II. “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC”

Shortly after the Civil War an immigrant ship from Scotland was coming up the Schuylkill River. It had taken weeks to cross the Atlantic and now it was close enough to be gaily bombarded by peaches thrown from the shore. The passengers caught the strange fruit in their hands and learned to eat it and the taste was welcome after so protracted a spell of ship’s provisions.

There was a fifteen year old girl passenger from Edinburgh who did not take part in the pastime. She came of a lowland Scotch family, a family of seafarers: her father, a sea captain, had been lost at sea and so also had her brother. Bred to patience, she now sat quietly watching. But one of the men came over and dropped the peach he had caught into her lap. “You should eat it,” he explained, and she replied, gazing at the fruit, “It’s too bonnie to eat.”

This Scotch girl was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, to live with an uncle in business there. A few years later she came to Lewiston, Pennsylvania, to teach school. And here it was that Isabelle Moody encountered William Prescott Frost, Jr., on his rebound from New England. Young Frost had his eye on other projects of ambition, but for the time he too was a school teacher in Lewiston. They were married, and the husband went on to San Francisco to work on a Democratic newspaper, the Bulletin. A little later he wrote his wife that the windows of the newspaper office had been shot out but he was unharmed. The paper had, it seems, printed derogatory statements about some stock and those who were interested in it had resorted to gun play. Into this smoldering and sometimes violent community Isabelle Moody followed her husband and there on March 26, 1875, a son, christened Robert Lee Frost, was born.

The christening tells the story of the father’s political sympathies. Too young to fight in the Civil War, the boy had been an intense copperhead and had meditated on somehow slipping South to join the Confederates. Now he was a States’ Rights man and once he showed Robert a map of the United States and divided it into five nations into which he predicted the country would sometime split.

The father liked San Francisco. He liked the spirit of plunging which diffused through the community and he was himself always playing the stock market. He liked to spend money liberally. And he liked the threat of grimness which one experienced by simply observing that men wore revolvers with the frequency New Yorkers today wear sticks.

One Sunday afternoon Robert and several other children were permitted to walk along the beach with his father and a few associates. A bottle was found and stopped up and tossed into the waves. Out came the revolvers of all the men and they fired at the floating target. It was no more uncommon than throwing stones.

One Christmas Eve Robert, his sister and his mother returned to their house quite late. They were about to prepare for bed when his mother asked Robert if he had locked the door. He answered that he had, but it at once became indisputable that he had not, for the door was heard to open without benefit of key and someone, to their consternation, entered. Mrs. Frost rushed her children into a room, locked its door, shooed them under a table, and extracted a revolver from a drawer. “I’ll shoot if you come further!” she spoke with a quaver. There was no answer, and she repeated her threat. Then Mr. Frost’s laugh was heard, relieving a tension that was likely often to seize San Franciscans of that period.

On the Fourth of July the plunging editor broke loose. It was his day and it was neither safe nor sane. An old fashioned celebrator, he made the greatest racket possible, set fire to outhouses and destroyed minor properties. He went to the limit on political celebrations, too. In politics or the stock market he would soon make a lucky stroke if he played hard enough. Then after success had burgeoned, he would take care of that consumption that threatened him. He would take a trip to “the Islands”; that is, to Hawaii, the favored resort of that time for consumptives. In the meantime he drank liquor to keep up his pace, he drank warm blood at the stockyards to alleviate the disease, and he did all the celebrating possible when his party triumphed. Robert was a celebrant too, riding, costumed, on floats in the big parades or trudging in torchlight processions until he was sent home to bed from weariness.

But the political ambitions yielded only small fruits. Mr. Frost did go as a delegate to one Democratic National Convention and he was city campaign manager in 1884 when Cleveland was elected President. He was defeated, however, when he ran for election as tax collector of San Francisco. In that campaign the boy Robert was his constant companion—his job was to visit the saloons with his father’s campaign cards and to impale these on the ceiling by flinging upwards a card with a tack through it and a silver dollar beneath the tack which worked as a sort of flying mallet—and this, one fancies, remains to this day the most active participation in politics of Robert Frost.

In 1885 consumption won the contest for the body of William Prescott Frost and silenced its teeming hopes and plans, its explosive moods and tense restraints. His wife who had suffered for weeks at a time from his gloomy silences and his son who had suffered from his grim severities mourned for him—and found that his extravagance had led to letting his insurance lapse. It was necessary to return to the New England the dead man had hated, to seek refuge with Robert’s grandparents in Lawrence.

So the little boy relinquished the tiny chicken farm he had started in the backyard at San Francisco and on the long ride sat beside his surviving parent, both sunk in memories of the grim dignity of the deceased, he who had never worn anything but a top hat, who had always been drily polite without the least ingratiation, and yet had been pathetic, too, since he had been terrible to himself. If anything planted tragedy in Robert Frost, it must have been, one surmises, the vision of his father, friend on the one hand of Buckley, the notorious blind boss of San Francisco, and on the other of Henry George with whom for a brief time he managed a single tax newspaper.

Perhaps from his father he acquired a certain recklessness of temperament, less extreme, but discernible in the drifting ways of his life: his father was energetically imprudent and the world, one knows, judges the son gently imprudent in the affairs of practical living. But the presence of the mother is also implied in the poetry. Her Scotch blood, transmitted, courses perhaps in the canny good sense, in the slightly oblique humor, and above all in the thriftiness of the poetic productions. She was herself an occasional versifier and reviewed books for her husband’s newspaper. In religion she was a Swedenborgian, and these facts are sufficient to suggest that she probably awakened an emotional area in her son that the father left untouched, that area that was later to fructify into a new contribution to American poetry.