AFTERWORD: FROST AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS

Any biographer of Robert Frost must tremble slightly when coming across his note to Sidney Cox in 1932: “To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.”1 Indeed, one of the commonest mistakes made by biographers involves reading the life too closely into the work. This mistake has often been made in the numerous biographies and memoirs of the poet that exist to date. The reader must, in fact, wonder why another biography of Frost is necessary. A brief look at the extant biographical writing on this subject will, I think, suggest that Frost has generally not been well served by his biographers.

As I see it, there have been three waves of Frost biography, with the most recent (by Jeffrey Meyers in 1996) serving as a throwback to the second phase. The first wave began with a little book still worth reading: Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense (1927) by Gorham B. Munson. The biographer races through the life and work straightforwardly, seeing Frost as a classical humanist, a man of enduring “good sense,” a phrase he repeats frequently. This goodness of sense is said to hark back to the ancient Greeks and Goethe. Munson writes:

What [Frost] trusts is his own experience (having good sense he knows that there is nothing else to trust) and his own experience happens in Frost’s case to be mediatory in character. Being intelligent, being deeply emotional, being obliged to make terms with practical life, the man of good sense casts up a rough balance of these three aspects of his life and travels, so far as he is permitted so to do, in the center of the highway.2

Munson argues that Frost’s “comprehensive answer” to the questions of existence is “the natural … vision of life.” He concludes that this “man of good sense and fine sensibility has succeeded in writing, and for that he will be treasured in what we hope, against many odds at present, will be the long and noble course of American literature.”3

While Munson may have been the first biographer, he was working from a view of Frost already in play. For some years Frost had been regarded by journalists and critics as a worldly-wise but genial philosopher of common sense and ordinary experience. This view was in fact promoted by Frost, who was a remarkably good publicist for himself. Frost also possessed immense personal charm, which made him a natural for the lecture circuit. Beginning in 1915, when he returned to the United States from England, the road show continued until his death in 1963. Audiences were treated to the slow-talking, witty, wisecracking, rueful, commonsensical, quasi-philosophical man of letters—a carefully composed mask no less artful than those constructed by Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain before him.

This platform Frost is the poet Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote about in 1927, in an endearing profile: “Even when [Frost] consents to sit on a platform he has a vanishing and peripatetic look, and the doctrine he enunciates in his dry, sly, halting way is very different from the glib aestheticism his students might expect of a poet. Perfectionist and polisher of words though he is, he proclaims words to be ‘less than nothing unless they amount to deeds, as in ultimatums and battle cries.’”4 Like so many of Frost’s early biographers, Sergeant mistook the mask for the man.

In 1935, Robert Newdick of Ohio State University wrote to Frost to suggest a reordering of certain poems in his collected edition. This initial contact led to correspondence and various meetings, and Newdick (on his own) began to collect material for a biography of Frost. As it were, Newdick only managed to write about a hundred pages of his book before dying, unexpectedly, in 1939. What might have been an excellent full-length study of Frost’s life and work was brought to an untimely halt. The surviving manuscript, with a good deal of additional material gathered by Newdick, was published in 1976 as Newdick’s Season of Frost: An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost, edited by William A. Sutton. It remains a valuable resource for biographers.

The image of Frost as farmer-poet offering homespun wisdom from the lecture platform prevailed through the mid-sixties. This view was given minor expression in Sidney Cox’s book-length portrait, A Swinger of Birches (1961), a posthumously published memoir by a man who knew Frost for over forty years. It found its fullest expression in Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (1960). She attempts a broad portrait of “one of the most beloved poets and sages of our midtwentieth century,” but she was not a sophisticated critic, and her readings of the poems are often embarrassing; her interpretation of the life was not much better. Frost, she tells us, owns “the stability and optimism of the Victorian age.” She writes somewhat breathlessly about his struggle to overcome personal odds in order to achieve “a positive view of life,” and she virtually never tires of celebrating “this great, witty, complex, and endearing personality so loved by the American people.”5 For all its obvious flaws, The Trial by Existence is rich in quotations from Frost, who spoke freely to Sergeant on many subjects, and for this alone it retains considerable value.

The Sergeant book was followed quickly by a minor biography in the sentimental groove by Jean Gould called Robert Frost: The Aim Was Song (1964).6 The subtitle says it all: Gould writes, she says, as “a devoted Frost reader.” She claims that her book is full of direct quotations from Frost, although she met him only briefly and by her own admission “did not take notes except in a few instances.”7 The book moves inexorably toward the nonconclusion that “Robert Frost was a songster till the end—and a lover of life.”8 Her readings of the poems are, as might be expected, naive—indeed, the poems are taken as exact transcriptions of actual events. Would that she had known of Frost’s warning to Sidney Cox.

The great corrective to the Cox-Sergeant-Gould picture of the lovable sage was Lawrance Thompson. A Princeton professor, Thompson had written the first full-length critical book on Frost, called Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost (1942). Frost liked it, and he asked Thompson to write his official biography. (Thompson, it should be noted, at first demurred, suggesting Bernard DeVoto or Louis Untermeyer as more likely candidates.) He did sign on, though one wonders if he would have done so had he known the work would consume the rest of his life—on many levels.

A major problem arose when Thompson took against his subject in a rather chilling way (the turn came in about 1945). Thompson’s dislike of his subject vitiates his book, as Donald G. Sheehy has suggested in a comprehensive article on the subject.9 Thompson’s three volumes (the last volume was co-written by R. H. Winnick, a friend and former graduate student) run to almost a thousand pages, piling detail upon detail, often uncritically. The word “monster” appears not only in Thompson’s actual text (where it does, several times); it was also the predominant word used by reviewers to describe Frost after reading Thompson. Reviewing the final volume in the New York Times Book Review (January 16, 1977), for example, David Bromwich found himself repulsed by the figure conjured in those pages, saying that “a more hateful human being cannot have lived.” Howard Moss, a poet and the longtime poetry editor of the New Yorker, likewise decided that Frost must be “a mean-spirited megalomaniac.” Countless readers and reviewers echoed these sentiments.

Was Frost, as Thompson suggests, really such a selfish, egomaniacal, dour, cruel, and angry man? Certainly the evidence of many who knew the poet well runs counter to this claim. And there is in the poems themselves a deep core of natural sympathy for human beings that would seem to oppose this assessment.

Part of the difficulty in trying to assess Thompson’s work lies with a general naïveté that exists when it comes to thinking about literary biography. Few genres have been less theorized, and this has led to much confusion about the nature of biographical work. An assumption is often made that biographies are true or false in the way scientific data is true or false. I would rather emphasize that biographies have a lot in common with novels. This does not mean that they are “made up” or “not true.” Rather, the word “fiction” derives from the Latin fictio, which means shaping, and the job of the fiction maker is in certain respects similar to the work of the biographer. He or she must assemble, must discover, a “story” in the countless random facts that make up an individual life. A lot depends on the story or mythos developed by the biographer.

In Thompson’s case, the biography was driven by a mythos that distorted, rather than clarified, the material at hand. His story about Frost (only slightly caricatured) runs something like this: An innocent and idealistic youngster was brought up by an occasionally cruel father and an overprotective, insufferable mother. Largely because of his mother’s pampering, he came to believe that things would go his way in life, but they rarely did, and therefore he became angry and resentful. His high school sweetheart, for example, did not simply fall head-over-heels when he snapped his fingers, and this led to near-suicidal behavior on his part. Later, his children did not listen to him when he told them what to do, and he turned vengeful. He failed at a long succession of tasks: getting through college, making a go of farming, getting his poems published. All of these failures, Thompson implies, “caused him to become self-protectively arrogant.” He eventually began to confuse himself with the God of the Old Testament, and would strike out viciously at those who got in his way.

As Frost developed, says Thompson, the “imagined forms of retaliation kept changing, even as the actual forms of humiliation changed.” An example follows:

In Salem, when he became the best pitcher on his grammar school team, he dreamed he would some day achieve renown as a hero in the major league of his choice—and even a baseball could serve as a lethal weapon if carefully aimed at the head of an enemy batter. Later, in high school, where his baseball dreams were spoiled, he achieved excellence as a scholar, and thus found a successful way of scornfully triumphing over those who were better than he at baseball. As soon as he began publishing poems in the high school literary magazine, he began to dream that some day his reputation as a literary hero would provide him with another way of triumphing over his enemies.10

A quick glance at Thompson’s index should alert the careful reader to his presuppositions. Under the poet’s name one finds these damning subheads: “Anti-intellectual,” “Baffler-Teaser-Deceiver,” “Brute,” “Charlatan,” “Cowardice,” “Enemies,” “Hate,” “Insanity,” “Murderer,” “Pretender.” With these categories firmly in place, Thompson is able to sift through the data and create a figure shockingly in contrast to the genial farmer-poet described by Munson, Sergeant, Gould, and scores of magazine profilers.

On the other hand, one has to admire the detail accumulated by Thompson, in the biography itself and in the two thousand pages of typed notes he left behind. These notes inevitably form a kind of (slippery) base upon which all future biographers must rest, since Thompson had unique access to his subject. Indeed, Thompson was probably too close to Frost to write about him with any degree of objectivity. His personal dislike of the man, perhaps aggravated by a clandestine affair with Kay Morrison, made the possibility of writing a well-balanced biography remote. Thompson’s private attitude to Frost is vividly on display in a letter to Kay written in 1945: “I admire you deeply for the long-suffering patience with which you’ve accepted [Frost’s] self-indulgence when it comes to asking more of your time and strength and life than he has a right to ask.… You’ve done a superb job under the most exasperating conditions, and I respect all your decisions and actions in the difficult task of walking a tightrope during all these emotional hurricanes and thunderstorms of his.”11 The wonder is that Thompson was able to write as well as he sometimes did about Frost. (I should emphasize here that Thompson’s work, despite its serious flaws, remains groundbreaking and indispensable: the starting point for any serious biographical scholarship on this subject.)

A third wave of Frost criticism began with the reaction against Thompson that inevitably set in. William H. Pritchard’s Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984) represents an important corrective. Pritchard’s book is not, strictly speaking, a biography but a reading of the poems in the light of Frost’s personal experience. He dwells on the teasing aspects of the verse, reading the poetry back into the life rather than the other way around. “I am concerned to identify and describe Frost’s play of mind as it reveals itself in an art which is notable for the amount of felt ‘life’ it contains,” writes Pritchard, “and in a life which is notably artful, constantly shaped by the extravagant designs of his imagination.”12 It remains my favorite book on Frost.

Four years after Pritchard’s book, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost (1988), by John Evangelist Walsh, was published. Walsh concentrates exclusively on Frost’s three years in England (1912–15), a period of huge importance for understanding his development as a poet. Like Pritchard, Walsh takes Thompson to task for his mean-spirited work, suggesting that “only after successive loss, disappointment, and tragedy had taken their toll of an essentially brave and generous heart did Frost’s view of life, his attitude toward people and events, start to unravel.”13 The English years are given their full due here, in a well-researched book worthy of its subject.

A further corrective to Thompson came with Stanley Burnshaw’s Robert Frost Himself (1986), a memoir of the poet by his former editor at Henry Holt (who had known Frost personally since 1929). While oddly shaped and often rambling, Burnshaw takes us back to the Frost of Sergeant and Gould without sentimentalizing his subject. He ends with a quotation from a review of Frost’s Selected Letters by Randall Jarrell that is worth citing:

In the end he talked as naturally as he breathed: for as long as you got to listen you were sharing Frost’s life. What came to you in that deep grainy voice—a voice that made other voices sound thin or abstract—was half a natural physiological process and half a work of art; it was as if Frost dreamed aloud and the dream were a poem. Was what he said right or wrong? It seemed irrelevant. In the same way, whether Frost himself was good or bad seemed irrelevant—he was there, and you accepted him.14

The tone of this quotation fairly mirrors the attitude of Burnshaw toward his subject.

Lesley Lee Francis, the poet’s granddaughter, published another memoir, The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry, in 1994. Her book marks a further step in rewriting Thompson. Drawing on a cache of family papers, Francis portrays Frost as an attentive, loving father who taught by example and precept what it meant to “live by poetry,” cultivating, as Francis says, a “trusting, childlike view of life” and encouraging “a freshness of response to the world.” She concludes that “academic scholars … often lost sight of a life that was no less poetic than the poems it produced, poems addressed to all kinds, and [that] reach out to challenge us, to ‘rumple our brains fondly,’ as he would tell his students.”15 The subtitle of her book, Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim, directs us to a man with a view of life radically in contrast to the dour figure portrayed in Thompson’s book.

The most recent biography of the poet, Robert Frost, by Jeffrey Meyers (1996), represents a throwback to Thompson. It contains little in the way of original research, although Meyers churned up a lot of dust by presenting the relationship between Frost and Kay Morrison in a melodramatic fashion. The intimate nature of this relationship had already been suggested by Pritchard and explored in depth in an impressively balanced and detailed article by Donald G. Sheehy that appeared in 1990.16 Meyers does not mention the Sheehy article, nor the passage in Pritchard where he writes about Frost’s proposal of marriage to Kay Morrison. He relies heavily on an interview with Kathleen Morrison’s daughter, Anne, who seems not unbiased in her views—to put it mildly.

Meyers sensationalizes Frost’s various life crises unduly, as Helen Vendler has noted: “Many of his pages read like newspaper précis of the plots of soap operas.”17 This aside, the book is also plagued by misinformation. For example, Meyers has Frost being expelled from Dartmouth instead of choosing to leave—a blatant mistake, based on one interview with a man who was simply wrong. The documentary record at Dartmouth does not support Meyers’s claim, nor does Frost’s own account of his withdrawal, which he repeated many times with no inconsistencies. As Vendler says, “a scrupulous biographer would have recognized, in support of Frost’s version, that he also left Harvard (in good standing) without finishing.” Similarly, Meyers’s treatment of Lesley Frost, the poet’s daughter, is “horrendously distorted,” according to her daughter.18

The most inept part of Meyers’s biography, however, occurs when he reads the poems biographically. Two brief examples will serve to make the point. In a self-proclaimed “new reading” of “Design,” Meyers rehashes (without acknowledgment) the famous readings of this poem by Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling, then adds his original touch: “In ‘Design,’ the normally black spider and blue heal-all … are both wickedly white—a play on Elinor’s maiden name.”19 Thus Elinor absurdly (and irrelevantly) becomes the witch who cobbles together the unholy elements of white spider, white moth, and white heal-all!

Even more shocking is his reading of “The Silken Tent,” a poem which opens:

She is as in a field a silken tent

At midday when a sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,

So that in guys it gently sways at ease.

Meyers swoops on the last line, noting that the breeze “has dried the dew on [the tent’s] ropes so that it sways in ‘guys’ (a triple pun on ropes, mockery and men).”20 In other words, Kay Morrison (whom he regards as the undisputed subject of the poem) was swaying “in guys”—as if Frost would resort to such a bizarre colloquialism here. Vendler comments, “The illiteracy of such ‘readings’ points to how greatly Meyers misunderstands the directions for reading encoded in a poem, the extent to which semantic possibility is controlled by context.”21

Frost himself cautioned against finding in his poems irrelevant ambiguities, with connotations spreading like ink on blotting paper. Metaphors and symbols provide a way of delimiting (as well as opening out) meaning; thus, the poet controls the reading of a poem, sharply defining its boundaries. No one understood this better than Frost. “The direction of the piece combs the word into the single one of its meanings intended like a hair,” he once said. “Some would have it that the words are cowlicks that won’t be combed straight in a direction.”22 Similarly, in “Education by Poetry,” he warned that “unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you.”23

My hope, of course, is that my own biography sets the record straight here and there, putting in place a fresh mythos, one that combs the facts in a certain direction but does not preclude a future biographer (and there will be many) from combing the same material differently. In my readings of the poems, I have tried hard not to “render ungraceful what [Frost] in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.”