Robie Macauley was born on May 31, 1919 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was the older brother of the noted photographer and film producer C. Cameron Macauley. His father owned and published the Hudsonville newspaper, The Ottawa Times, and Macauley used the printing press to publish his first books of fiction and poetry. At age 18 he printed and bound a limited edition of Solomon's Cat, a previously unpublished poem by Walter Duranty, setting the type and engraving the illustrations.
Education
As an undergraduate at Olivet College, he studied under Ford Madox Ford (describing him as "my first teacher and editorial mentor.") and then won a three-year literary prize scholarship and transferred to Kenyon College to study under John Crowe Ransom. There he lived in a writer's house with Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Randall Jarrell. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in February 1941, and the same year was awarded a fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
War years
in April 1945. The statue is "The Rape of Persephone" by Ferdinand Dietz.]] He was drafted in 1942 and served in World War II as a sergeant with the 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division ("Old Hickory") in Europe, then on April 6, 1945 he became a special agent in the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) with the 97th Infantry Division, serving in the Ruhr Pocket and in Japan after the war. 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 wrote four autobiographical short stories based on his experiences in 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; in "The Thin Voice" he describes the unlawful murder of a German prisoner by American troops in Heiligenkreuz, Germany; 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; 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 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..."
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 Saburo Kurusu and German Admiral Paul Wenneker, as well as artist Paul Jacoulet. 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: Dr. Franz Joseph Spahn, Nazi Gruppenleiter in Japan; Paul Sperringer, a former SS Stormtrooper and right-hand man 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; Count Karl Friedrich Eckbercht Durckheim-Montmartin, wealthy head of the Goebbels propaganda machine in Japan; Heinrich Loy, a Gestapo spy who allegedly took part in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch; Dr. Karl Kindermann, Meisinger's Jewish-Russian interpreter who was briefly employed by the Americans; Alrich Mosaner, leader of the Hitler Youth in Japan; and Otto Burmeister, an informant for Meisinger. Most of these individuals were later released by the CIC.
Robie Macauley was awarded the Legion of Merit for his work in detaining members of the Gestapo in Japan.
in 1947. Macauley's camera is a Certo Dollina II. Photo by C. Cameron Macauley.]]
Iowa Writers Workshop
After the war he taught briefly at Bard College then worked at Gourmet Magazine and for Henry Holt and Company. In 1947 he taught at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop with Paul Engle, Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht (with whom Macauley had served during WWII), where he dated Flannery O'Connor, advising her on drafts of her first novel, Wise Blood. 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 in 1953 Cord Meyer offered him a position in the International Organizations Division of the Central Intelligence Agency. Macauley moved to Paris where, with John Crowe Ransom's encouragement, he participated in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, working closely with Michael Josselson and Melvin J. Lasky. Macauley assisted in the publication of Quadrant Magazine (edited by James McAuley), an Australian literary journal that at the time had "an anticommunist thrust". He was also U.S. representative to the International PEN Congress in Tokyo (1957) and Brazil (1960).
The Kenyon Review
1959 he returned to the US to succeed John Crowe Ransom as editor of The Kenyon Review, where he published fiction by John Barth[1], V. S. Pritchett, Frank O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing, Karl Shapiro, Nadine Gordimer, Robert Penn Warren, Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Richmond Lattimore, V. S. Naipaul, Robert Graves, Christina Stead, and T. S. Elliott, as well as articles, essays and book reviews by Raymond Williams, Martin Green, Richard Ellmann, Leslie Fiedler, Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, and Malcolm Cowley. In 1964 he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards together with John Cheever and Philip Rahv. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and took a sabbatical in 1964-65 as a Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of London.
Playboy Magazine
1966 Macauley became an editor at Playboy, where he published fiction by Saul Bellow, Sean O'Faolain, John Updike, James Dickey, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Crichton, John LeCarre, Irwin Shaw, Arthur Koestler, Isaac B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, John Irving, Anne Sexton, Nadine Gordimer, Kurt Vonnegut and J. P. Donleavy, 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." During this period he also taught fiction at the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Circle Campus. In 1967 he co-founded 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).
Houghton Mifflin
In 1977 he became a Senior Editor at Houghton Mifflin, where he published The Mosquito Coast, Shoeless Joe, and several works of nonfiction such as The Puzzle Palace, The Bunker, The Dungeon Master, and The Nine Nations of North America. He later taught at the Harvard Extension School and in 1990 co-founded and co-directed the Ploughshares International Writing Seminars, a summer program of the Emerson College European Center at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands.
Robie Macauley died in Boston on November 20, 1995.
Robie Macauley published two novels, The Disguises of Love (1951), the story of a university professor's love affair with a student and how it affects his wife and son, and A Secret History of Time to Come (1979), an adventure thriller set in a devastated post-apocalypse America 200 years in the future.
Short stories
His short fiction appeared in Furioso, the North American Review, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Esquire, Fiction, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Cosmopolitan, the Virginia Quarterly Review and Playboy, for which he was awarded the Furioso Prize (1949), The O. Henry Award (1951, 1956 and 1967)[2], and the John Train Humor Prize (1990).
In spite of his expertise and experience, Macauley's own fiction received only moderate recognition. "Robie Macauley's prose, like the best poetry, has a startling economy of means and precision of language," declared Melvin J. Friedman in Contemporary Novelists. "The author's work," continued Friedman, "is the enviable product of years spent in close and sympathetic relationship with the best novels from Jane Austen through James Joyce." David H. Lynn, editor of The Kenyon Review, described Macauley's fiction as "subtle, stinging, disturbing, witty." Eugene Goodheart, commenting on The End of Pity and Other Stories, said "Macauley has all the gifts of a master short story writer: narrative power, a quick and vivid imagination of character...a capacity for delivering the scene that at once surprises and satisfies the reader's expectation, i.e., a fine sense for the significant scene or action, a felicity of phrase that is not merely decoration, but becomes perception."
Since 2001 StoryQuarterly has awarded the annual Robie Macauley Award for Fiction
Nonfiction
He co-authored (with George Lanning) a textbook on writing, Technique in Fiction (1964, revised in 1989), and co-authored (with William Betcher) a book on marriage counseling, The Seven Basic Quarrels of Marriage (1990). He edited America and Its Discontents together with Larzer Ziff. Between 1942 and 1990 he contributed dozens of book reviews to The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, Furioso, Vogue, The New York Herald Tribune, The Partisan Review, The Boston Globe, The New York Review of Books, Encounter, The New Republic, The Chicago Sun-Times, Dialogue, the Boston Review, and other publications. He also wrote a series of contemplative essays on writing, writers and literature which were published in Shenandoah, The Irish University Review, Transition, The Texas Quarterly,Ploughshares, and The Paris Review.
