Robie Mayhew Macauley (May 31, 1919 – November 20, 1995) was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned more than 50 years.
Biography
Early life Robie Mayhew Macauley was born on May 31, 1919, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was the older brother of the noted photographer and movie producer C. Cameron Macauley. His uncle owned and published the Hudsonville newspaper, The Ottawa Times (named for Ottawa County), and Macauley used the printing press to publish his first books of fiction and poetry."Leslie W. Boyer, James F. Guinane, Charles C. Macauley: Our Final Salutes", by Guy Miller, The Fossil, Volume 104, Number 1, Whole Number 334, Glenview, Illinois, October 2007 At age 18 he printed and bound a limited edition of Solomon's Cat, a previously unpublished poem by Walter Duranty,Walter Duranty, I Write As I Please, Read Books, 2007 , p. 331. setting the type and engraving the illustrations."Scoops Big Publishers On Book of Poetry", The Washington Post, Feb. 6, 1938, p. PY1.
Education As an undergraduate at Olivet College, he was a student of Ford Madox Ford (describing him as "my first teacher and editorial mentor."Howard Junker, "Editor's Note: The Last Word: West Coast Writers and Artists", ZYZZYVA Spring 1999).Macauley's 1950 introduction to Ford's Parade’s End includes his reflections as an undergraduate.Ford, Ford Madox. 1950. Parade’s End. With an Introd. By Robie Macauley. [1st Borzoi ed.]. New York: Knopf.
Macauley then won a three-year literary prize scholarship and transferred to Kenyon College to be a student of John Crowe Ransom. There he lived in a writer's house with Robert Lowell,Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, Faber Faber Inc; First UK edition, May 1983. Peter Taylor,McAlexander, Hugh, "Peter Taylor: The Undergraduate Years at Kenyon" The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 3/4 (Summer – Autumn, 1999), pp. 43-57 and Randall Jarrell. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa during February 1941, and the same year was awarded a fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.Susan Hobson, "New Creative Writers: 17 Novelists Whose First Work Appears This Season", Library Journal, October 1, 1952, p. 1642. He graduated summa cum laude from Kenyon in June 1941.
War years He was drafted in March 1942 and served in World War II as a special agent in the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) with the 97th Infantry Division, in the "Ruhr Pocket" and then in Japan after the war.Kennedy, Thomas E., "A Last Conversation with Robie Macauley", Agnii, Vol. 45, 1997.
On April 23, 1945, Macauley's division helped liberate Flossenbürg concentration camp. Macauley later said, "I entered some concentration camps the day we liberated them--the most horrifying days of my life. My job was to interview survivors. Most of the bodies that I saw had been stripped and it was impossible to tell which were those of Jews and which of Christians. Nazi murder was a great leveler, fully ecumenical... Hitler's bell tolled for all..."Macauley R. "Who Should Mourn?", The New York Times, Letters to the Editor, August 8, 1976.
Macauley wrote four autobiographical short stories based on his experiences doing intelligence work, collected in The End of Pity and Other Stories, (1957). In "A Nest of Gentlefolk", (winner of the 1949 Furioso Prize) he describes the CIC's futile search for Nazi war criminals in the war-ravaged town of Hohenlohe;Macauley R. "A Nest of Gentlefolk." Furioso, 1949:5-19. in The Thin Voice he describes the unsuccessful attempt by an American officer to prevent some freed Russian POWs from killing a vicious collaborator in Heiligenkreuz, Germany;Macauley R. "The Thin Voice." The Kenyon Review, 1951;13(1):50-63. in "The End of Pity" he tells the story of a woman's suicide after visiting her ruined house in a combat zone in Oberkassel;Macauley R. "The End of Pity." New World Writing, 1952. and in "The Mind is its Own Place" he describes his brief post-war encounter in Karuizawa, Japan with Captain Kermit Beahan, bombardier of the bomber "The Bockscar" who released the atomic bomb over Nagasaki. Macauley described Beahan as "a young captain with a college-boy face [who] had suffered some strange mutation of feeling so deep and so destructive..."Macauley R. "The Mind Is Its Own Place", The Partisan Review, September 1953.
According to Macauley's letters archived at the University of North Carolina, while in Karuizawa he was friends with former Japanese Ambassador to the US Saburō Kurusu and German Admiral Paul Wenneker, as well as pianist Leo Sirota and artist Paul Jacoulet. He was also acquainted with three-time former Japanese Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe, to whom he presented a copy of The American Leviathan: The Republic in the Machine Age, written by Charles A. Beard.
In his capacity as CIC Station Chief, he supervised the arrests, on October 30, 1945, of a number of prominent Nazi leaders who were in hiding in Karuizawa:"26 Germans in Spy Ring Seized", The New York Times, October 30, 1945, p. 2. Franz-Josef Spahn, Nazi Gruppenleiter in Japan; Paul Sperringer, a former SS Stormtrooper and assistant to Gestapo Chief Colonel Josef Meisinger; Karl Hamel, Meisinger's secretary; Charles Schmidt-Jucheim, a former San Francisco police officer and an ex-US Army sergeant who attended Gestapo training in Germany and renounced his US citizenship; Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, chief of Nazi propaganda in Japan; Heinrich Loy, a Gestapo spy who allegedly participated in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch;Robert Whymant, Stalin's spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring, I.B. Tauris, 1996; , p. 283. Dr. Karl Kindermann, Meisinger's Jewish interpreter who was an informant for the Gestapo; Alrich Mosaner, chief of the Hitler Youth in Japan; and Otto Burmeister, chief of the Nazi education system in Japan."Nazi Leaders in Japan in CIC Custody: 13 Hitler Operatives Nabbed Without Warning in War Criminal Roundup." Nippon Times, October 31, 1945, p. 11. Most of these individuals were later released by the CIC."Swiss Neutral Claims Nazis are Still on the Loose in Japan", Spartanburg Herald-Journal, May 12, 1946, p. A5
Robie Macauley was awarded the Legion of Merit for his work in detaining members of the Gestapo in Japan.Hobson, 1952, p. 1642.
Career
Iowa Writers Workshop After the war, he taught briefly at Bard College then worked at Gourmet Magazine and for Henry Holt and Company. During 1947 he taught at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop with Paul Engle, and Anthony Hecht (with whom Macauley had served during World War II), where he befriended Flannery O'Connor, advising her on drafts of her first novel, Wise Blood.Gooch, Brad, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, 2009.Cash, Jean, Flannery O'Connor: A Life, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002; , pp. 25-26. He completed his MFA at the University of Iowa in 1950 and spent the next three years at the Woman's College (now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro) where he taught modern American literature and writing.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom Macauley received a Rockefeller Fellowship and during 1953 Cord Meyer offered him a position in the International Organizations Division of the Central Intelligence Agency. With John Crowe Ransom's encouragement, Macauley accepted and relocated to ParisEllis H, Meyer J. Masculinity and the Other: Historical Perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2009, p. 145. where he participated in the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Saunders, Frances Stonor, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, The New Press, April 2001, p. 240. Published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Macauley assisted in the publication of Quadrant magazine (edited by James McAuley), an Australian literary journal that at the time had "an anticommunist thrust".Pybus, Cassandra. "CIA as Culture Vultures", Jacket, July 12, 2000.
He was a U.S. representative to the International PEN Congress in Tokyo (1957) and Brazil (1960).Biography of Robie Mayhew Macauley
The Kenyon Review During 1958 he returned to the US to succeed John Crowe Ransom as editor of The Kenyon Review."Education: Ransom Harvest", Time, May 12, 1958."New Editor at Kenyon Review", The New York Times, March 25, 1958, p. 14. Ransom described Macauley as "wise and thorough, thoroughly experienced, an excellent critic...; a pretty good fiction writer who has just begun to get a lot better; and a person universally admired and liked."Charlotte H. Beck, The fugitive legacy: a critical history, LSU Press, 2001; , p. 29. During the next seven years, Macauley published works by T. S. Eliot, Nadine Gordimer, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, Richmond Lattimore, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowell, V. S. Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O'Connor, V. S. Pritchett, Thomas Pynchon, J. F. Powers, Karl Shapiro, Jean Stafford, Christina Stead, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren,"End of the Kenyon?", Time, March 9, 1970."Robie Macauley" (obituary), Toledo Blade, November 22, 1995, p. 12 as well as articles, essays and book reviews by Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Ellmann, Leslie Fiedler, Martin Green, and Raymond Williams.Robie Macauley: An Inventory of His Collection, Harry Ransom Center.Berman RS. "Macauley's 'Kenyon Review' the View from the Sixties." The Sewanee Review 1979;87(3):500-507. In 1964, he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards together with John Cheever and Philip Rahv."5 Juries Selected to Pick '64 National Book Awards", The New York Times, December 2, 1963, p. 43. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and took a sabbatical in 1964–65 as a Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of London.
Playboy Magazine In 1966 Macauley became the fiction editor at Playboy, where he published fiction by Saul Bellow, Michael Crichton, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, James Dickey, J. P. Donleavy, Nadine Gordimer, John Irving, Arthur Koestler, John le Carré, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Bernard Malamud, Mary McCarthy,A Guide to the Letters to Robie Macauley, University of Virginia Special Collections Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Seán Ó Faoláin, Anne Sexton, Irwin Shaw, Isaac B. Singer, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut as well as poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. David H. Lynn, writing in The Kenyon Review, said that "in the years when he was fiction editor, Playboy was second only to The New Yorker in prestige as a place for serious writers to display their talents."Lynn, D. H., "Editor's Notes", The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn, 1996), p. 1. During this period he also taught fiction at the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Circle Campus.
In 1967, he co-initiated the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses together with Reed Whittemore (The Carleton Miscellany, The New Republic); Jules Chametzky (The Massachusetts Review); George Plimpton (The Paris Review); and William Phillips (The Partisan Review).Pauline Uchmanowicz, "A Brief History of CCLM/CLMP", The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 44, No. 1/2, Spring – Summer, 2003, pp. 70-87.
Houghton Mifflin