It Is for Love That I Live: The Legacy of Rod McKuen

By Carlos CunhaMarch 26, 2015

It Is for Love That I Live: The Legacy of Rod McKuen

IN THE HISTORY of callous obituaries, poet Rod McKuen may have earned himself a prominent place with his death on January 29 in Beverly Hills at age 81. One obit, from the Associated Press, identified McKuen in its first sentence not as a poet but as the “King of Kitsch.” Another, in The New York Times, quickly reminded readers that his work was “facile, tepid and aphoristic.” The most balanced obituary appeared in The Guardian, which pointed out that he’d been a shrewd self-promoter and exploiter of passing styles.


One consolation: In spite of the fact that McKuen had slipped into obscurity in the last decades of his life, there were obits enough, and they inevitably wound up on front pages and homepages. Alas, one strained to hear in them any of the “warm” that McKuen enjoins us to “listen to” in one of his most famous poems. Little love remained for the foremost love poet of his era.


My acquaintance with McKuen’s work dates from my teenage years in South Africa. In an auto-parts store where I was working, when we were idle, one of the older clerks and I would lean over the counter and write alternate lines of impromptu poems. He had come up with this pastime and was much better at it than I was. In school, the sort of poetry I’d had to dissect, memorize, and recite, full of archaisms and stiff forms, had left me cold. I especially detested rhyme and meter, which, when they were not simply obscuring sense with sound, were making a false phrase sound true, or so it seemed to me. I acquired a taste for verse only once I found an after-school version of it: American-style free verse. And this happened only after I had dreamily fallen in love with a girl and caught a radio interview with the husky-voiced Rod McKuen, who was on a tour in South Africa at the time and somehow made me dream about her, and myself in relation to her, even more.


This was in the late 1970s, and McKuen’s poetry collections were prominently on sale in South Africa. Subsequently, as I tried to teach myself to write poetry, I scoured the local library for other, more literary free-verse poets — D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg — but none managed to beguile me as much as McKuen did, with verses like this, from Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows:


I sit across the room watching you —
the light from the street lamp coming through the
         shutters
hysterical patterns flash on the wall sometimes
                 when a car goes by
otherwise there is no change.
Not in the way you lie curled up.
Not in the sounds that never come from you.
Not in the discontent I feel.


McKuen’s poems seemed the most contemporary and colloquial, the most casually imagistic and unsentimentally romantic, and the least burdened with concerns that were outside my emotional, educational, and cultural range at the time or, otherwise, failed to address my most pressing objective — sleeping with my girlfriend. So it was McKuen who I took as a model in my first stabs at poetry. No doubt this was also because his style seemed easy enough for a novice to emulate, although I never could get my lines to fragment and break, or the poems to end, with quite the rightness that I seemed to see in his. There was, I thought, a secret to writing his kind of verse, and I was not getting it, and eventually I simply gave up trying to write poetry altogether and turned to journalism.


Yet I was still very much a McKuen fan when, during a two-year sojourn in the United States at the outset of my twenties, the weekly paper that I was working for, near Cape Cod, sent me up to Boston to do a profile on the Globe’s chief obituary writer, who happened to be a summer resident in our town. As repelled as I tended to be by all things lugubrious (a word I would find this obit writer to be very fond of using, understandably enough) I looked forward to our meeting — because he was also the Globe’s chief poetry reviewer and had, just the week before, interviewed McKuen, who he seemed to know pretty well. He was evidently puzzled that I, a man of 20, at the start of the 1980s, should be so interested in McKuen, whose seasons in the sun were fading out by then. But the old obit writer had only kind, if not particularly illuminating, things to say about McKuen as a man and as a poet.


Meanwhile, I filled my letters to my girlfriend back in South Africa with imagery of myself as a McKuenesque loner strolling along wintry, broken-down seafront streets in the American Northeast, an evidently depressed part of the world. Although she had appreciated the McKuen cast of the poems I had written to her in South Africa, she probably found this epistolary posturing dismayingly bleak (even lugubrious) as an ad for what awaited her in the United States, were she to join me as planned. She got cold feet, things fell apart between us, and I went off McKuen not long after.


It was not until more than two decades later that I concerned myself with McKuen again. I can no longer recall why, but it may have been simply because web browsing had become a workplace pastime, and I’d begun to run across references to him online. I was then startled to find that he had a website, and there I learned that he had spent much of the intervening years in a reclusive, creatively barren depression. McKuen, it seemed, had himself gone off McKuen at about the time I had. When he eventually emerged from this dark period, it was with the help of Prozac and the friendship of, among others, a fan who offered to set up and run the site for him, as a way of “debunking the rumors and incorrect info” then to be found on the internet, which McKuen told him he distrusted. McKuen’s webmaster, Ken Blackie, is about a decade my senior and also, as it happens, from South Africa — leading me to suspect that McKuen was more popular and better appreciated by readers in South Africa than anywhere else. His case might be somewhat like that of Rodriguez, the Detroit folk singer who was the subject of the Oscar-winning Searching for Sugar Man.


What contributed to the onset of McKuen’s depression? Some interviews cited the loss of friends to AIDS, although his malady seemed to predate the syndrome’s spread. But I cannot help but also blame the vicious critical dismissals he had to face at the height of his fame and afterward, the gleeful hatchet jobs that his obits saw fit to regurgitate.


On those harsh obits: I am sure part of their callousness had to do with the way obits are written. Even when larger newspapers used to have specialized obit writers, like the one I interviewed at the Globe, they looked for a fresh assessment on a subject only in the case of the most historically consequential of figures. Otherwise, compiling an obit has always been indeed an act of compilation, a patching together of quotes from old clips, intended as no more than a crude summary, even if the reader usually takes it as a considered summing up. And it does look as if McKuen, in his time, did get terrible notices as counterpoints to his popular successes: his work was called mawkish, silly, schmaltzy, platitudinous, and irrelevant, and that moniker the King of Kitsch was bestowed on him at the height of his fame, on a Newsweek cover.


McKuen’s poems are certainly open to just about any charge that has been laid against them from loftier precincts. I, myself, wince at the facile deployment of alliteration, parallels, reversals, and the other verbal conceits that he used to make the lines sway and that tend to stand in place of true lyricism, observation, and insight. The thinking is often platitudinous and clumsy, the language sometimes bordering on illiteracy. There are awful puns like “I’ll keep filling holes until they’re whole.” There is the redundant use of synonyms. And there is the overuse of the word “sometimes,” as if it were the key not only to his folksy, laidback voice but also a shortcut to convey that pathos of passing time that has always been a staple of poetry. He has a bad autodidact’s way with big words: he often throws in one (“disentangled” in his breakthrough poem, “Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows,” or “covenant” in a verse from “Caught in the Quiet”) as though he has just learned it, is not absolutely sure of its appropriate use, but is infatuated with its sound and what idea he has of its meaning. There are bits that are simply poor English: “I’ve held back no reserve,” or “I can keep a smile on/long past its due,” or his putting down the word “council” when he meant “counsel.”


Today, the harder I look at McKuen’s poetry, the harder I find the task of defending it and, instead, fall to wondering dismally about the shabby flimsiness of the stuff that feeds our illusions when we are still green, and how that makes us no less fervent about them, even willing to kill and die for them in wars and jihads. Still, what of McKuen’s tone, cadence, rhythm, vision, attitude? Can I not still discern some artistry there? I certainly believe McKuen had a distinctive poetic style and persona, and both seemed very modern at midcentury, or thereabouts, and deft enough to beguile millions of modernity-loving readers.


Though based on the facts of his life, the persona was undoubtably something of a genial invention: a Jet Set–age American loner in a roadie’s jeans and sneakers, wistfully kicking around in nostalgic nooks of the world’s “lonesome cities,” places that contrive to put him in mind of the best salve he seems to have found for the perennially orphan-like state of his soul — those fleeting moments of physical intimacy or adoration, rendered with the sort of erotic detail that shows his yearning to be sensual rather than pornographic, motivated more by desire for closeness than by lust.


McKuen wrote in a song lyric:


It is for love that I live alone
Because the lovers that I imagine
are safer than the ones I’ve known.


McKuen’s poetry celebrated solitude, or what, in his avoidance of conventional poetic diction, he preferred to call aloneness or lonesomeness. He may have been one of the key street-level promoters of the great American myth of the romantic loner. It was a myth that Americans bought into for a long time, but we seem to have finally seen through it: that particular hero has ridden off into the sunset and we are, for the most part, glad to see the back of him. Today, when we are all about the team, the network, the community, we regard the idea of the lone star as a risibly unconvincing relic, just juvenile kitsch from a more ingenuously self-centered time. So we cannot help but doubt the sincerity of a poetic persona like McKuen’s, and we doubt it all the more when we consider how much it must have diverged from his reality as a thriving showbiz entrepreneur, ever showing up on TV, ever hobnobbing and collaborating with the other stars of his time in America and abroad, ever churning out product and relentlessly promoting it — records, movie scores, books, even operas and symphonies. He was obviously too busy creating, recording, promoting, and performing, too fixed on profits and publicity, to be the drifting, introverted, romantic solitary of his verses. That persona was no doubt more persuasive in remote places like South Africa, where we were relatively ignorant of how much of a schmoozing member of the showbiz world he was.


But a glaring disparity between who one is in the world and who one is in one’s writing is common enough in literature. Consider the case of a frivolous, chattering dinner-party dandy by the name of Marcel Proust, who made an unassailable case for that disparity in his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve. The writing, as Proust noted, comes from another, quieter, truer part of the man. McKuen is no Proust, of course, but his verses do celebrate quiet and stillness and isolation and must have arisen from such moments in the author’s life. And, when you consider his biography, you can allow for the possibility that it is from a genuine and tender place within himself that he derives the sense he conveys of being, in essence, an orphan drifting about in search of consolation. McKuen was, after all, born to an abandoned and impoverished woman in a charity hospital in Oakland. He never knew his real father, was abused physically by his stepfather and sexually by an uncle and aunt, and, running away, started making his own way in the world at the age of 11, precociously working on ranches and farms.


McKuen said he published his first poem in the Portland Oregonian when he was a logger, though he kept the news from other lumberjacks lest they think he was a “sissy.” By the age of 15, he was the host of a late-night music show at a San Francisco radio station. He worked on his writing in a journal, and, as a serviceman in Tokyo, finally went public with it in the form of a newspaper column. Back in San Francisco, he sang in clubs, read his poetry in coffee houses with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and recorded his first poetry album, Beatsville. In New York he tried his hand at pop music and had a couple of hits. Next came Paris, where McKuen became friends with Jacques Brel, converting some of his songs into global English-language hits, including Ne Me Quitte Pas/If You Go Away and Le Moribond/Seasons in the Sun. He published his first poetry collection, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, and soon followed it up with Listen to the Warm and Lonesome Cities. The latter was also issued as a recording, which won a Grammy. He had nine records in Billboard’s Hot 200 in a span of three years and received an Oscar nomination for the song Jean, from the 1969 film version of the Muriel Spark novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In the mid-1970s he wrote a dolorous work of nonfiction prose, Finding My Father. As often happens in the case of those who once were abandoned, when it came his turn to be a father, which he was twice over during his stay in Paris, he did some abandoning himself, leaving his sons and returning to the United States.


For all of McKuen’s success, his tough beginnings surely stuck to him. They could have played a role in the Rousseau-like abandonment of his children and ultimately in his two-decade long depression. And they surely lie darkly under his otherwise light-seeming romanticization of the loner.


In 2003, when I first looked at his poetry again, I remembered my frustration as a teenager trying to figure what tricky prosodic principle McKuen might have been following in the way he broke his lines. Now, suddenly, he was online and corresponding with fans via email, so why not write and ask him? I did just that, in an idle moment, and a couple of days later got a reply. Alas, it was not terribly enlightening. Using one of those redundant word pairs characteristic of him, he told me he had always gone by “feeling and intuition.”


More recently, I have learned that a great deal of what, aside from the line breaks, I once liked in McKuen’s poems and tried to imitate, he may himself have been imitating. In response to a fan letter on his site, he confirmed that he modeled his “more romantic poetry” on the work of Walter Benton, an American poet from the 1940s who, like McKuen, came from a background of little formal education and multiple blue-collar jobs, was also very popular with lay readers, and also had his poems issued as spoken-word recordings with musical backings. Benton himself is not entirely forgotten. At least one of his two collections is listed for sale on Amazon.com, and some of his verse is elsewhere online. Its similarity to McKuen’s is striking. Consider these fragments, chosen quickly and at random, from both men’s poetry (I have removed the line breaks):


A) without a rain check or a parachute, a key to heaven or a long last look.
B) with Sausalito and sign language, canoe and coffee, ice cream and your wide eyes.


Or:


A) Nor could I turn your hips, your thighs, your belly in a sweeter curve.
B) I know the hills and gullies of your body, the curves, the turns.


In both cases, the first line is Benton’s, the second McKuen’s.


McKuen himself dismissed criticism of his work as simply a resentful reaction to his outrageous success. “I only know this,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002. “Before the books were successful, whether it was Newsweek or Time or The Saturday Evening Post, the reviews were always raves.”


Perhaps, but that does not necessarily discredit the criticism, and it’s only natural that critics should be at their most vituperative when trying to expose a success they deem grossly unmerited. More troubling was the bandying about of off-target epithets such as “mawkish” and “schmaltzy” and “New Age” and the curious “aphoristic,” which I had never before come across as a put-down. It is this that leads me to suspect that other factors were at work, including his overexposure on schlocky American TV shows. Ditto for the overproduction on the musical side of his career. Though I never took much interest in his music (I am a testament to the fact that his poetry succeeded independently of his musical celebrity), it seems to me that his original compositions were sound enough — he enjoyed the respect of many artists who are themselves still respected, not least among them Frank Sinatra, for whom he wrote all the material in the album A Man Alone. But he was perhaps too willing to cover other people’s romantic songs, and these, like Charles Aznavour’s She, often were undeniably schmaltzy.


But what McKuen’s chances for posterity as a poet may have suffered the most from, I believe, was his direct competition. McKuen inspired readers to seek out other accessible poetry, and perhaps one of the greatest beneficiaries of that search was not a contemporary but a figure from the 1920s, Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet. It was Gibran, with his prayer-like inspirational prose poems and his Orientalism, both of which meshed with the counterculture sensibility of the 1960s, who became very much the Paulo Coelho of McKuen’s time, its true King of Kitsch. Single stanzas or aphoristic lines from Gibran’s writings were turned into faux scrolls that hung in living rooms and bedrooms and even bathrooms, in homes where it was hard to spot any other reading matter. And I suppose it was such wall-hanging kitsch that lent a pejorative cast to the word “aphoristic.” Gibran was regarded as inspirational in the way that later came to be associated with the New Age; he, not poor McKuen, was one of the spiritual fathers of that movement. But because the Gibran revival coincided with McKuen’s best years, their images converged in the public eye. It is because of him, I would argue, that McKuen is derided as New Age and faulted for being aphoristic.


Then there was Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer, poet, and novelist. Back in South Africa, when I landed my first reporting job and told my editor of my liking for McKuen, he said he was more of a Leonard Cohen man himself. This was, I would discover, a comparison that was often made, with Cohen usually coming out on top. They were both raspy-voiced male singers and poets from North America, but Cohen was the heavier weight, his material darker, harder, more existential, more uncompromising. If McKuen suffered from being confused with Gibran, he suffered from being set in opposition to Cohen.


McKuen’s books often appeared with a back-cover blurb of praise from W.H. Auden. I never saw much in common between the two poets, other than the fact that both took an interest in writing operas. And I never saw Auden quoted on McKuen outside of McKuen’s book covers. Nor have I ever come across any other recognized literary figure with much to say about McKuen. As the obits and Wikipedia have it, the literary world’s rejection of him has been uncategorical. At least his predecessor and model, Benton, was allowed into a poetry anthology, one edited, moreover, by a former poet laureate, Louis Untermeyer. In An Uninhibited Treasury of Erotic Poetry, first published in 1963 and reprinted in 2000, Benton is among the greatest poets of the ages, his verse coming after some e.e. cummings and Stanley Kunitz and before Theodore Roethke.


But McKuen, I believe, does not properly belong to the literary world, so why submit him to its judgment? His poetry is not erudite poetry, not literary poetry. It is pop poetry, which is a genre that, in its written form, has become practically extinct, with McKuen having been its last major exponent. At least in English-speaking countries, the place of pop poetry has been entirely taken over by the song or rap lyric, which depends for its charm less on its words (which are often unquestionably illiterate and artless) than on the musical accompaniment, the fashion, the stagecraft, the video, and other infantile razzle-dazzle. McKuen may not lay claim to any genuine literary achievement, but he could make a few words on a bare page seem at least as enchanting to a teenager as a good rock ballad. And the literary standards of those poems were certainly higher than most of the pop song lyrics that directly competed with him for the memories and mimicry of the youth of my time. And many of his young fans grew up to be writers themselves: I have never met another McKuen man or woman who was not also still involved with the written word somehow. McKuen not only helped a lot of people fall in love with others, he helped a lot of people fall in love with writing.


That McKuen sold millions of books worldwide, something no poet since has been able to do, is by itself a startling marker in cultural history, much worthier of consideration and analysis than of condescension and vitriol. McKuen was a valid, global phenomenon of pop culture who deserved, in his obits, a sympathetic reassessment rather than a harsh rehash of the hasty dismissals of his time. But perhaps Kevin Blackie or some documentarian like Rodriguez’s is even now priming his iPhone to put together a film that will do that Great American Loner a bit more justice. Too bad it didn’t happen, as in Rodriguez’s case, while the man was still alive.


¤


Carlos Cunha’s essays and stories have appeared in publications like the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly Online, the Seattle Review, and the Manchester (UK) Review.

LARB Contributor

Carlos Cunha was born in Portugal, grew up in South Africa and lives in Florida, where he is a copy editor for The New York Times International Weekly. His essays and stories have appeared in publications like the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly Online, the Seattle Review and the Manchester (UK) Review.

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