10
A PERSON OF GOOD ASPIRATIONS
1917–1919
I came to live in the house of a professor who was off in Europe having what a professor would call a good time. He had left all his books for me to have a good time with, but had taken good care that I shouldn’t have too good a time with them. He had marked them all and with a pencil whenever he had found a mistake of any kind—just as if they were written exercises of pupils. He had never praised anything (I should have loathed his praise), but he had never contributed an idea or interesting commentary.
—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1919
Frost had originally responded to the news that Edward Thomas had enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery with sympathy, telling him, “I am within a hair of being precisely as sorry and as glad as you are.” He added, in noble tones: “You are doing it for the self-same reason I shall hope to do it for if my time ever comes and I am brave enough, namely, because there seems nothing else for a man to do. I have never seen anything more exquisite than the pain you have made of it. You are a terror and I admire you. For what has a man locomotion if it isn’t to take him into things he is between barely and not quite standing.”1
An odd, contradictory mix of motives went into Thomas’s decision to go to war, and Frost was only too familiar with this sort of internal conflict. Since coming back to the United States, he had looked on with trepidation from afar as Thomas moved from camp to camp in England, noting with satisfaction that his friend always found a little time to write poems (many of which he sent to Frost for comment). By the time he arrived in France in the winter of 1917, he had already published over half a dozen poems in periodicals (under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway), and a volume of Eastaway poems had just been accepted by a London publisher—a collection dedicated to Frost, who had urged him to turn to poetry.
Thomas’s letters from the front arrived irregularly at the tiny post office in Franconia, describing the dismal conditions under which this war in France was being fought. Thomas was stationed in the village of Arras, where he served as adjutant to a colonel. His duties included long bouts of observation work from a high post overlooking the scene of battle. In one letter, he described to Frost “the moan of the approaching & hovering shell & the black grisly flap that it seems to make as it bursts.” He often seems eerily detached from the terrible scenes he describes, as if he were himself in no danger.
Frost, meanwhile, persuaded Alfred Harcourt to issue the Thomas poems in the United States. In these negotiations, Helen Thomas acted as agent for her husband, striking up a regular correspondence with Frost, who had recently urged her to let the American edition appear under the name of Edward Thomas and not a pseudonym. Knowing her husband’s wishes, Helen insisted that “Eastaway will not be Thomas & that’s that.” Her description of his soldiering is memorable: “He’s back on his battery now in the thick of it as he wanted to be, firing 400 rounds a day from his gun, listening to the men talking, & getting on well with his fellow officers. He’s had little time for depression and homesickness. He says, ‘I cannot think of ever being home again, & dare not think of never being there again.’”
The letter contained a shattering, though matter-of-fact, postscript: “This letter was returned by the Censor ages after I posted it. I have had to take out the photographs. But lately I have just received the news of Edward’s death. He was killed on Easter Monday by a shell.”
Frost was devastated. “I knew from the moment when I first met him at his unhappiest that he would some day clear his mind and save his life,” he wrote back to Helen. “I have had four wonderful years with him. I know he has done this all for you: he is all yours. But you must let me cry my cry for him as if he were almost all mine too.”2 In a letter to Edward Garnett, he said, “Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had. I fail to see how we can have been so much to each other, he an Englishman and I an American and our first meeting put off till we were both in middle life. I hadn’t a plan for the future that didn’t include him.”3
The death of Thomas was so overwhelming that Frost could not immediately respond—as a poet. “I find he was too near to me,” he said. “Some time I shall write about him. Perhaps it will come to me to write in verse. As yet I feel too much the loss of the best friend I ever had. And by that I don’t mean I am overwhelmed with grief. Something in me refuses to take the risk—angrily refuses to take the risk—of seeming to use grief for literary purposes. When I care less, I can do more.”4 Thirty years later, in an essay called “A Romantic Chasm,” he mused: “I wish Edward Thomas (that poet) were here to ponder gulfs in general with me as in the days when he and I tired the sun with talking on the footpaths and stiles of Ledington and Ryton.”
Eventually, he managed to get his feelings onto paper, in a poem called “To E.T.,” which first appeared in the Yale Review in April 1920:
I slumbered with your poems on my breast,
Spread open as I dropped them half-read through
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb
To see if in a dream they brought of you,
I might not have the chance I missed in life
Through some delay, and call you to your face
First soldier, and then poet, and then both,
Who died a soldier-poet of your race.
I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain
Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained—
And one thing more that was not then to say:
The Victory for what it lost and gained.
You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you—the other way.
How over, though, for even me who knew
The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,
If I was not to speak of it to you
And see you pleased once more with words of mine?
Frost addresses the deceased directly, regretting that in life, to his face, he had “Through some delay” not called Thomas “First soldier, and then poet, and then both.” The tone is complex, beginning with that odd admission by the speaker that he had fallen asleep with the poems on his breast “half-read.” This poem, as William Pritchard has noted, “seems undistinguished by Frost’s usual range of tone and wit.”5 On the other hand, there is subtleness here; the opening itself, with its admission of laziness with regard to reading Thomas, detours around any idealization of Thomas that might threaten to obliterate the poem with sentiment. Even so, Frost succumbs to a kind of sentimentality when he calls Thomas “a soldier-poet of your race.”
In the third stanza, one feels the pressure of conflicting emotions: “I meant, you meant that nothing should remain / Unsaid between us.” He and Thomas were roughly the same age, and oddly similar in temperament, even family circumstances. In fact, this is a fairly rare example in Frost’s life of an equal relationship. For the most part, he preferred to spend time with younger men who looked up to him; if they were writers, they were poets of lesser talent, such as Untermeyer, or teachers, such as Sidney Cox.
The memorably concise third stanza gives way to a concluding stanza of lesser power. Indeed, “How over” is a distracting way to begin a stanza, and the next line (about the “foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine”) is slack and rhetorical. The final question rescues the poem, however, with a quiet pathos, embodied in an intimate appeal to Thomas for sympathy.
Louis Untermeyer admitted to Frost that he disliked “To E.T.” and received this response some years later: “You know, you old skeezicks, you never managed to dislike heartily any poem I ever wrote except the one to E.T. and that is complicated with the war in such a way that you are afraid it may be a tract in favor of heroism. (But it isn’t.)”6 In the end, Frost was never quite able to express his deepest feelings about Thomas in poetry.
Among the poems Frost wrote in Franconia in the summer of 1917 was “For Once, Then, Something.” It is one of his most intriguing poems:
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs
Once, when trying with a chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
The poem employs a hendecasyllabic meter that vaguely imitates a meter used by Catullus, one of Frost’s favorite Latin poets (whom, according to Reuben Brower, he was fond of quoting in the original). As a poem, it ranks with “Spring Pools” and “The Silken Tent” as one of Frost’s most intricate pieces of verse making, one that intimately marries his poetic vision and personal philosophy; to a degree, it represents his response to critics who saw him as a country bumpkin whose poems did not see much beyond the “shining surface” of rural life, with himself at its center. The image of Narcissus is implied, with the poet looking into the well (of memory?) and seeing himself “in the summer heaven godlike” while wearing a poet’s crown of laurels, his head poking through the proverbial clouds.
The poem turns on the word “Once”; with the ironic italics, Frost is cutting himself a bit of critical slack, as if to say: How about it, friends? Grant me that once in a great while I see more than the surface, more than my own reflection. But even here, he admits the impossibility of finding “truth,” that mysterious something that lies “at bottom.” “Water came to rebuke the too clear water.” That biblical word “rebuke” suggests that perhaps some higher (or lower) spiritual force has connived to prevent a human being from catching more than a glimpse of Reality (in the Platonic sense). The biblical texture is reinforced in the next line, where “and lo” precedes the ripple that finally scrambles the image. The last line is deeply ironic, in that the “something” might well be “nothing.” The uncertainty of the poem is reinforced by the feminine (i.e., unaccented) endings of each line, which suffuse the poem with a feeling of inconclusiveness.
Frost had a number of unfinished poems on his desk, including “Paul’s Wife,” “To Earthward,” “The Aim Was Song,” and many others that would eventually appear in New Hampshire (1923). Some of these poems had been lingering in his folder marked “Unfinished Poems” for a decade or more. Typically, Frost would suddenly recall a poem and return to it, striking out lines, adding more. Some poems stayed in rough draft for decades on end. “Dust of Snow,” for example, was finally published (in the London Mercury) in 1920, but early versions seem to date back to 1896.7
During the fall of 1917, Frost felt as though he were just beginning to hear the sound of his voice again, but Amherst called, and he could not resist.
* * *
In a time when most colleges have a poet on campus, if not several, it seems difficult to imagine how odd it was for Amherst College to have hired Robert Frost in the winter of 1917. The initial work of Stark Young and Alexander Meiklejohn had resulted in Frost’s becoming a temporary member of the Amherst faculty as a replacement for George Bosworth Churchill, who had been elected to the Massachusetts Senate. Exactly how he might fit in was an open question—one that Frost himself entertained quite frankly. In the recesses of his heart, he wondered if teaching was a good way to support his avocation. “My object in living is to unite / My avocation and my vocation,” he would write in “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” A poet first and last, he often said that teaching distracted him from the real work of making poems. But a reliable income was sorely needed, especially now, the English sojourn having utterly depleted his savings. Furthermore, the lure of Amherst was considerable.
It was an obvious place for Frost to go. President Meiklejohn—an Englishman by birth who had come to America in 1880, at the age of eight—had been at the college since 1912, having previously taught philosophy at Brown (which had been his own undergraduate college). He was drawn to innovative approaches in education, and the appointment of Frost was a bold stroke in this direction. “The college is primarily not a place of the body, nor of the feelings, nor even of the will; it is, first of all, a place of mind,” Meiklejohn had written. He hoped to plunge students into “the problems of philosophy” from the outset, promoting the “fun of reading and conversing and investigating and reflecting.”8 These were all good signs for Frost, who liked nothing better than “conversing and investigating and reflecting.”
Frost had written to Untermeyer that “you get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious.”9 On Amherst College letterhead a few days after arriving on campus, he wrote to Untermeyer: “I seize this department stationery to give you a new sense of what a merely important person I am become in my decline from greatness.”10
As a place to live, Amherst appealed to Frost and his family. It was a tiny New England village of classic proportions, with a broad common surrounded by tall elms. The college—one of the oldest and most respectable in the country—lay at the southern end of the common, a cluster of redbrick and gray granite buildings constructed along the crest of a hill. From the highest vantage, one got a panoramic view across miles of fertile valley. The Frosts moved into a yellow wood-frame house on Dana Street, a short walk from the campus. The children were enrolled in local schools. A warm welcome came from their neighbors Otto and Ethel Manthey-Zorn, who would soon become close friends. When Elinor discovered that the house was devoid of blankets, Ethel quickly produced an armful of her own.
In his first semester, Frost was responsible for teaching a seminar on reading and writing poetry and a larger class on English drama before Shakespeare. The former was his favorite; it met one night each week in an upper room of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house, which faced the common. The students gathered in worn leather armchairs around a log fire, and Frost held forth entertainingly on pet topics, such as the sound of sense. “He often appeared in the room with a clutch of slim volumes in his briefcase,” one student recalled, and he would usually begin by reading aloud from Dickinson, Herbert, Wordsworth, and assorted contemporaries. Students presented their own poems in class, and Frost reacted generously to their work; he encouraged the class to remain long after the two prescribed hours were over. He rarely got home to Dana Street before midnight, and he would often be so revved up by the night’s conversation that he would sit in the kitchen until dawn, reading and writing.
The drama course proved taxing. Frost was not an expert on the subject, and he spent much of his spare time reading Heywood, Kyd, Lyly, Greene, Peele, and Marlowe—staying one step ahead of the students. Whereas his predecessor in the course, Professor Churchill, had stressed the historical background to these playwrights, Frost kept the emphasis squarely on the texts. He also stressed the basic principles of drama: the importance of situation, the use of tone in the creation of emotion, and aspects of voice. These were all subjects he had talked about at length before, although never in a classroom setting.
Frost was frustrated by the rigid approach to writing already in place at Amherst, and fought his own battle against this conventionality. He insisted that students write from the heart about subjects that genuinely mattered to them, emphasizing the importance of close personal observation of the world. “I’ll never correct a paper for style,” he told his classes. “I’m looking for subject matter, substance in yourself.”11 He noted in his journals: “What we do in college is to get over our little-mindedness. Education—to get it you have to hang around till you catch on.”12
Reports from students suggest that Frost was easygoing to the point of being disorganized. One student, for instance, reported that his drama course was “the most loosely run and undisciplined class of any of the classes I attended in college.”13 Another remembered that Frost was “headstrong with his own ideas” but “always stimulating.” He usually began class with “a long ramble about whatever subject was of interest that day,” making no attempt to interest students who did not already share his enthusiasm for the subject. A rude handful of students in the drama course would actually play cards in the back of the room, unchallenged by Frost, who did not want to adopt the role of disciplinarian.
One might have expected Frost to feel grateful to both Stark Young and Alexander Meiklejohn for their support, but this was not the case. He took against their liberalism at once, seeing himself as a rugged Emersonian individualist who rebuffed any notions of collectivism. He felt isolated in the academy and struck back with characteristic force at those who disagreed with him, making scathing remarks to his students about certain colleagues. “He had violent prejudices and hatreds,” recalled Henry A. Ladd, a member of the Class of 1918.14 For the most part, there was little opportunity in his classes to disagree with him, largely because he did most of the talking himself.
Much of his animosity was directed toward Young, a sophisticated, urbane southerner whose effete, openly homosexual manner unnerved Frost. When he heard from one of his favorite students that Young had unabashedly tried to entice him into sexual relations, Frost reported this to Meiklejohn. But Stark Young was well published, and hugely popular as a teacher; what is more, Meiklejohn considered Young a close friend. This was of course long before the days when sexual harassment claims were routine, and Meiklejohn was not about to dismiss such a valuable member of the faculty based on indirect accusations. Meiklejohn’s stance clearly hardened Frost against him. Never one to hold his tongue, Frost was unguarded in his criticisms of the president with both students and faculty.
Before the term was over, the United States had finally entered the war against Germany, and many of Frost’s students dropped everything to enlist. He cheered them on. As ever, he had great sympathy for students who wanted to drop out of college for any reason. War, in particular, struck him as a very good reason. “I don’t see why the fact that I can’t be in a fight should keep me from liking the fight,” he wrote to one of his English department colleagues, George Whicher.15 He often said that only age and family responsibilities kept him home.
The Stark Young affair wore at his nerves, and he began to regret having taken the job at Amherst in the first place. He wondered if it were right, after all, for a poet to spend precious reserves of imaginative energy in the classroom, where the rewards were so intangible. He had been productive in England, as a poet, and it was obvious to him that while he was teaching he was not writing.
In March, he spent a week in the Chicago area as the guest of Harriet Moody (widow of the poet William Vaughn Moody), who had arranged for him to read and lecture at several local colleges and poetry societies. These public performances seem to have recalled him to his vocation, as a poet, and by late spring he longed for the peace and freedom of Franconia. He wanted to get back to gardening and mild chores, to sitting on the porch with his mountain view, and to writing poems. He also looked forward to putting the abrasions of Amherst politics well behind him.
The summer came and went too quickly, however. Frost was back on the Amherst campus in the fall of 1917, having been lured back by Meiklejohn—who admired Frost despite his prickly behavior. To sweeten the deal, Meiklejohn saw that Frost was granted full professorial status, with a commensurate salary ($2,500 for the upcoming academic year). Given his precarious finances, Frost believed he had no choice but to return.
The money was important, since Mountain Interval had not sold anything like as well as North of Boston. Indeed, this little book—somewhat hurried into print by Alfred Harcourt—had not made the kind of impact Frost had wished for it. Nevertheless, it contains half a dozen poems that rank among Frost’s absolute best: “The Road Not Taken,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “Hyla Brook,” “Birches,” “Putting in the Seed,” “The Hill Wife,” and “The Sound of Trees.” Most of these were actually written in Derry long before and hoarded in his notebooks, although Frost would occasionally trim or add lines before final publication.
The second stint at Amherst proved no more satisfying to Frost than his first. The poems certainly did not come; indeed, Frost complained that he couldn’t write well “with somebody looking over my shoulder.” President Meiklejohn, as a figure of authority, took on the character of the disapproving father in Frost’s imagination, and relations between them seemed only to get worse—if that was possible. The situation with Stark Young also deteriorated, especially now that Young was fully aware of Frost’s attempts to subvert him.
Frost took comfort, however, in his growing fame. “The Ax-Helve” appeared in October in the Atlantic Monthly, attracting compliments from friends and colleagues. It was another of Frost’s remarkable poems about the nature of poetry itself. The Canadian woodsman in the poem, Baptiste, becomes distraught when he sees that the narrator is chopping wood with a bad ax. He offers to carve a good handle (or “helve”) for him, free of charge. That night, at Baptiste’s home, the process of carving becomes an ingenious metaphor for the act of poetic composition:
Needlessly soon he had his ax-helves out,
A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me
To have the best he had, or had to spare—
Not for me to ask which, when what he took
Had beauties he had to point me out at length
To insure their not being wasted on me.
He liked to have it slender as a whipstock,
Free from the least knot, equal to the strain
Of bending like a sword across the knee.
He showed me that the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work. He chafed its long white body
From end to end with his rough hand shut round it.
He tried it at the eye-hole in the ax-head.
“Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.”
Baptiste knew how to make a short job long
For love of it, and yet not waste time either.
In the margins of a friend’s book, next to this poem, Frost wrote in pencil: “This is as near as I like to come to talking about art, in a work of art—such as it is.”16 Once again, Frost had found a metaphor of universal significance in a local image.
That fall, Amy Lowell chose to focus on him in a widely noticed book, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, where she included Frost among Robinson, Sandburg, Masters, John Gould Fletcher, and H.D.—elite company for a man who, only a few years earlier, had been virtually unknown in his own country. Lowell, unfortunately, was prone to sentimental caricature when it came to Frost, and she spoke of him as “all compounded as he seems to be of the granite and gentians of our Northern mountains.”
Not surprisingly, Frost was annoyed by the way Lowell found his regionalism a form of limitation. On December 2, 1917, he wrote to her in a sly, bemused fashion that nevertheless impressed upon her that he was no hick from the woods:
I must see you before long if only to put it to you while the business is still before the house why I am not by your own showing the least provincial, the most national, of American poets—why I ought not to be, anyway. Doesn’t the wonder grow that I have never written anything or as you say never published anything except about New England farms when you consider the jumble I am? Mother, Scotch immigrant. Father oldest New England stock unmixed. Ten years in West. Thirty years in East. Three years in England. Not less than six months in any of these: San Francisco, New York, Boston, Cambridge, Lawrence, London. Lived in Maine, N.H., Vt., Mass. Twenty-five years in cities, nine in villages, nine on farms. Saw the South on foot. Dartmouth, Harvard two years. Shoe-worker, mill-hand, farmhand, editor, reporter, insurance agent, agent for Shakespearean reader, reader myself, teacher in every kind of school public and private including psychological normal school and college. Prize for running at Caledonia Club picnic: prizes for assumed parts at masquerade balls; medals for goodness in high school; detour for scholarship at Harvard; money for verse. Knew Henry George well and saw much at one time (by way of contrast) of a noted boss [Christopher “Boss” Buckley in San Francisco]. Presbyterian, Unitarian, Swedenborgian, Nothing. All the vices but disloyalty and chewing gum or tobacco.17
Frost put himself forward boldly and cleverly. Although he continued to play the role of the Yankee farmer-poet, especially when reading his poems in public, he did not want to be mistaken for a rube, especially by sophisticated critics of poetry.
Lesley Frost had by now gone off to Wellesley College, where her professors made demands that she considered pedantic and petty. She had, of course, been educated in unusual circumstances, often at home by her parents; conventional education was perhaps bound to grate on her. Furthermore, she was as headstrong and willful as her father. She did not take happily to college life, which struck her as regimented and pointless. After one year, with her father’s support, she dropped out with the hopes of becoming an airplane pilot—a prospect that unsettled her parents. Flying was not womanly work, especially in these early days of aviation.
In the fall of 1918, Amherst was “part military camp, part college,” as one student recalled. The American entry into the war had changed the tone of college life, and Frost could not avoid getting into arguments with colleagues and students about the wisdom of the war. More to irritate his antiwar colleagues than because he really believed in this particular war, Frost maintained an unwaveringly hawkish stance.
His manner in the classroom in the fall semester of 1918 was recorded by E. A. Richards, a member of the Class of 1921:
During those months it was good to be even remotely in acquaintance with Mr. Frost … for here was a man more deeply sentient, more solidly intellectual, with those qualities in finer and more equable balance than we had heretofore known.…
We were glad to go to his house at ten or eleven at night and sit somewhat uneasily in his sitting room until he came in from some depth of the dwelling and sprawled out on a lounge. He read from this poet and that, throwing the book aside when he had reached what seemed to him the furthest reach of luminous expression in some particular poem. And then he would say what occurred to him in relation to that poem, going from there to the general considerations of poetry.
He never, or rarely, talked about his own work.18
President Meiklejohn continued to believe that having Frost on his faculty was good for the college, and he was aware that it might be difficult to keep him. Frost would often express his doubts about teaching, wondering aloud if he shouldn’t return to Franconia and resume farming. But Meiklejohn appealed to Frost’s vanity, offering him an honorary degree at the 1918 commencement; Frost was reappointed to a professorship with the understanding that he would teach only in the fall semester, leaving him free to write and travel the rest of the year, as he saw fit. It was a remarkable deal.
The fall of 1918 was infamous for a flu epidemic that killed thousands in the month of October alone. Frost, who was always susceptible to colds and flus, fell desperately ill during the second week of classes and could not teach for over ten weeks—missing most of the term. He was even too unwell to celebrate the end of the war on November 11. Elinor, meanwhile, was also under considerable strain, having to look after her sick husband and take care of the children.
Frost stayed at Amherst through the spring of 1920, but remained unhappy about Stark Young, who grew increasingly bitter about Frost’s attempts to unseat him. Young believed that Meiklejohn had been manipulated by Frost, against his own better judgment, into extending the poet’s contract at the college. A situation developed in which some members of the faculty sided with Frost, while others (the majority) stood by Young. In the end, there can be no doubt that Frost behaved ungratefully toward Young, who had been instrumental in bringing him to Amherst in the first place. This academic feuding utterly destroyed Frost’s peace of mind, and he could not write.
The fact that Frost was not writing troubled him greatly, and he blamed Amherst for distracting him from his real work. He had always found it easier to write when he was farming, and he wanted to get back to the farm in Franconia as soon as possible. Needing a good excuse to resign, he kept pushing the Stark Young issue with Meiklejohn, insisting that Young be fired on grounds of “immorality.” The president was not about to fire Young, of course, and he made this plain to Frost, who then suggested that he must resign himself in protest. He did so, in January, although he stayed on through the graduation. As he explained to one alumnus, he felt “too much out of sympathy with what the present administration seems bent on doing with this old New England college” to continue as a member of the faculty. But he was honest enough to admit that he had enjoyed “the ‘academic freedom’ to be entirely myself under Mr. Meiklejohn.” In a somewhat self-dramatizing vein, he claimed that the president hated his “dangerous rationalistic and anti-intellectualistic philosophy.”19 In truth, Meiklejohn was more than willing to let Frost be Frost.
There can be no doubt, however, that Frost intensely disliked the liberal atmosphere at Amherst, where ideas of every stripe were tolerated, even encouraged. As he wrote to Wilbur Cross at the Yale Review: “I am too much a creature of prejudice to stay and listen to such stuff” as Amherst put forward.20 He was also busy erecting his reputation for cantankerousness, and in his first major foray into the public arena, he had certainly laid a solid foundation. As usual, he was well aware of his calculations; he would tell Untermeyer, “Nothing I do or say is as yet due to anything but a strong determination to have my own way.… I cut up no ructions but with design to gain my ends even as aforetime when I was a child in San Francisco I played sick to get out of going to school. There’s a vigorous devil in me that raises me above or drops me below the level of pity.”21 Yet he was, he maintained, “a person of good aspirations.” Everything was based on that, and his friends ultimately agreed. “He could be contrary and difficult,” recalled Victor Reichert, “but you always knew Frost meant well. His standards were very high, personally and professionally, even though he pretended otherwise at times—even played at being worse than he was.”22