Robert Frost

The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume Two review

Volume One of Robert Frost’s Letters wound up in 1919 with his ­resignation from a teaching position at Amherst College, where he disliked the progressive curriculum fostered by the President, Alexander Meiklejohn. By the second year of Volume Two, he has more than recouped the loss, with steady employment as a lecturer at the Bread Loaf School in Vermont and a sideline job as a consulting editor for his publisher Henry Holt. Always a canny negotiator, Frost took charge of his career; he responded with equal dexterity to the demand for new poems and invitations to deliver public readings. He was keen on popularity but minded how he got it: there is never a hint of the meretricious, and he seems to have made a conscious decision early to stay out of the front lines where his admirers were helping. He must have had offers to edit an anthology, for example. He never went for it. But in his late forties now he was looking for variety in his base of operations.

Against his usual suspicion that college was good for no one, he would reconcile himself by 1927 to “doing the itinerant teacher this year at Wesleyan, Amherst, Michigan, Dartmouth, and Bowdoin – two to ten weeks each. I expect to be ten weeks at Amherst every year from now on. It is a strange relation to colleges I have grown into”. Frost indeed was willing to instruct in every setting from the book club to the university oration. Presumably, he was brokering his fame to buy himself time for writing; but his energy was squandered in the binges of performance; and there is a pattern to it: he rebukes himself but travels the circle again. Even so, the books he ended up publishing in these years, New Hampshire (1923) and West-Running Brook (1928), show only a slight falling off from the extraordinary achievement of his previous three volumes. “A Star in a Stone Boat”, “Two Witches”, “Dust of Snow”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “For Once, Then, Something”, “To Earthward”, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”, “Spring Pools” and “Acquainted with the Night” are the great poems of this period, but every line in both books has the workmanship that proved Frost a master poet a decade earlier. The letters have little to say about the poems.
A letter to the poet Louis Untermeyer in 1921 catches him in a characteristic posture, half humble and half proud. Frost is departing New England to serve as “an idle-fellow of the University of Michigan for one year”. With his privileged status in that position and his agreement to come back in subsequent years, he would pretty much invent the American idea of the “writer in residence”. But he was far from idle as a host to the authors he brought to Ann Arbor for readings – the first series included Vachel Lindsay, Whitter Bynner, Carl Sandburg and Dorothy Canfield Fisher – and an intelligent curiosity about the work of his contemporaries is apparent throughout the letters. Writing to John Bartlett in January 1926, he casually lists the books he has recently read: Edward Grey’s Twenty-Five Years, Lord Charnwood’s commentary on the Gospel of John, Since Lenin Died by Max Eastman, Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson and The Professor’s House (“Willa Cather is our great novelist now”). So reading is still an innocent pleasure – “Gee, they’re all good books” – but the duties of the shop often intrude or impede.
As of September 1921, Frost reports his standard fee as $100 per lecture or $75 each for two lectures; two years later, the success has swollen beyond expectation, and he boasts that he has delivered fourteen lectures in fourteen days; he has also written “three hundred lines of blank verse between ten at night and noon the next day”: first, the garrulous-witty monologue “New Hampshire”, spoken by a novelist with prejudices a good deal like Frost’s own; then, at the end of the morning at a single shot, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. The editors have found no reason to doubt this report. Frost wrote, after all, in moods of exhilaration which he knew to be rare. As a teacher his intellectual range was great and apt to be underrated. A line in the Amherst catalogue for 1923–4, quoted in the superb and compre­hensive notes to this edition, shows an elective course he offered to third-year students with enrolment by permission of the instructor, under a plain but daunting description: “Judgments in history, religion, and the Arts. A study, by the case method, of how such judgments are arrived at and evaluated”.
A letter to Untermeyer in spring 1924 gives a likely clue to the thinking that went into the course:

Style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. Let the sound of Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement. Do the same with Swinburne and you will see that he took himself as a wonder. Many sensitive natures have plainly shown by their style that they took themselves lightly in self-defense. They are the ironists. Some fair to good writers have no style and so leave us ignorant of how they take themselves. But that is the one important thing to know.

A better definition could hardly be imagined; but the obiter dicta that follow are idiosyncratic to Frost: “I own any form of humor shows fear and inferiority . . . . Humor is the most engaging cowardice”. Against the grain of the times, he accepts no division between art and morals: “Belief is better than anything else and it is best when rapt above paying its respects to anybody’s doubts whatsoever”.

He called that seminar a philosophy course. More commonly, he taught literature and called it literature. The best discovery of the workshop format he devised was his idea of getting beyond mere grading and marking. This mechanical part he believed should be left to a corps of grammar policemen, always on hand and decently paid to make local comments and corrections. But conversation of a special kind was what the rarer talents deserved. “The experienced older painter allows inexperienced younger painters to set up their easels alongside of his for what they can get out of his example, stimulation, and shop-talk” – so too with the experienced writer. In a letter of February 1922 to George Whicher, Frost remarked that the master writer should

be willing to live for a while on terms of equality almost with a few younger writers. Almost I say. I wouldn’t have him go so far as to carry his manuscript to them as they would be free to bring theirs to him. But I would have him stick at nothing short of that . . . . He would refrain from fault-finding except in the large. He would turn from correcting grammar in red ink to matching experience in black ink, experience of life and experience of art . . . . The proof of the writing is in what it elicits from him. He may not need to write it out. He can talk it out before the fire. The writing he has nothing to say to fails with him . . . . On the rare occasions when he goes after the pupils it will be to show them up not for what they aren’t but for what they are. He will invade them to show them how much more they contain than they can write down.

An interested and wilful turn on “invade”: his intuition is that the apprentice writer wants to stand in the shadow of something formidable. The better he finds he can see the sunlight anyway, the stronger his chances of survival.

 By the time Frost passed his fiftieth year in 1924, he had developed the diplomatic skills of a veteran lawyer and accountant. The letters exhibit a certain selective candour about his aims; there is the occasional tactical threat of withdrawal from this or that enterprise; and an economy of truth comes out when you compare his reports of the same transaction to different correspondents. Yet even the purely business letters are marked by a characteristic wit and tact. Frost writes to Untermeyer about a young poet he hopes to get published: “I’m pretty sure he’s a poet. It would please me a lot if you should see it as I see it”. Discretion and sincerity are there so mixed as to place no unseemly burden on disagreement. Elsewhere he lights on the exact leverage necessary to determine the choice of his own poems for anthologies edited by Untermeyer, Mark Van Doren and Conrad Aiken. By this interested management, Frost knew he could help to create both a particular emphasis and a variety in the way the public came to know him.

The pressure of his personality even on its smaller errands is nicely illustrated by a letter to Wilbur Cross – an English professor at Yale and editor of the Yale Review, who seems to have been one of the few academics Frost respected. He sends him a batch of poems with an appallingly crafty cover letter:

Your good opinion is more to me than much money. You know that. Still I must get as much money from you as you will spare to encourage American poetry in the person of me. So I am going to understand you to offer me one hundred dollars for the group of four. You do, don’t you? That is considerably less than half as much a line as I am getting from people whose money is worth, we’ll say, about half as much as yours. But let not this be anything between us. Pay me what you will or must. Only treat me like a friend and fellow countryman.

Is a reply even possible? He has got the better of you, there, whether you pay his price or not.

Frost knew that he looked out for himself to an uncharitable degree. Occasionally people told him so; and his letters never forget this fact, which they neither excuse nor regret. One of the earliest letters speaks of turning his back on his sister Jeannie, whom he has just had committed to an insane asylum:

She was willing to go almost too far to show her feeling about [the First World War] . . . . One half the world seemed unendurably bad and the other half unendurably indifferent. She included me in the unendurably indifferent. A mistake. I belong to the unendurably bad . . . . As I get older I find it easier to lie awake nights over other people’s troubles. But thats as far as I go to date. In good time I will join them in death to show our common humanity.

There is a necessary limit on sympathy – that is the reasoning, if you are an artist with work to do; doubly so if you believe with Frost that everyone in the end is “wholly stripped of pride / In the pain that has but one close”. To have brought her disaster closer to himself would have spared no one, and we must not care too tenderly for those who cannot care for themselves. Though it is a prudent principle, Frost speaks of it warily. He knows how it sounds.

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Such a radical self-trust was probably encouraged by his perfect lack of belief in the Christian God. He had the company here of the great moderns, Yeats and Joyce, Stevens and Lawrence, but unlike them he was a popular figure and writing for an audience conventional in its pieties. A letter to Untermeyer of March 1920, confronted by this fact, turns boyish and slapdash with successive jolts of mischief, bad puns, cornball humour and a throwaway biblical nickname, topped off by half-deliberate misspellings and a malapropism:

Elinor has just come out flat-footed against God conceived either as the fourth person seen with Shadrack Meshack and Tobedwego in the fiery furnace or without help by the Virgin Mary. How about a Shellean principal or spirit coeternal with the rock part of creation, I ask. Nonsense you know its nonsense Rob Frost only you’re afraid you’ll have bad luck or lose your standing in the community if you speak your mind. “Spring,” I say, “returneth and the maple sap is heard dripping in the buckets (allow me to sell you a couple)” . . . . Like a woman she says Pshaw . . . . I took out an accident policy limited to death by boiling in a sap pan, swore off baths, and took up my new life as a farmer today by absentmindedly boring a hole clear through a two foot maple tree and out onto the other side. “Amatoor!” all the little leaves began to murmur. “Book farmer!” Leaves is of course an anachronism – that well known figure of speech. There werent any leaves as yet.

The leaves of a book and the leaves of a tree are a metaphor hard to split into tenor and vehicle if you are a farmer working to support your poetry; but he may be nothing but a poet who pretends to live off farming. In either case, he gets his poetry from an anachronism – this recent farm in Franconia was an imitation of the earlier one in Derry, where Frost really did have a go at living by working the land.

“Play” was the essence of art, for him, but in life the temper of his sport was masterful and he hated to be teased. He took premeditated revenge against a trick Joseph Warren Beach played on him “the day he used me for a chaperone to sit in his ford car for respectability while he stole off and fornicated in whatever takes the place of alders in Minnesota”. Beach was a professor then at the University of ­Minnesota, the woman was his assistant in the graduate programme, and they were already having an affair. Frost turned the joke on its head when he challenged Beach to marry her and offered to serve as best man:

I could see he thought it was funny to be so romantic at my expense. So to be equally funny and romantic at his I went straight on from that moment and inside of two days had him sewed up in marriage for the rest of his life . . . . You mustnt play lascivious tricks on a literary man. I help hasten the consequences. One practical joke deserves another. Of course mine was the more serious of the two.

The final sentences there, gloating over the morally dubious triumph, are followed by an unsettling confession: “One of my faults is a love of the excitement of putting a thing through – or a person”. The editors are conscientious in their note: “RF took pleasure in Beach’s ‘sinful’ personality, but as a subject for anecdote this appears to have misfired, damaging Beach’s chances for promotion at the University of Minnesota. Relations between the two were later patched up satisfactorily”. Satisfactorily means not quite happily; patched up is not the same as repaired.
Was Frost playing God for the fun of it? But he imagined God as just playing too, in his verse commentary on the Book of Job, A Masque of Reason. Written in the mid-1940s, the grimly anarchic closet drama tends to be underrated because of its strangeness. Frost imagines a reunion of the dramatis personae when the biblical narrative is well over, and in this sequel God is happy to see Job again. He has always wanted

To thank you someday for the way you helped me
Establish once for all the principle
There’s no connection man can reason out
Between his just deserts and what he gets.

After a preliminary exchange of pleasantries, God comes to the point:

I’m going to tell Job why I tortured him
And trust it won’t be adding to the torture.
I was just showing off to the Devil, Job.

To which Job replies:

’Twas human of You. I expected more
Than I could understand and what I get
Is almost less than I can understand.

The lines might have slipped out of Endgame; the moral of the long torment and the test of patience is “almost less than I can understand”, but God is only human and whimsical like the pagan gods: how can he help showing off to the Devil his newest creation, Job – a creature so virtuous in his demonstration of trust (supposing that trust is a virtue). Besides, God adds, “it was of the essence of the trial / You shouldn’t understand it at the time”. God is echoing Frost’s own theology in “The Trial by Existence”, the central statement of belief in his first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913).

A similar playing at God – or fascination with God at play – is just under the surface of the most baffling poem in West-Running Brook, “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers”. The plot consists of the subtraction of joys from the life of a beautiful high-born woman; it is cast as a theological parable, with echoes of Thomas Hardy’s “Subalterns” and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Eros Turannos” – a dialogue wherein a commanding “Voice” is attended by obedient “Voices” who must execute his will, like archons in the service of a Gnostic demiurge. But the Voice reveals that the Voices have no work to do; her free actions alone will be her undoing. The short way this poem takes with its miseries would be perverse if the narrative were not so charmless (almost blank). Yet it was a poem Frost chose to reprint in the spare Selected Poems he authorized a few months before his death in January 1963.

The defeat of the will was a favourite subject with him. His word for loss or gain in the contest of life is always “luck” – he is continually surprised to find his own life turning out lucky. So he tells his correspondents in various ways (especially the younger ones): play bravely with your fate. The other side of the lesson is a sometimes explosive impatience, beyond the bounds of exasperation, with people who have dragged others into their uncertainties. This becomes a leading motive of two letters denouncing Untermeyer for his decision remarry his first wife, Jean Starr, after making a great show of emancipation in leaving her for another woman. All three are poets, and this irks Frost the more; the predicament of these bohemian jellyfish has everything to do with their cultivation of sensibility. “How much better”, he chides Untermeyer,

if you had been a staid orthodox Jew and never had run wild after a super wisdom that doesn’t exist. You are back now where you started from and not one bit improved in mind or spirit. The whole experience has been a waste of time and energy. You haven’t found out anything that you didn’t know before – that we didnt all know before: and I wont listen to you if you say you have.

The chief concern appears to be that Untermeyer not make poetry out of the miserable anticlimax. “I beg of you,” says Frost. “Honestly. The thought would be too much for me of all three of you putting up a holler in verse about it all. The decencies forbid you should score off it.” And again: “Talk no more – unless you can talk unclever unsophisticated simple goodness. You tempt me to soak you in milk to renew your innocence. The funny positions people can talk themselves into in a lifetime of try-it-on talk”.

Frost’s talk is never the try-it-on sort, and he can show a parental imperiousness in dealing with correspondents of all ages. His more delicate confiding is often reserved for people he knows only in passing. Thus the whole truth about his career as a farmer comes out in a letter to a summer neighbour:

Apparently we have had like aspirations, and we have met with somewhat the same disappointments. Farming seemed the ideal occupation to combine with poetry, if you couldnt have poetry alone, as of course you couldn’t. So I ran away to the land instead of running away to sea. It was a reckless plunge. All I knew of farming I had acquired by working out on farms in spring and summer vacations. I had learned to plant most seeds take care of hay and keep hens laying . . . . But I had never learned horses or cows. I couldnt milk a cow. We came out better than was to be expected on these premises. We lived as farmers six or seven years poorly of course and with some help from outside and going a little deeper into debt every year. I remember being troubled in conscience about declaring myself a farmer to the census-taker. I decided that I was a genuine farmer though a bad one. But if I was wretched I was happy. Farming wasn’t just an expense. It was part of a living. And it was an idyl; it was woods and fields and a chance to have it out with myself in solitude. I went to the farm in Derry N.H. dubious in health and afraid of the world. The farm reconstituted me . . . . I like a few people to know the truth of the matter.

This is not the capricious reversal of a public attitude in private. He would write to the same effect in a letter to Gorham Munson, the author of one of the first book-length discussions of his work, because he thought Munson was scrupulous and his judgement non-trivial.

Of Frost’s own literary judgements, one stands out particularly, in a letter to an aspiring poet fifteen years his junior:

I like [Thoreau] as well as you do. In one book (Walden) he surpasses everything we have had in America. You have found this out for yourself without my having told you: I have found it out for myself without your having told me. Isn’t it beautiful that there can be such concert without collusion? That’s the kind of “getting together” I can endure.

Among living or recent poets, he turns with most pleasure to Robinson, Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas and Marianne Moore; but when called on by an anthologist, he is professionally ready with his opinion of the best poems to represent T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Vachel Lindsay, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, Edna St Vincent Millay and John Crowe Ransom.

In a comment on Ernest Hemingway’s death many years later, Frost would find the appropriate words of praise: “he was rough and unsparing with life. He was rough and unsparing with himself . . . . Fortunately for us, if it is a time to speak of fortune, he gave himself time to make his greatness”. Probably that is much the way Frost would have wanted to think of himself. It was certainly how he wanted people to see him, no matter from what distance. He was rough and unsparing to defend the moments when a spark could be struck; most of the time, he knew, would have to be spent on waiting. “Even in an atom”, he wrote to Munson, “there’s more space than matter – infinitely. The matter in the universe gets together in a few terribly isolated points and sizzles.” He gives a happier version of the truth to a different correspondent:

Suppose I live like Landor till ninety? That will give me one thousand six hundred weeks all to myself to put in at any thing I like . . . . All in all it has been such a lucky and original life that I can’t understand my ever being for a moment cross or difficult or dissatisfied or cast down . . . . I am amply indulged in everything regardless of my deserts. Where is there a case parallel? And over and above everything I have had the fun of writing a few poems.

As one reads The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume Two – never tedious for all the chat and twice as entertaining for the clarity of the notes – poems are still finding him, and he is having some fun.