VII. “INTO MY OWN”

Passing down a side street in New York as he came away from the steamer which had brought him back from England, Robert Frost’s eyes saw propped on a stand a magazine he had never heard of. From curiosity he purchased it at once: it was called The New Republic. Inside he came upon a page appreciation of North of Boston which was signed by Amy Lowell. But more arresting still, the book appeared to be published by Henry Holt and Co. An American publisher! He did not know he had one. This seemed a good omen, and the following day Frost called on the Holt company.

Yes, they had imported the sheets for three hundred bound copies from David Nutt, and this small order had been very quickly exhausted. Now they would like to publish North of Boston and A Boy’s Will themselves, but David Nutt had reserved all rights. It soon appeared, though, that David Nutt had violated the agreement, and Henry Holt won the legal right to bring out Frost’s books in America. In quick succession they published North of Boston and A Boy’s Will within that year, 1915.

Rapid sales followed. North of Boston eventually ran around twenty thousand copies, and the other books have done well, considering the market for poetry, though not nearly so well as the first.⁠[5] The critics were exuberant: among them was Edward Garnett who contributed an influential article on Frost, since included in Friday Nights, to the Atlantic Monthly. Furthermore, public taste for a time appeared to have crystallized about such work as Frost’s. The hour was right, for there was ripening a new interest in contemporary American verse: the critics were enthusiastic: and the character of Frost’s writing, at once novel and conservative, pleased all camps. A great many people agreed with Edward Garnett’s opinions: “It seemed to me that this poet was destined to take a permanent place in American literature.... Surely a genuine New England voice, whatever be its literary debt to old-world English ancestry.”

Recognition, long deferred, now heaped itself upon the quiet poet. A chapter in Amy Lowell’s Tendencies in Modern American Poetry was given over to him and his work, Louis Untermeyer wrote a chapter on his verse in A New Era in American Poetry, Llewellyn Jones did likewise in First Impressions, Clement Wood in Poets of America, and it very shortly came to pass that no survey of the poetry of our decades was complete without a considerable discussion of this author. Waldo Frank in Our America introduced his passage on Frost by saying: “The poetry of Frost is of that excellent sort which it is hard to catalogue. It is lyrical. It is dramatic, since his books are—as he says—‘of people.’ It is philosophic, since the tales he tells trace conscious lines about the boundaries of life. Fully, it is poetry—and of New England.”

Frost found himself an advisory board member of the Seven Arts in 1916 and 1917, that gallant venture in behalf of our national arts directed by Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks and James Oppenheim. And in the file of the Seven Arts there rests The Way Out, the one published play by Frost. Truly, he had scarcely tapped and all the doors of literary America suddenly opened to him.

He had come into his own, so far as eminence counts. In 1916 he was Phi Beta Kappa poet at one of the colleges he had neglected to graduate from, and he read at Harvard for the occasion the poem called The Axe-Helve. Since then there has been a shower of honors. In the early part of 1922 he was elected an honorary member of the International P.E.N. Club in the company of Thomas Hardy, Anatole France, Romain Rolland, Selma Lagerlof, and others of western world fame. This international honor was seconded in the same year by the local action of the Women’s Clubs of Vermont in conferring on him the title of Poet Laureate of that state. Very quickly, too, his work has been incorporated in the English literature courses of foreign universities: at the Sorbonne study of Robert Frost’s books is a requirement in the English teacher’s course and from the University of Montpellier, Jean Catel has written, “We are going to study Frost as a poet together with such recognized writers as Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, etc.” Lately critical estimates of his poetry have appeared in Italy.

But Robert Frost was not to be hurried. Mountain Interval came out in 1916 and absorbed most of the balance of his unpublished poems. Then a wait until 1923 when a Selected Poems was brought out, and then New Hampshire, the first new book in seven years. It is now four years since New Hampshire and Frost is still unwilling to release another collection. “In a year or two I suppose I’ll have another book ready,” he says.

The tables have been changed since Derry days, but he continues the pattern. Therefore, in 1915 he purchased a farm on a hill just outside of Franconia, New Hampshire. In 1920 he moved to Vermont where he had purchased a large farm at South Shaftsbury in the district presided over by that ardent Vermonter, Dorothy Canfield. He is still the farmer and poet. And teacher, too, for that element in him retains its energy. From 1916 to 1919 he was a member of the faculty of Amherst College, this poet without a scholarly eminence in the orthodox sense, without a college diploma even (though now he holds honorary degrees from three institutions of higher learning), but he was encouraged to conduct classes in literature and philosophy in his own freehand way. In teaching literature he assumed that the conspicuous landmarks would be seen in other courses. He could therefore ramble in the lesser known regions of good writing, dwelling always in his informal presentation on the enjoyment of books and slyly encouraging honesty of initiative in writing.

Then President Burton of the University of Michigan called Frost to fill the new Fellowship in the Arts which he established in 1921. The appointment was for one year, but was extended to two, at the close of which Robert Bridges, the British Poet Laureate, was appointed Fellow for the following year. But in 1925, so welcome had Frost been on the Michigan campus, he was called back to Ann Arbor to hold a life fellowship in poetry founded entirely for him.

It was not long, however, before the magnetic pull of New England soil and the fact that two of his children had made their homes in the east drew him away from the attractive post at Michigan. He resigned and came back to the ruggedly lyrical Green Mountains of Vermont in 1926, with the plan of distributing his “teaching” efforts among several colleges.

Thus during the academic year, 1926–1927, Frost was “boarded around” by the various colleges who competed for his residence on the campus. He traveled about, to Wesleyan University for two weeks, to Amherst for ten, to Michigan for a few weeks, to Dartmouth for a visit, and so on, mingling in each place with students and faculty, giving lectures and readings, consulting with literary aspirants, imparting a fresh emotional quality to the collegiate routine that is too usually strange to it. But it is unlikely that he will “tramp about” so much in another year, as Amherst claims his presence (Frost does his teaching by simply being what he is) for an entire term during the next collegiate year.

Imagine that you have been invited to be the guest of Robert Frost for a few days. Let the place be Amherst. He is staying there for a month or two in a house rented from a professor now on his sabbatical year. As you alight from your taxicab late in the afternoon, a well filled out man of good height steps on to the porch, and you are aware that the note this waiting personality strikes is quiet yet vivid. A large boned rugged frame, a strong neck, and poised on its full column a head so modeled that it gives the strength of the body a lyrical accentuation. This head has been described as a faun’s and the eyes and mouth are sometimes said to have an elfin quality, and indeed it is true that one might think of faunishness and sly flitting elves in glancing at it. That is fanciful, though, and not really in correspondence with the sensitivity, the fluent gravity, the friendly lines of the countenance now welcoming you. The words and manner are simple: there is a trace of shyness which attests that the simplicity is not an affectation and yet there is also ease.

You enter and Mrs. Frost, quiet, sweet, intelligent and devoted, greets you. Talk begins, dinner is served. Mr. Frost has been out of touch with the centers of literary life. He asks questions, about the Dial, about William Carlos Williams, about that and this eddy in the literature of the day. Patently, he is out of it, he doesn’t follow the magazines and supplements and current books with any assiduity, apparently he prefers to hear—in country fashion—from the lips of the people he meets what is going on.

After coffee, you settle down in the living room for a long evening’s talk, you playing alternately the crisp rôle of questioner and the respectful one of listener, and Frost “in his dry, sly, halting way,” as Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant puts it in her vivid portrait of Frost, talks and ruminates, tells stories, offers critical notes, and speculates. The speculative note in his conversation is important, for it signifies that the growing ends of his mind and feelings still carry him on. There is no impending death here of sensibility or thinking, no dogmatism, in short, that closes off further possibilities of enlarging his experience.

Perhaps he speaks of his Indian-fighting ancestor, Major Charles Frost, and how for years he looked on him with a little disapproval as a black sheep in the family whom other people honored for his treacherous conduct at the Indian conference. Frost, you perceive, sympathizes with the Indians: he doesn’t like unfair play. But lately he has learned that Major Frost objected to the stratagem and entered into it with great reluctance: he is glad to think a little better of the early settler.

He drifts into reminiscence of San Francisco days and that grim father of his. Sometimes his father would give him some change and commission him to bring back cigarettes. But on one awful occasion the quarter slipped from his hand as he was running to the store and fell into one of the cracks of the board sidewalk then the prevalent style in San Francisco. In vain did his small hands try to recover it, and passersby were able to do no better. Frantic, he went to the store, fearfully explained he had dropped his money, and begged for a package of cigarettes. Laughter from the clerk and the men standing about. Nothing to do but return home in trepidation and tell his mother. Father was working in his study and by now no doubt impatient for a smoke. His mother also stood in fear of father’s anger, but in the present case she decided that Robert must go in and tell of the loss. Only first let them pray, mother and son, that Robert should be let off easily. Then Robert went in and reported. His father glanced up for a moment from something he was writing, said brusquely, “Never mind,” and turned back to complete his sentence.

There was something deep between Frost and his father. The man was mentally alert: he had stood second in his class at Harvard and he had been an associate of Henry George. He was ambitious, as his political activity reveals. And he was, despite his consumption, strenuous, engaging in long swims and once in a six day walking race with the champion, Dan O’Leary. He won that, too. O’Leary had sworn that he could give him a liberal handicap and then walk him down. When O’Leary failed to do so, he claimed that Frost’s father had violated walking rules, but afterwards he became his friend. But above all—and this is the really deep bond—his father seems to have planted tragedy into his son’s view of the world: so deeply did he do this that to this day his father’s character excites a species of awesome regard in the son.

And now, in reply to a question, Frost is speaking of school days in Lawrence, of first adventures in reading poets, of meeting Elinor White who tied him for scholarship honors. And he points out how his grandfather, according to his light, loyally stood by him, how he sent him twice to college, backed him patiently in various endeavors to make a living, and finally gave him a farm—which he didn’t succeed in managing expertly. “Never earned a cent, save from and through verse. But for my first twenty years at it I earned a total of two hundred dollars,”⁠[6] he remarks without bitterness.

The poem that he read before the Men’s Club of the Central Congregational Church at Derry, the poem that was so instrumental in landing for him his job at Pinkerton Academy, was, he tells you, The Tuft of Flowers in A Boy’s Will, “Yes,” he says with a smile to interpret the remark, “The Tuft of Flowers got me my first real job. Whole family owe their life to this poem and they’d better believe it.”⁠[7] The Black Cottage, The House-Keeper, and The Death of the Hired Man all date, he goes on to inform you, from 1905 before he joined the Pinkerton faculty, and he adds that “Virgil’s Eclogues may have had something to do with them.... I first heard the voice from a printed page in a Virgilian Eclogue and Hamlet.”⁠[7]

The talk shifts the scene to London ... the fooleries of Skipwith Cannéll and Ezra Pound ... the jiu jitsu demonstration Pound made on Frost’s person in a restaurant..... Pound and Frost invited to luncheon by two ladies, Pound disgusted by their shallow flow of talk on art, Pound rising, knocking his chair over as he did so, saying haughtily, “I leave these ladies to you,” departing to Frost’s consternation.... Pound’s challenge to Lascelles Abercrombie to fight a duel on the score that Abercrombie’s articles were a public offense—and the amusing aftermath.

We return to America and Frost tells how editors now snatched for the opportunity to print the poems which previously for many years had been vainly offered to their magazines. And you lead him on to tell how liberal the colleges have been in their attitude toward his way of conducting classes—a curious chapter in modern education.

Frost goes on to speak of the people he knows: of Lincoln MacVeagh and Alfred Harcourt when they worked at Holt’s, of Carl Sandburg’s work and Louis Untermeyer’s visits, of a professor at Amherst he admires because “he loves the classics and he is a field scientist.” He expresses his doubts of the “bunko-sciences” (mostly sociological and psychological in character). He tells of a night spent with Paul Elmer More at Princeton. He inserts somewhere one of Padraic Colum’s Irish stories. He relates an experience at Vassar College. He supplied his audience with broadsheets on which were printed several of the poems he would read during his lecture. At the close of the talk the roomful of girls avalanched upon him to autograph the broadsheets. After that he no longer considered it a good idea to furnish his audiences with the poems he intended to recite.

The family is mentioned. His son, Carol, and one daughter, Irma, are married: the oldest daughter, Lesley, runs a book-shop in Pittsfield but now she is going around the world, managing a bookstall on the liner: Marjorie has not been well for some time.

It is past two now. One studies Frost’s face in the lamplight. His “skin and his rebellious hair have now a fine harmony of tone, ‘the grey of the moss of walls,’ a young and living greyness that, like a delicate lichen, softens without hiding the hard and eternal shape of the rock beneath.”⁠[8] And while one studies him, he is perhaps telling you of the friendship that existed between him and Thomas Bird Mosher. Mosher early picked out one of Frost’s poems for affection and printed it in his catalogue, and Frost saw him every so often, saw the sad decline of this epicure who drolly mourned the loss of his sense of taste and in desperation had beefsteaks specially sent from Boston to Portland and specially prepared by the best cooks he could engage only to find them tasteless for him. But never to the end, Frost reminds you, did Mosher lose his fine taste for the blue china poetry of the nineties. Or perhaps he tells you of Aroldo Du Chêne who sculpted his head, or of J. J. Lankes whose woodcuts so appropriately join in mood with the text of New Hampshire. Frost had admired the feeling for New England landscape Lankes had revealed in some woodcuts reproduced in the Masses and the Liberator. And Lankes had admired Frost’s poetry and illustrated several of the poems for his own enjoyment. Then poet and artist were brought together by Carl Van Doren, then an editor of the Century, in a fortunate collaboration for which each, unknown to the other, was already prepared.

Somehow the talk shifts again. “I believe,” Frost is saying, “in what the Greeks called synecdoche: the philosophy of the part for the whole; touching the hem of the goddess. All that an artist needs is samples. Enough success to know what money is like; enough love to know what women are like.”⁠[9] Nature, he explains, does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish and he does so by making a garden and building a wall. That garden is art. Wallace Stevens, he says, has made a formal garden with his poetry.

⁠[10]“One of the real American poets of yesterday,” he goes on to say, “was Longfellow. No, I am not being sarcastic. I mean it. It is the fashion nowadays to make fun of him. I come across this pose and attitude with people I meet socially, with men and women I meet in the classrooms of colleges. They laugh at his gentleness, at his lack of worldliness, at his detachment from the world and the meaning thereof. When and where has it been written that a poet must be a club-swinging warrior, a teller of barroom tales, a participant of unspeakable experiences? That, today, apparently is the stamp of poetic integrity. I hear people speak of men who are writing today, and their eyes light up with a deep glow of satisfaction when they can mention some putrid bit of gossip about them. ‘He writes such lovely things,’ they say, and in the next breath add, half worshipfully, ‘He leads such a terrible life.’ I can’t see it. I can’t see that a man must needs have his feet plowing through unhealthy mud in order to appreciate more fully the glowing splendor of the clouds. I can’t see that a man must fill his soul with sick and miserable experiences, self-imposed and self-inflicted, and greatly enjoyed, before he can sit down and write a lyric of strange and compelling beauty. Inspiration doesn’t lie in the mud; it lies in the clean and wholesome life of the ordinary man. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I haven’t the power to feel, to appreciate and live the extremes of dank living and beautiful inspiration.

“Men have told me, and perhaps they are right, that I have no ‘straddle.’ That is the term they use. I have no straddle. That means that I cannot spread out far enough to live in filth and write in the treetops. I can’t. Perhaps it is because I am so ordinary. I like the middle way, as I like to talk to the man who walks the middle way with me. I have given thought to this business of straddling, and there’s always seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something tricky. I see a man riding two horses, one foot on the back of one horse, one foot on the other. One horse pulls one way, the other a second. His straddle is wide. Heaven help him, but it seems to me that before long it’s going to hurt him. It isn’t the natural way, the normal way, the powerful way to ride. It’s a trick.

“I am an ordinary man, I guess. That’s what’s the trouble with me. I like my school and I like my farm and I like people. Just ordinary, you see.”

He pauses. “What I have said,” he reflects, “sounds a little too moral. My point always is that a poet may live as vile a life as he pleases, but then his poetry ought to be of a vile beauty. I hate dis-integrity. I hope I have some range in the appreciation of beauty. I can see it all the way from exquisite through homely and mean even to vile. What I am unsympathetic with is a wide discrepancy between life and art.”

The college clock strikes three. It is Frost’s usual bedtime. Tomorrow he will be up around eleven, a student or two will call with some writings for him to read, at one o’clock we are to be driven to a farm house for a “real New England luncheon,” later there will be a walk.

“Frost,” Waldo Frank has remarked, “is not only a beautiful poet. He is a beautiful person.”