by the anthologist Louis Untermeyer in publishers' ads (“I certainly do not find these poems pornographic”) that swept a teenage mob into bookstores. Rod McKuen's poems didn't approach pornography—though they did approach Hallmark. The White House had asked the National Endowment for the Arts to list poets for invitation, and the original list did not include McKuen. Pressure crashed on the NEA—from furious agents and publicists, and from Congress, which controls the budget. Rod McKuen stood in line.

A dozen poets read their poems, in groups of three. Jane and I were not among the readers, so we listened to Phil Levine and his gang. Afterward we gathered to mingle, chatting and drinking white wine. I had not seen John Ashbery or Adrienne Rich for years; they had been my classmates at Harvard. We talked to my old friend Jim Wright, who walked with a cane. (Soon I saw him at Mount Sinai, then at a hospice in the Bronx, where he died.) There were Maxine Kumin, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Creeley, and De Snodgrass. We shook the President's hand. He greeted us all, looking in our eyes, asking where we came from. Of course he expected everybody to be a professor, but by that time I had resigned from Michigan and moved to the old family house. When I told him “New Hampshire,” he said, “Dartmouth?” with a little nod of his head. I was flustered and named my hometown, “Wilmot.” He said, “Oh,” almost as if he remembered Wilmot State. There is not even a store in Wilmot.

 

The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson was President. It gives grants to artists and to arts institutions: painters and museums, writers and publishers. Late in the 1980s, I returned to Washington for NEA panels, once to support poets with fellowships, another time to fund literary organizations. Then in 1991 I became an NEA councilor. (I took the job in order to defend obscene art from congressional attack.) I spent boring sessions in the NEA quarters at the Old Post Office, and attended the 1991 White House ceremony for the National Medal of Arts. I sat in an auditorium to observe Bush the First bestow the medals. (I had seen him before, in 1948, when I was a Harvard freshman and the World War II veteran played first base for Yale.) As Bush stood on a raised platform, I watched a Marine help the country singer Roy Acuff climb two steps for the bestowal. I do not remember some of the honorees, but others included the painter Richard Diebenkorn, the dancer Pearl Primus, and the violinist Isaac Stern. The President said a word or two—this oilman from Texas with a desiccated Ivy League accent—and put a bemedaled ribbon around each neck. In the receiving line, I shook Bush's hand. (Jane wouldn't touch my hand for a week.) We repaired to another room for lunch. The President made mild introductory remarks, and lunch was exemplary. During coffee, Bush rose rapping on his water glass with a spoon. “Well,” he said, “I don't know about you artists, but I have work to do.” We murmured the required laugh. “You're all heroes of the arts, but there are other heroes too. Fifty years ago Joe DiMaggio hit in fifty-six straight games, and Ted Williams batted .406.” He swept his arm toward the end of the room, and we turned to see Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams standing in the doorway smiling. The artist-heroes leapt in a standing ovation. Isaac Stern, short and plump and old, thundered his palms with gusto—while the tall men in the doorway disappeared as swiftly as they had arrived.

In time the word spread. This afternoon the President's work would fly him with Williams and DiMaggio to the All-Star Game in Toronto.

 

In 1995 Jane died of leukemia. I grieved, I mourned, I wrote about her. I read her poems and mine at colleges and conferences. Much later I was Poet Laureate of the United States for a year, which allowed me more of Washington's museums. The Library of Congress was welcoming and helpful, but I was not a productive Laureate, and resigned after one year. I returned to the District with Linda for an interview with Diane Rehm. I returned for my daughter Philippa's fiftieth birthday party.

 

Then, in February 2011, came a telephone call from the current director of the NEA. President Obama would award me a National Medal of Arts on March second. I would go back to the District of Columbia to be adorned, as twenty years earlier I had watched Bush the First adorn others. Recipients in 2011 included several musical sorts—Van Cliburn, James Taylor, Sonny Rollins—as well as artists and directors and biographers and institutions. Meryl Streep could not attend because she was being Margaret Thatcher in London. Ella Baff received an arts medal on behalf of Jacob's Pillow and its dancers. The National Endowment for the Humanities honored its recipients on the same occasion, and somehow included three novelists. Philip Roth had already received the arts medal, during the Clinton administration, and I was delighted to find two other literary friends—Joyce Carol Oates and Wendell Berry. I asked a humanities administrator why novelists belonged to humanities and not to art, and she told me that no one had any idea.

The night before the awards, the two endowments sponsored a huge, fatuous, black-tie dinner, I suppose an annual perk for ill-paid staffers. The high point of the evening was when the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair gave an elegant keynote address. All of us were splendidly outfitted. It was shocking to see Wendell in an immaculate rented tuxedo instead of his usual overalls. Linda had brought a long and fancy dress with a sparkly top, which cost her $37.45 at a consignment shop. My formalwear was a fifty-year-old acrylic tux, a plain white shirt, and a clip-on tie.

Next afternoon, we arrived at the White House an hour before the ceremony. Men and women in uniform gave us a brief tour of decorative rooms, then showed us the empty East Room, where we would receive our medals. Each of us sat in an assigned chair, and we rehearsed protocol—how we would climb to the platform, how we would turn toward the President, how we would return to our seats. A small Marine practiced saying our names aloud. Van Cliburn corrected a vowel. Mark di Suvero gave detailed instruction. My name was no problem. Most of us wore dark suits. Sonny Rollins wore a flowing red silk shirt and Mark di Suvero a bright red jacket. Ella Baff's shoes were equally red. I had planned to use my one remaining suit, blue silk bought in Bombay in 1993, but the pants no longer fit. My Poet Laureate outfit and my gray flannels had been perforated by moths. I wore khakis, and found a black jacket that would cover my white shirt from the night before. I added a cherished red silk necktie bought in Shanghai.

We waited next door while the guests arrived and settled in. Then we marched in order down the center aisle to take our seats up front. The band stopped, and we were applauded. Michelle Obama sat in the front row wearing a shiny green dress. The President in a grave suit entered past a table heaped with medals. He declared that this occasion was more pleasing than most of his work. He praised the centrality of art and literature, and talked of Robert Frost's visit to Russia, and of
Portnoy's Complaint
. Mostly, all I could hear was my heartbeat. When he stopped, the Marine summoned us each by name, and identified me as a former Lorit. A military man took my arm to help me climb two stairs, as I had seen another do for Roy Acuff. I told the President how much I admired him. He hugged my shoulder and bent speaking several sentences into my left ear, which is totally deaf. I heard nothing except my heart's pounding. When my friends watched on the Internet, seeing the President address me, they asked what he had said. I told them that he said either “Your work is immeasurably great” or “All your stuff is disgusting crap,” but I couldn't make out which.

He draped a purple ribbon around my neck from which hung a heavy, gold-colored medal, and the soldier helped me step down. When all of us had been honored, we returned up the aisle we had descended. Nancy Pelosi sat in the crowd and I gave her a thumbs-up. We returned to the room next door, where the President and the First Lady joined us. We lined up to be photographed, first all together, then singly between our host and hostess. Each of us posed for two seconds and was replaced by the next medalist. It was a few weeks before I received the ten-by-twelve, signed (as it were) by Barack and Michelle Obama. “Thank you for years of inspiring work!” One Size Fits All. In the picture they both grin gorgeously—while I am perpetually unable to smile when posing for a photograph. I look as sour as Dick Cheney, sinking between two tall, elegant figures.

We exited into an area where we met the rest of the world. I hugged Linda, and Allison my granddaughter, who had studied art history and English at Vassar and whom I had been able to add to the guest list. I saw friends I didn't expect, and mingled with other medal wearers. We had been silent and shy. We drank some nonalcoholic liquid, and after ten minutes it was as if we had drained a dozen martinis. Everyone became loud, friendly, and jolly. I told James Taylor that we once sat on a platform together, not aware of each other's line of work. I chattered with Joyce Carol Oates and happily greeted Wendell Berry. Mark di Suvero, Ella Baff, and Van Cliburn bubbled. Sonny Rollins was quiet and the best to talk with. My son had attended his 9/11 concert, so I brought him my son's gratitude. Linda sat chatting with him about politics and literature for half an hour; they exchanged addresses and later letters. Allison moved among writers and musicians she had read and listened to. Everybody took photographs of everybody standing with everybody.

Gradually we diminished. Our exhausted party returned to the Willard. My agents took us out for dinner with the Berrys. Allison at twenty-three was carded for her glass of wine. Wendell, who sat opposite my beautiful granddaughter, insisted on being carded also, and chatted with us all. His laugh—as Jane used to say—makes the best sound in the universe. After dinner, when a taxi took my family back to the Willard, I completed my crowded day with customary aplomb. Stone sober, I fell down as I stepped out of the taxi, and a bellhop caught me midair.

 

Leaving Washington this time, more than sixty years after Eisenhower's parade, I returned to my New Hampshire solitude. I cherish my visits over the decades—marching against the war, Jimmy Carter's party, defending unacceptable art, honors for Isaac Stern, the apparition of baseball heroes, my daughter's fiftieth birthday, President Obama's embrace—but nothing in human life is unmixed, and honors inevitably balance themselves with self-doubt. Everyone knows that medals are rubber. During his victory parade, did Eisenhower consider that George Marshall was possibly the better general? My daughter enjoyed her birthday party, but of course she thought of another decade. A friend who won the Pulitzer told me that, if she also won the National Book Award, she would know that her work was unredeemable. In 2011 the District of Columbia sent me home feeling not only worthless but ecstatic.

 

The next day I got back to writing. What else was there?

Well, there was anticlimax. When Linda and I returned to my house, we found a stack of five
Concord Monitor
s, the local paper, delivered in kindness by the morning deliverer. Top of the first page was a photograph of the President looming over me, hanging the medal around my neck. My mouth is open in life's widest smile as I confront the neatly dressed Obama in my sports coat and khakis, with my frizzy hair and reckless beard. I thought it was the best photograph of my life. It must have been Alexandra Petri's favorite too, who blogs for the
Washington Post
and a day later posted the joyous picture. (She graduated from Harvard in 2010, fifty-nine years after I did.) She identified me, called me a poet, and assured her audience that I was not a yeti. She announced a contest for a caption. Entry upon entry rolled in, uniformly gormless and gleeful with ridicule. Then there were reactions. I was praised and Ms. Petri was scolded. I was defended as a poet, and flattered despite my appearance. Philip Terzian wrote a kind essay in the
Weekly Standard
—but attacked the
Washington Post
as liberal. An Alaskan eye picked it up, and Sarah Palin blogged to defend a nameless “eighty-two-year-old cancer survivor” against the
WaPo
. Of course I enjoyed the attention, an extra scoop on my ice cream cone. With our increasing longevity, Ms. Petri should live to be a hundred. May she grow a beard.

IN DECEMBER OF
1952 my first wife Kirby and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. At the border crossing, on a two-lane macadam road with no other car in sight, we stopped to present documents that permitted us to enter Marshal Tito's country. Walking back to our Morris, we met a man approaching from a big black car headed toward Austria. He looked important, like a diplomat or a capo. He had seen the initials of national origin on our small convertible, and addressed us in English. I held in my hand our confusing travel directions. We asked the man if Zagreb was straight ahead.