A Career Careerist : ARCHIBALD MacLEISH: An American Life, <i> By Scott Donaldson in collaboration with R.H. Winnick (Houghton Mifflin/A Peter Davison Book: $35; 524 pp.)</i>

When he was running for President four years ago, George Bush was often said to have the best resume in American politics. In modern American literature one would have to give the equivalent citation to Bush’s fellow Skull-and-Bonesman, poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), who, while earning three Pulitzer Prizes, served as a writer on Fortune magazine; as Librarian of Congress; as assistant secretary of state for cultural and public affairs, and as Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. His daughter remarked upon “his knack for turning up in the right place at the right time,” but readers of Scott Donaldson’s new authorized biography of MacLeish will come to recognize the poet as a superb careerist and literary trimmer. As with Bush, observers of MacLeish sometimes wondered what the man stood for with any constancy. He could even have sat on both sides of a Yale-Harvard game: He was an undergraduate at the first and a law student at the second.

His father was a prosperous partner in Chicago’s Carson Pirie Scott department store, his mother a civic-minded woman who had once been the principal of Rockford (Ill.) Seminary. At Yale and Harvard, MacLeish made important lifelong friends and connections like Dean Acheson, the future secretary of state.

His life was charmed; his brother died in the First World War, but he was transferred away from the battery he commanded just before much of it perished by the Marne. His dilemmas were almost always luxurious ones: practice law or devote himself to poetry? He eventually settled on the latter, heading into a place and time described by Donaldson in critical boilerplate: “The twenties in Paris were years of cultural rebuilding seemingly almost from scratch. The slate was wiped clean, and artists came to write upon it anew.” MacLeish played at being a modernist, turning out imitative verse and trying to live out the aesthete’s creed that would form his most memorable utterance, in “Ars poetica”: “A poem should not mean/ But be.”

The cigar-smoking poetess Amy Lowell had his number: “I want to see you standing on your own feet,” she wrote him in 1925, “and not diving head foremost after first one type of thing and then another.” Sure enough, during the politicized ‘30s, MacLeish, while writing for Henry Luce’s Fortune, would be urging a life of social commitment upon his fellow poets, telling them, in effect, not to be but to mean .

When Franklin Roosevelt asked MacLeish to become Librarian of Congress, Donaldson would have us believe that the poet took the train home from Washington “tortured by doubts.” Excited by calculations is probably more like it. Even so, after taking the job, he did well with it, reorganizing the place and insuring the safety of the library’s greatest treasures (they were transferred to Fort Knox) during World War II. Along the way, he wrote speeches for F.D.R. and briefly headed the Office of Facts and Figures (dubbed the Office of Fuss and Feathers by journalists). During the war, his production of poetry slackened, both quantitatively and otherwise, his literary reputation declining as his one for public service rose.

His generally adorning biographer does concede his subject’s “unhealthy reliance on the favorable opinion of others,” but MacLeish conceded as much himself, and a reader feels embarrassed to realize that the stinging criticisms Donaldson quotes, usually in order to rebut them, remain closer to the mark than almost anything the biographer says himself. A “diatribe” of Edmund Wilson’s against MacLeish is in fact not so much “vicious” as dead on the mark, as is the judgment Rolfe Humphries made in 1934: “If you are looking for a poet you will find nobody home in the earthly tenement known as Archibald MacLeish; but you will find a fellow who would like to be considered a poet, who knows various arts of the necessary disguise, who is a talented, industrious and successful mimic of poetic activity.”

From 1949 to 1962, MacLeish spent his happiest years teaching writing at Harvard. (He twice declined to admit the young John Updike to his course.) He remained a prominent public figure, and was conspicuous in his denunciations of Joe McCarthy. A few years before his mandatory retirement at the age of 70, he scored a surprise Broadway hit with “J.B.,” a Thornton Wilder-like update of The Book of Job.

The poet’s private life was without much drama. He made a long and mostly happy marriage to Ada Hitchcock, a talented singer who devoted her life to keeping unwanted distractions away from her husband (these sometimes included the couple’s children). MacLeish seems to have had some extramarital liaisons, but Donaldson’s deference to his subject drives him into a whirligig of circumlocution about the matter: “Whether they led to carnal knowledge is a question whose answer is not easily discovered.”

The lingering impression is that of a cold fish, rather pompous and, for all his poems celebrating the democratic virtues, a snob. MacLeish’s most famous and difficult friendship was with Ernest Hemingway, but even this yields only small anecdotal beer. Donaldson quotes an apologetic thank-you note that Papa wrote the MacLeishes after he supposedly behaved badly at dinner and walked off with their corkscrew. “Actually,” writes Donaldson, “the dinner was a great success, and the supposed theft of the corkscrew remained a good-humored joke between them ever after.” I guess you had to be there.

Scott Donaldson is not incapable of good work (his 1983 book about F. Scott Fitzgerald was sturdy and sensible), but “Archibald MacLeish: An American Life,” which acknowledges a large debt to research done a decade ago by R. H. Winnick, is some of the worst- written academic biography (a much tormented genre in any season) to come along in some time.

It is full of gush (“His hairline was receding, but that only served to emphasize the nobleness of his Palladian brow”), and line after line of such consuming banality that one keeps writing “Gee” in the margins: “Duty with a capital D was ingrained in him.” Cutesiness and cliche abound, and the whole job is mired in such awe that one suspects Donaldson has served too long on the committee responsible for composing honorary-degree citations at the College of William and Mary, where he teaches. Minor characters aren’t so much introduced as toasted: “(John) Cowles, who was president of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and at one time served as head of the Harvard Alumni Association, was a brash, inquisitive man with a healthy capacity for the enjoyment of life, Betty a clever and strong-minded companion.” Gee. Any “interest” is always “passionate,” and nothing is left merely “rare” when it can be “exceedingly rare.”

Toward the end of this enormous book, Donaldson notes: “In his eschatological awareness of the end of things (translation: “Knowing he didn’t have much time left”), MacLeish begrudged any time spent away from poetry.” There is something admirable about the way the man kept driving his limited gifts, on and on, toward the end, which came just before his 90th birthday in 1982.

Donaldson, playing with one of his subject’s most famous assertions, that we are “riders on the earth,” ends by saying that MacLeish “did not ride upon the earth. He bestrode it.” Let’s just say, more truthfully, that he kept up. Unfortunately, I can’t remember when I’ve been so glad to see a biographical subject expire--not in his real life, just in the posthumous one accorded him by this biography, a book that could not, at long last, be brought to a close any other way.