1968 - Mark Kurlansky [79]
The Russian grew visibly uncomfortable as he said, “I know nothing of such matters.” Ginsberg quickly changed the subject to another favorite, drug use. Yevtushenko said, “These two subjects—homosexuality and narcotics—are not known to me, and I feel they are juvenile preoccupations. They have no importance here in Russia to us.”
In 1962, when British composer Benjamin Britten wrote War Requiem, he was not thinking about Vietnam. He was commemorating the reopening of Coventry Cathedral, bombed during World War II. The text came from Wilfred Owen’s poems about World War I. But by 1968 War Requiem was considered to be “antiwar,” and anything that was antiwar had a following. Wilfred Owen’s nearly forgotten poems were being read again, not only because they expressed a hatred of war, but because of his sad life story. Owen had been a company commander in World War I who discovered his poetic talent while venting about his war experiences. He almost went on to a brilliant literary career, but a week before the war ended he was killed in combat at the age of twenty-five and most of his work was published posthumously. In 1968 not only was the poetry of Owen becoming popular again, but also that of Rupert Brooke, another young poet who died in World War I. The poet-victim of war seemed to be an irresistible setting for literature in 1968. Even Guillaume Apollinaire, the French writer who died the day before World War I ended from a shrapnel wound to the head months earlier, was attaining cult status in 1968. Better known in the art world as the critic who promoted Picasso, Braque, Derain, his own mistress, Marie Laurencin, and many others—the inventor of the word surreal—he was also a poet. In 1968, when a new English translation of The Poet Assassinated was published, Richard Freedman, reviewing it for Life, said, “A half-century after his death Apollinaire is more than ever a big man on campus.”
It seemed the literary capital of writers who had opposed wars, any wars, was on the rise. Hermann Hesse, the German pacifist who moved to Switzerland to evade military service in World War I, was enjoying a popularity among youth greater than he had known during most of his life. Although he died in 1962, his novels, with an almost Marcusian sense of the alienating quality of modern society and a fascination with Asian mysticism, were perfectly suited to the youth of the late sixties. He might have been amazed to discover that in October 1967 a hard-driving electric rock band would name itself after his novel Steppenwolf. According to the twenty-four-year-old Canadian lead singer, guitar and harmonica player, John Kay, the group, best known in 1968 for “Born to Be Wild,” had a philosophy similar to that of the hero of the Hesse novel. “He rejects middle-class standards,” Kay explained, “and yet he wants to find happiness within or alongside them. So do we.”
In 1968, it seemed everyone aspired to be a poet. Eugene McCarthy, senator and presidential candidate, published his first two poems in the April 12 issue of Life magazine. He said that he had started writing poetry about a year before. Since no one in the working press believes that a politician does anything just by chance in an election year, Life magazine columnist Shana Alexander pointed out, “Lately McCarthy has discovered, with some surprise, that people who like his politics also tend to like poetry. Crowds surge forward eagerly when they learn Robert Lowell is traveling with the candidate.”
This turn toward verse showed in McCarthy an understanding of his supporters that was surprising in a candidate who was seldom caught doing anything to curry favor. Most of the time, conventional political professionals and the journalists who covered them did not understand him at all. McCarthy would skip speeches and events without warning. When television host David Frost asked him what