Robert Frost, Man and Myth

THE ATLANTIC

BY JAMES DICKEY

BELOVÈD” is a term that must always be mistrusted when applied to artists, and particularly to poets. Poets are likely to be belovèd for only a few of the right reasons, and for almost all the wrong ones: for saying things we want to hear, for furnishing us with an image of ourselves that we enjoy believing in, even for living for a long time in the public eye and pronouncing sagely on current affairs. Robert Frost has been long admired for all these things, and is consequently one of the most misread writers in the whole of American literature.

In Frost’s case the reputation has come, at least to some extent, from the powerful additive of the Robert Frost Story, a secular myth of surprising power and tenacity: an image that has eaten into the rock of the American psyche and engraved Frost’s very engravable face as in a kind of Mount Rushmore of the nation’s consciousness. The “Frost Story” would, in fact, make quite an acceptable film script, even allowing for the notorious difficulty Hollywood has in dealing with writers. We enjoy wandering off, mentally, into a scenario of this sort, partly because we know that the main facts of the Frost Story, leaving aside the interpretation that has been put upon them, are facts, and also because the Story is and has long been something we believe in with the conviction accorded only to people and events in which we want to believe and will have no other way. Frost is unassailable, a national treasure, a remnant of the frontier and the Thoreauistic virtues of shrewd Yankeeedom, the hero of the dozing American daydream of self-reliance and experience-won wisdom we feel guilty about betraying every time we eat a TV dinner or punch a computer. The Frost Story stands over against all that we have become, and hints with mysterious and canny authority that it all might have been otherwise — even that it might yet be so.

It is a dream, of course. To us a dream, surely, but also a kind of dream to Frost, and despite the authenticity of whatever settings the film might choose for its backgrounds, despite the rugged physical presence of Frost himself, any film made of such elements would have to partake of nostalgic visions. It might open, for example, with a sequence showing Frost moving among his Properties — apple trees, birch trees, stone fences, dark woods with snow falling into them, ax handles, shovels, woodpiles, ladders, New England brooks, taciturn neighbors — and then modulate into a conversation with Frost for that cryptic, homely, devious, delightful way of making sense out of life — any aspect of it—that the public so loved him for: his way of reducing all generalities to local fact so that they become not only understandable but controllable.

If one wanted to include chronology one might have a little difficulty in making Frost’s life in England interesting, for aside from showing some of the places he lived in and visited and photographs of some of the people he knew, like Ezra Pound, Edward Thomas, and Lascelles Abercrombie, it would be hard to do much more than suggest his experiences there. Most of this part would probably have to be carried by voice-over narration, and might deal with Frost manfully being his Own Man, resisting being exploited and misinterpreted by Ezra Pound (“that great intellect abloom in hair”), and with his being a kind of literary Ben Franklin in Georgian England, uncorrupted and wary, delighting the jaded and oversophisticated with, well, his authenticity.

One might then work forward by easy stages into what everybody knows is coming: the great Recognitions of the final years, the readings, the lectures and interviews, the conferences with students and the press — thus affording more time for the Frost Talk — the voyage to Russia and the meeting with Khrushchev, and so on, all culminating in the Ultimate Reading, the Kennedy Inaugural and its little drama of the sunlight, Vice President Johnson’s top hat, and the details familiar to those who watch great as well as small events on television. Another poet, Galway Kinnell, has written of this occasion:

That drawing forth of the poem from “the great faithful heart” would be the end — how could you top it? — and everyone could leave the theater surer than ever that he had inherited something, some way of responding and speaking as an American, that matters.

To MOVE from this drama of public appearances to Lawrance Thompson’s Robert Frost: The EarlyYears is to move, if not wholly out of the myth — for Thompson is very much in its thrall, despite all that he knows of Frost’s actual life and personality — then rather into the area of its making, and the reasons for its making. One cannot inhabit Dr. Thompson’s book, even under the influence of the Story (or the film, for legends are probably all films of one kind or another), without ceasing to be comfortable in one’s prior assumptions. As partial as it is, Dr. Thompson’s account is yet the fully documented record of what Frost was like when he was not belovèd: when he was, in fact, a fanatically selfish, egocentric, and at times dangerous man; was, from the evidence, one of the least lovable figures in American literature. What we get from Dr. Thompson is the much less cinematic narrative (and yet, what if someone tried to film this Frost Story?) of the construction of a complex mask, a persona, an invented personality that the world, following the man, was pleased, was overjoyed, finally, to take as an authentic identity, and whose main interest, biographically and humanly, comes from the fact that the mask is almost the diametrical opposite of the personality that lived in and motivated the man all his life.

Most of Robert Frost: The Early Years, which takes Frost up through his period in England, is concerned with the twined alternatives of fear and hubris: with Frost’s desperate efforts to establish and maintain his self-image in the face of every conceivable discouragement, the period when he would quit any job — he quit a good many — go back on any commitment, throw over any trust or personal relationship which did not accord him the deference he persuaded himself he deserved. Dr. Thompson talks persuasively — though not, I think, conclusively — of Frost’s need to protect his sensibility from crasser natures and desensitizing work, but one never really believes that this justified Frost’s arrogance and callousness on the many occasions when they were the most observable things about him. These were the years of Frost’s hating and turning on anyone who helped or cared for him, from his friends like Carl Burell, who worked his poultry farm for him while he nursed his ego, to his grandfather, whose generous legacy Frost insisted on interpreting as a way of “writing off” the poet and “sending him out to die” on a farm that the grandfather actually purchased to give Frost a livelihood and a profession.

The fact that this is the “official” biography keeps coming back to one as one reads, and with this a recognition of the burden that must surely have been on Dr. Thompson’s shoulders in writing it: the difficulty in dovetailing the author’s bias in favor of his subject — for it is abundantly apparent that Thompson really does deeply care for Frost’s work and also for Frost himself—and the necessity to tell what did in reality occur on various occasions. Dr. Thompson has large numbers of facts, and the first task of the biographer is to make facts seem facts, stand up as facts before any interpretation is made from them. One of the ways to do this is to be pedestrian, for the world’s facts are pedestrian, and most of the time simply sit there saying over and over again, I am here, I am true, I happened, without any particular emphasis. Consequently there is a good deal of material like “at this stage the Frosts had an unexpected visitor, none other than Edmund J. Harwood, from whom Frost’s grandfather had bought the Derry farm” and “another acquaintance was made that evening, a burley red-faced country squire named John C. Chase, the modestly well-to-do owner of a local wood-working factory, which turned out a variety of products including tongue-depressors and similarly shaped tags for marking trees and shrubs in nurseries.” This makes for a certain monotony, but one is inclined to go along with it partly because it is the truth — the man’s name was John C. Chase, and he did make tongue depressors — but mainly because it is a necessary background for the second and far more important of the biographer’s tasks, that of interpretation. That part is primarily psychological, and if the protagonist has not chosen to tell either the biographer or someone else why he said or did something on a given occasion — and one must be constantly wary of taking him at his word — one must surmise. Dr. Thompson is very good at this, most of the time, but also at some points unconsciously funny.

During her sophomore year, Jeanie [Frost’s sister] suffered through moods of depression much like those which had beset her, intermittently, since her childhood days in San Francisco. Her spells of tears, hysteria, ravings, which caused her to miss more and more days of school, puzzled her mother increasingly. In the midst of one spell Jeanie was making so much noise that Mrs. Frost turned desperately to her son for help. Enraged, he stormed into Jeanie’s bedroom, found her lying face down on the bed, turned her over, and slapped her across the face with the flat of his hand. Just for a moment the one blow had the desired effect: Jeanie grew silent, stopped crying completely, and sat up. She stared at her brother and then said, scornfully, “You cad, you coward.” That was not Rob’s only use of violence when trying to help his sister.

When other incidents indicate clearly that brother and sister absolutely detested each other, one has a certain hesitation in identifying “Rob’s” motive as helpfulness. Yet it seems to me that Dr. Thompson’s deductions are right a great deal more than they are wrong, and that is really all we can ask of a mortal biographer.

Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. We watch him live through the decline and death of his alcoholic, ambitious father, follow him as he is shunted around New England as a poor relation, supported by his gentle, mystical mother’s pathetically inept attempts to be a teacher. We see him develop, as compensation, a fanatical and paranoiac self-esteem with its attendant devils of humiliation, jealousy, and frustration. He considers suicide, tries poultry farming, loses a child, settles on poetry as a way of salvation — something, at last, that he can do, at least to some extent — borrows money and fails to pay it back, perseveres with a great deal of tenacity and courage but also with a sullen self-righteousness with which one can have but very little sympathy.

He wanted, and from his early days — Dr. Thompson makes much of his “idealism,” learned from his mother — to be “great,” distinctive, different, a law unto himself, admired but not restricted by those who admired him. He did well in high school when he found that good marks earned him a distinction he had never had before, but he was continually hampered by his arrogance and his jealousy of others, and after graduation seems to have been able to do little else but insult the people who tried to help him and accept and quit one humiliating job after another with as bad grace as possible.

During all this time, however, his writing developed, and in a remarkably straight line. He had, almost from the beginning, a flair for straightforward, uncomplicated versification of the traditional kind, and a stubborn belief that poetry should sound “like talk.” He also apparently fastened very early on the notion that to hint is better than to say, and the idea that there are ways of saying, of seeming to say, both more and less than one seems to be saying.

Determining all questions of technique was his conception of the imaginative faculty as being essentially protection, self-protection, armor for the self-image. Looking back on Frost through the lens of Dr. Thompson’s book, one finds it obvious that the mode, the manner in which a man lies, and what he lies about— these things, and the form of his lies — are the main things to investigate in a poet’s life and work. The events of Frost’s life, events similar to those experienced by a great many people, are not nearly so important as the interpretation he put upon them. The persona of the Frost Story was made year by year, poem by poem, of elements of the actual life Frost lived, reinterpreted by the exigencies of the persona. He had, for example, some knowledge of farming, though he was never a farmer by anything but default. Physically he was a lazy man, which is perhaps why images of work figure so strongly in his poems. Through these figures in his most famous pieces, probably his best poems — haying, apple-picking, mowing, cleaning springs, and mending walls — he indulged in what with him was the only effective mode of self-defense he had been able to devise: the capacity to claim competence at the menial tasks he habitually shirked, and to assert, from that claim, authority, “earned truth,” and a wisdom elusive, personal, and yet final.

At his simplest, his most rhythmical and cryptic, Frost is a remarkable poet. In deceptively “straight” syntax and in rhymes that are like the first rhymes one thinks of when one thinks of rhymes, Frost found his particular way of making mysteries and moral judgments start up from the ground under the reader’s feet, come out of the work one did in order to survive and the environment in which both the work and the survival prolonged themselves, leap into the mind from a tuft of flowers, an ax handle suddenly become sin itself, as when “the snake stood up for evil in the garden.” This individualizing and localizing way of getting generalities to reveal themselves — original sin, universal Design, love, death, fate, large meanings of all kinds — is a major factor in Frost’s approach, and is his most original and valuable contribution to poetry. Like most procedures, it has both its triumphs and its self-belittlements, and there are both good Frost poems and awful ones, not as dissimilar as one might think, to bear this out.

The trouble, of course, is that Frost had but little idea of when he was in a position to make an effective (“earned”) judgment and when he was not. In the beginning he was cautious about this, but when the public spurred him on, he was perfectly willing to pronounce on anything and everything, in poems or out of them. This resulted in the odd mixture of buffoonery and common sense (but hardly ever more than that) of his last years.

And yet at his best, which we must do him the service of identifying as his most characteristic, he is perfectly amazing. We have all harbored at odd times a suspicion that the key to large Significances lay close at hand, could we but find it. Frost understood how this feeling could be made to serve as the backbone of a kind of poetry that was not only profound but humanly convincing as well, as most poetry, panting and sweating to be linguistically interesting, is not. One believes the Frost voice. That itself is a technical triumph, and of the highest kind. It enables the poems to come without being challenged into places in the consciousness of the “average” reader that have been very little visited before, and almost never by poems.

Yet it is well to remember, for all the uplifting force that it has legitimately, and illegitimately, been in so many lives, for all the conclusion-drawing and generalizing that the public has esteemed and rewarded it for, that the emotions of pain, fear, and confusion are the roots of Frost’s poetry. Lionel Trilling, with his usual perceptiveness, has seen this, and seen it better than anyone else, perhaps even including Frost, ever saw it. Trilling’s Frost of darkness and terror is more nearly the real Frost, the Frost permanently valuable as a poet, than any other, and it is in poems where these emotions fuse with his methods — poems like “Design” — that he moves us most.

What he accomplished, in the end, was what he became. Not what he became as a public figure, forgotten as quickly as other public figures are, but what he became as a poet. He survives in what he made his own invented being say. His main achievement, it seems to me, is the creation of a particular kind of poetry-speaking voice. He, as much as any American poet, brought convincingness of tone into poetry, and made of it a gauge against which all poetry would inevitably have to be tried. This voice endures in a few powerful and utterly original poems: “After Applepicking,” “Provide, Provide,” “To Earthward.”

Dr. Thompson’s authoritative and loving book makes clear that Frost’s way was the only one open to him, and also the fact that, among other things, his poems were a tremendous physical feat, a lifelong muscular striving after survival. Though tragically hard on the people who loved him, put up with him, and suffered because of him, Frost’s courage and stubbornness are plain, and they are impressive. But no one who reads this book will ever again believe in the Frost Story, the Frost myth, which includes the premises that Frost the man was kindly, forebearing, energetic, hardworking, goodneighborly, or anything but the small-minded, vindictive, ill-tempered, egotistic, cruel, and unforgiving man he was until the world deigned to accept at face value his estimate of himself. What price art, indeed? Dr. Thompson’s biography has, or should have, the effect of leading us all into a private place — the grave of judgment, or the beginning of it — where we ponder long and long the nature “of life and art,” their connections and interconnections, and the appalling risk, the cost in lives and minds not only of putting rhythmical symbols of ink on a white page, but of encountering, of reading them as well.