36 june 27, 2005 P the new republic tails off, its murky mistakes (or sins) per- images of their common world. In the We are things thrown in the air manently inscribed in the memories of opening poem of Day by Day, however, alive in flight. all concerned. Lowell takes a stronger, if partly ironic, our rust the color of the chameleon. As Lowell finishes what will be his last view of the contribution of age to poetic book, Day by Day, he writes a valedictory strength: Living by “improvisation and in- letter to Frank Bidart, certain that he has vention,” changing styles, enthusiasms, consumed all his subject matter: This is riches: wives, girlfriends, and addresses (there the eminence not to be envied, are thirty-eight addresses—not including Now there can be no more. I can rub the account hospitals—listed in Hamilton’s appen- my hands over the bottom of the pot accumulating layer and angle, dix), Lowell endured a punishing rest- and find no more material.... I think face and profile, lessness, a terrible drivenness, that was I’ve even thrown some of the metal 50 years of snapshots, belied by his leisurely social ease, his of the pot in.And yet, nothing is ever the ladder of ripening likeness. desultory amusement, his delight in late- perfect, even within its crippling in- night talk. His enormous early zest for evitable human limitations.... I think he letters give us (with- almost anything—theology, books, wom- the ambition of art, the feeding on out biographical intervention) en, friendship, politics—gradually dimin- one’s soul, memory, mind etc. gives a “layer and angle, /face and ishes, here, under the blows of illness and mixture of glory and exhaustion. I profile” of Lowell’s mind and marital failure and the inconveniences think in the end, there is no end, the Tcharacter. They offer forty years of Low- of age.A poem by Hölderlin, called “The thread frays rather than is cut, or if it ellian snapshots—those “lurid, rapid, gar- Course of Life,” could serve as a motto is cut suddenly, it usually hurtingly ish, grouped” likenesses (as he called for the later Lowell: frays before being cut. No perfected them in “Epilogue”). The lurid and the end, but a lot of meat and drink along garish certainly are here, but the letters Upwards my soul aspired, the way. are also touching, spirited, and reflective. but soon Like the snapshots, they are “grouped”: Love drew it down; Lowell’s thread was cut suddenly, but Lowell, for all his solitariness as a writer, Suffering humbled it more; the letters are witness to how many fray- intensely required others to talk to, to So I hasten round the curve ings preceded the end.The poem approx- write to, and to love, and the letters are Of life, and return whence I began. imating the sentiments in this letter had the proof of his literary gregariousness. appeared earlier, as the final sonnet in They confirm, especially in their volatility In the letters, as in the poems, Lowell is For Lizzie and Harriet. It is called “Obit,” of erotic choice, Lowell’s Keatsian char- a more humanly attractive figure at the and begins with an acknowledgment of acterization of writers as chameleons: weary end than in the fierce beginning. J the most hurting fraying of all, the disso- lution of a long marriage: “Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel.” The poem becomes a hymn in favor of natural David J. Garrow change over transcendence, but ends, “After loving you so much, can I forget / you for eternity, and have no other The Accidental Jurist choice?” The valedictory poems of Day by Day, published just before the poet’s death, are free-verse exhibits of the fray- Becoming Justice Blackmun: called,” the Court’s name for a gather- ing thread, as Lowell fears a depletion Harry Blackmun’s ing of the nine justices. “I walked into that can merely transcribe, not create—a Supreme Court Journey that room and there was Hugo Black, dejection phrased, of course, in as firm a By Linda Greenhouse William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan style as ever: (Times Books, 268 pp., $25) Jr., John Marshall Harlan—and I said to myself,‘What am I doing here?’ ” I am too weak to strain to remember, arry Blackmun always In the early 1970s, Blackmun was not or give remembered his very first the only person asking that question. recollection the eye of a microscope. day on the United States Justices Black, Douglas, and Potter Stew- I see Supreme Court.“I’ll never art all wondered whether the little- horse and meadow, duck and pond, forget the ninth day of known sixty-one-year-old Minnesotan universal consolatory HJune 1970, when I was sworn in,” he told could handle the tasks that confronted description without significance, a small audience in the south of France them all. Just eight years earlier those transcribed verbatim by my eye. in 1992. “Immediately after the swear- justices had watched with profound ing in we went into ‘the Conference,’ so sadness as a similarly untested Midwest- The animus of politics, the aspirations erner—Charles E. Whittaker, who had of religion, have waned, and the poet David J. Garrow is the author of Liberty joined the Court in 1957—cracked under sees himself modestly, hoping to be one and Sexuality:The Right to Privacy the emotional strain of the Court’s tough of those who have consoled their readers and the Making of Roe v. Wade (Uni- cases. Hospitalized after threatening to by transcribing into words the universal versity of California Press). commit suicide,Whittaker was pressured the new republic P june 27, 2005 37 into retiring by Chief Justice Earl War- When Blackmun’s huge collection of per- ren. Whittaker had been named to the sonal and official papers at the Library of lower federal bench, and then to the Congress was first opened in early 2004, Supreme Court, largely as a result of his five years after his death, one of the most close friendship with President Eisen- notable troves was the many deeply per- hower’s brother. sonal letters from Burger to Blackmun Harry Blackmun arrived in Washing- pre-dating 1970. ton straight from the same appeals court Linda Greenhouse, who for twenty- on which Whittaker had sat. He, too, seven years has covered the Supreme owed his appointment to that judgeship, Court for The New York Times, made and then President Nixon’s nomination the two justices’ lifelong relationship the of him to the high court, largely to one centerpiece of two front-page stories one man: Warren E. Burger, his closest friend year ago. Given advance access to the since kindergarten and, since 1969, chief Blackmun collection (along with Nina justice of the United States. Burger and Totenberg of National Public Radio), Blackmun grew up together in St. Paul Greenhouse had a two-month head start before Blackmun received a scholarship on other journalists, but the Times pub- to attend Harvard College. After law lished only a modest amount of the mate- school, also at Harvard, Blackmun re- rial that she gathered. Her new book is turned to Minnesota to clerk for a federal not a long one, nor is it based on any judge. He then joined one of the Twin additional sources beyond Blackmun’s Cities’ premier law firms, where he did papers, but it reprises in rich, thoughtful, much of his work for the Mayo Clinic in and more extensive detail the main emo- nearby Rochester. In 1949 Mayo asked tional and interpretive threads of Black- Blackmun to become its first in-house mun’s career. counsel, and Blackmun, his wife Dottie, Blackmun joined the Supreme Court and their three teenage daughters moved after a Senate Judiciary Committee hear- to small-town Rochester. ing that lasted less than four hours, de- Warren Burger earned his law degree spite the two prior nominees for that va- by attending night classes while working cancy, federal appellate judges Clement for an insurance firm in St. Paul. He then Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, joined a local law firm, married (Black- having both been rejected by the Senate. mun was best man at his wedding), and Blackmun’s confirmation was unani- became active in Republican politics. mous, but repeated newspaper depictions He managed the election campaigns of of him as Burger’s “Minnesota Twin” de- Harold Stassen, the youthful three-term cisively counterbalanced the senatorial governor, and also led Stassen’s unsuc- courtesy. Blackmun’s first years on the cessful presidential candidacy in 1948. high bench underscored both his insecu- At the closely contested Republican Na- rities about whether he belonged there tional Convention in 1952, Burger proved and his pronounced conservatism. In crucial to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first Wyman v. James, a case challenging in- ballot nomination.When Eisenhower be- trusive home visits imposed upon welfare came president, Burger was rewarded by recipients, and in United States v. Kras, being named assistant attorney general which disputed a $50 fee required of in charge of the Justice Department’s anyone filing for bankruptcy, Blackmun Civil Division. wrote majority opinions upholding the Three years later, Eisenhower ele- policies despite fervent dissents from the vated Burger to a judgeship on the U.S. Court’s liberals. Court of Appeals for the District of Co- lumbia Circuit. His judicial status not- he singular—and momen- withstanding, Burger remained in close tous—exception during Black- contact with the Justice Department, and mun’s first three years on the when the Minnesota judge for whom Court was his opinion in Roe v.