16
HIS OWN STRATEGIC RETREAT
1935–1938
I should hate to spend the only life I was going to have here in being annoyed with the time I happened to live in.
—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1935
The strain of Marjorie’s death took its toll in many different ways. For a start, Willard Fraser was devasted, and was at first unable to look after baby Robin by himself. He was helped in the painful summer after his wife’s death by Lillian, who had made a remarkably strong recovery from tuberculosis. Elinor, too, pitched in, but this put so much extra strain on her that she suffered a serious heart attack in November. Frost thought, briefly, that he had lost his wife. He was, he told Untermeyer, “all fear for Elinor.”
His own pulmonary problems continued, with repeated bouts of coughing and fevers. The Frosts decided to follow their doctor’s orders and go to Florida in December with Lillian, Carol, and Prescott. The elder Frosts traveled by train to Key West, followed by Carol’s family in their car. In those days, Key West was an isolated, untrendy place, a nearly tropical island that had recently lost almost half its population when the cigar business, which had been its chief industry, moved to Tampa. It was still, as Frost noted, “fairly dense with population, equal parts Negro, Cuban, and American.”1 The island was, by comparison with the mainland, primitive, with no public sewers or running water, and few amenities. Key West’s most famous resident was Ernest Hemingway, although Frost did not run into him.
Frost did, however, run into Wallace Stevens, who was staying at a nearby hotel, the Casa Marina. Stevens and Frost had never met, but they encountered each other several times now, and Stevens invited Frost to have dinner one night at the hotel with himself and a well-known southern judge, Arthur Powell, a friend of Stevens’s. Frost was mildly suspicious of Stevens, who was vice president of an insurance company in Hartford and every inch a country club man. John Bartlett later recalled Frost’s account of this meeting, which was doubtless exaggerated for effect: “[Frost] told a story of an evening, much of a night, spent in Florida with a New Englander, vice-president of a big Connecticut insurance company, but also a poet—kept the two lives absolutely separate.… The vice-president-poet drank heavily at dinner, offended by making passes at the waitresses, and in the hotel room was very drunk. He would order the judge to tell the same story over and over again.”2 Frost apparently enjoyed telling this story, and word eventually got back to Stevens, who was displeased. Some notes were exchanged between them, concluding the following summer with this from Frost:
It relieves me to know that you haven’t minded my public levity about our great talk in Key West. I’m never so serious as when playful. I was in a better condition than you to appreciate that talk. I shall treasure the memory of it. Take it from me there was no conflict at all, but the prettiest kind of stand-off. You and I and the judge found we liked one another, I think. And you and I really like each other’s works. At least down underneath I suspect we do. We should. We must. If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from words. Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep, and events. Hurrah for us in private!3
Stevens himself put the matter like this to Harriet Monroe: “I have only recently returned to the office after a visit to Key West. Robert Frost was spending the winter there. We had a number of pleasant meetings, after which I invited him to come to dinner one evening. It so happened that on the afternoon of that day Judge Powell and I were giving a cocktail party. The cocktail party, the dinner with Frost, and several other things became all mixed up, and I imagine that Frost has been purifying himself by various exorcisms ever since. However, it was nice to meet him, particularly since he was a classmate of mine at college, although we did not know each other at Cambridge.”4
While in Key West, Frost occupied himself by writing an introduction to Sarah Cleghorn’s autobiography (she was a Vermont neighbor). Cleghorn was a reform-minded progressive thinker—thus antithetical to Frost—but he liked her personally and, as usual, threw his support behind his friends regardless of their political leanings. His own politics were of course distinctly conservative in character, although with a quirkiness that made it difficult to place him. The truth was, he was merely annoyed by the politics of the present. “Only dull clods live in the present,” he scribbled in his notebook in Key West. “They alone have the nerves to stand the impact of things.”5
That winter, Key West had become one of Roosevelt’s pet projects for emergency relief. In fact, two-thirds of the island was currently on relief, and the local government was in bankruptcy. Municipal authority temporarily lay with the Florida Emergency Relief Administration. Frost was distressed by what he saw and considered the town a “safe place for slackers.” He wrote to Otto Manthey-Zorn: “So help me I didn’t know the safety I was getting into in coming to Key West. Elinor will absolve me of having got her involved more or less personally in the New Deal on purpose. But it is a portentous fact that I have brought her to the pet salvation project of her President and mine. It’s the damnedest joke yet.”6
Frost’s response to the political situation is seen in the poetry he wrote this winter in Key West. “A Drumlin Woodchuck” and “Departmental” were begun there, and both reflect (however indirectly) Frost’s current political concerns. While “Departmental” is extremely light, and seems to make no real point except to chide bureaucratic efficiency, “A Drumlin Woodchuck” can be taken on many levels as a poem about Frost’s own “strategic retreat” from national politics. The poem (which takes up in a public way a theme treated more personally in “The Ovenbird” some years before) comes from the mouth of a woodchuck (which is also a colloquial way of referring to a local person in Vermont) who lives in an oval hill that has been carved out by glacial drifting (a “drumlin”). “My own strategic retreat,” the animal says, “Is where two rocks almost meet, / And still more secure and snug, / A two-door burrow I dug.”
As a political loner, Frost worried about being attacked, and the drumlin woodchuck seems just as concerned about protecting himself from his enemies, although he “shrewdly pretends / That he and the world are friends.” But he and the world are not friends, or so the poet implies. The woodchuck is endlessly alert, ready to attack if necessary, but preferring to retreat, to protect his flanks. “We take occasion to think,” says the clever woodchuck:
And if after the hunt goes past
And the double-barreled blast
(Like war and pestilence
And the loss of common sense),
If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,
It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.
The roots of Frost’s idiosyncratic politics are nicely exposed here. What motivated him, and engendered his stance of embattlement, was the need to take care of himself, and his own, and to protect his independence in a time when the government threatened to deprive him, and his fellow-countrymen, of it. The self-protectiveness arose from a fear of survival, and he regarded this as common sense. “I keep my head down most of the time,” Frost once told an audience, “like a woodchuck. I keep to my hole. I play it safe.” And he did, most of the time, keeping two rocks behind him and escape routes at either end of his hole.
Elinor felt exhausted during their time in Key West, and the good weather helped only a little. Her heart seemed to race whenever she climbed stairs, and she became dizzy whenever she attempted to clean the house or cook. She wrote to Natalie Davison, the wife of Edward Davison, on February 8: “I do not seem to gain much strength. When I try to do anything, my arms are as heavy as lead, and if I overdo it at all, I begin to tremble all over.”7
Because of Elinor’s illness, Frost did not teach as planned during the late winter at Amherst; he had written to Stanley King, the current president of the college, to explain his inability to perform his usual duties, and King had been fully sympathetic; when Frost returned to Amherst in April from Key West, however, he plunged into a series of public readings and lectures at the college to compensate for his absence. These occasions were widely attended by students and faculty, and reporters from both the student and town newspapers gave detailed accounts of the poet’s manner, which delighted the audiences: “The character, wit, and chatty informal style” of the poet was noted. In his usual manner, he digressed eagerly as “the muse led him in unexpected directions.” In one lecture, he attacked “the modern way of writing poetry,” detecting the baleful influence of Ezra Pound, who encouraged his followers to “seek originality by subtracting meter and meaning from their work.” When he ventured into politics, as he would often do, he could never resist making jabs at the current mania for utopian thinking. “There are too many things to be done before Utopia can be attained,” he said in his final lecture, which was held during commencement week in the college chapel, “yet writers from Plato to [Herbert] Spencer and ever later have crusaded in this seemingly hopeless cause.”8
Soon after his return to the farm in South Shaftsbury that summer, Frost began work on an unusual assignment: to write an introduction to King Jasper, a posthumous volume of poems by his old (but never close) friend E. A. Robinson, who had only recently died. He and Frost had gotten on well in the past few years, although they rarely saw each other. Robinson made no secret of his admiration for Frost, and this softened Frost toward the man whom he often regarded as his chief rival; he agreed to write the introduction in part because it was a good opportunity for him to put a word in for the kind of poetry he himself wrote.
The introduction became a platform for Frost to air many of his pet peeves. “It may come to the notice of posterity (and then again it may not) that this our age ran wild in the quest of new ways to be new,” he complained. He rehashed a number of the themes that had been raised in his Amherst lectures a few weeks before. Poets had vainly attempted to seem original by omitting punctuation, capital letters, metrics, images, and so forth. They had eliminated “phrase, epigram, coherence, logic, and consistency.” But to what end? Where was the real originality in all of this?
In a moving turn, Frost wrote, “The utmost ambition is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of, to lodge a few irreducible bits, where Robinson lodged more than his share.” He added, beautifully, “The style is the man. Rather say the style is the way the man takes himself; and to be at all charming or even bearable, the way is almost rigidly prescribed. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other under it will do.”
* * *
The Frosts traveled west in July to visit Marjorie’s grave and to see both Willard and the baby. It was a painful journey, but Frost distracted himself by putting in an appearance at the Rocky Mountain Writers’ Conference, which was now directed by Edward Davison, his old friend. (Davison still hoped one day to write Frost’s biography, although Frost was now cooperating with Robert S. Newdick of Ohio State University, who had been working assiduously on a biography of Frost since 1935—a project interrupted by Newdick’s untimely death in 1939.) One gets a sense of the mood of the Colorado visit from the recollections of Margaret B. Anderson, the daughter of John and Margaret Bartlett:
We were barely settled in our Pine Street house when Rob and Elinor came for the Writers’ Conference again. It was the first time since Marjorie’s death that John had seen them, and Willard came down from Billings with Robin, his mother, and brother Jack. Robin had spent some time in the East with Carol and Lillian, but the tearing of the emotions, shifting her back and forth, was too much for the family to bear. Rob decided it was better to have her brought up in Montana with Willard and her grandmother. The Frasers stayed with us, Rob and Elinor at the Boulderado Hotel.
I remember sitting on the bench under our apple tree talking to Elinor. Her voice was quiet, her eyes tearful, but without tears. In her hands she clutched a ball of a handkerchief and an abused pack of cigarettes. She seemed cool, distant, and her smile was only a remote suggestion, as if she meant “some other time, not now.”
But Rob, John noted as soon as he greeted the Frosts at the station in Denver, looked fresh, vigorous, and happy, “never more so.”9
Among those on the faculty at the Writers’ Conference was Robert Penn Warren, who gave a lecture entitled “The Recent Southern Novel,” which Frost attended. Warren recalled, “He was unhappy with my subject. The novel did not interest him, and the Southern novel least of all. He couldn’t read Faulkner, he said. Never read much fiction, except when his students wrote it.” It pleased Frost, however, that so many students and people from the community were eager to meet him. Warren said that “he gave a series of lectures on poetry that were held in the largest auditorium at the University, and the hall was jammed. People stood up and down the aisles. Frost was never more winning: his humor fresh, funny. His manner was engaging. He read his poems with a deep, grainy voice, sometimes twice. He’d say, ‘I’ll say that one again, in case you missed it the first time around.’”
Warren found Frost highly sympathetic. “He was genuinely appreciative of other writers. He had an interest in the Southern Agrarians, and he called himself a Yankee Agrarian.”10 Indeed, Frost had much in common with that school of southern intellectuals identified with the Southern Agrarians, who were essentially anti-industrialists, believers in agriculture as the basis for culture. Their conservatism also applied to the natural world, which they wished to preserve from the ravages of commercialism, creeping suburbia, and the kind of mindless growth that had ruined so much of the industrial north in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their famous manifesto of 1930, I’ll Take My Stand, a dozen leading Agrarians defined their movement. Donald Davidson wrote that “the making of an industrialized society will extinguish the meaning of the arts, as humanity has known them in the past, by changing the conditions of life that have given art a meaning. For they have been produced in societies which were for the most part stable, religious, and agrarian; where the goodness of life was measured by a scale of values having little to do with the material values of industrialism; where men were never too far removed from nature to forget that the chief subject of art, in the final sense, is nature.”11
One of the doctrines that the Agrarians, like Frost, disliked intensely was the idea of progress. “The concept of Progress,” wrote John Crowe Ransom, “is the concept of man’s increasing command, and eventually perfect command, over the forces of nature; a concept which enhances too readily our conceit, and brutalizes our life. I believe there is possible no deep sense of beauty, no heroism of conduct, and no sublimity of religion, which is not informed by the humble sense of man’s precarious position in the universe.”12 This might well have been written by Frost; as Warren said, “Frost’s lectures in Colorado were deeply in harmony with what the Southern Agrarians were saying, although he put everything in his own very personal and memorable way, usually playing concepts off one another, pairing them and switching them. His performances were occasions for wit, playful, although marked by an underlying seriousness.”
One of the things that the Southern Agrarians emphasized was that a society as a whole must be disciplined, regulated according to established principles. Frost strongly concurred; he wrote in his notebooks that summer, “I heard a false progressive say that self-discipline was the only discipline, and I was tempted to say that he who has had only self-discipline knows no discipline at all.”13 In his usual wayward, self-deconstructing manner, Frost added: “One of the hardest disciplines is having to learn the meaningless,” by which he apparently meant the meaninglessness of life, that sense of a universe without design or obvious purpose.
After the Colorado conference, the Frosts traveled with the Bartletts to New Mexico, where the poet Witter Bynner presided over a local poetry group in Santa Fe. Frost had always admired Bynner from a distance, as a poet and cultural force, although he knew that Bynner was headstrong and prickly. He nevertheless agreed to speak to the group. It was both an occasion for him to see the famous Pueblo Indian ruins and an opportunity to forge an alliance with Bynner. The day the Frosts went to visit the Pueblo site, however, was also the day that Bynner had arranged a large lunch for Frost at his home.
Frost arrived late, annoying Bynner from the outset. A tense discussion soon followed over a recent book of poetry by Horatio Colony, one of Bynner’s Harvard classmates. The book was full of thinly veiled celebrations of homosexuality—a subject that Frost found distasteful. Bynner praised the book as one of the best things he had read since first encountering A. E. Housman (another poet whose work had a vivid strain of homoeroticism). This comment insulted Frost, and in his impish vein he pretended that he, too, was a great admirer of Colony’s book; indeed, he asked to read one of his favorite poems aloud. Bynner was briefly deceived and passed the book to Frost, who read an obviously charged passage in which the implications of the poem were clear. Frost then teased Bynner by saying he was “too young and innocent to understand such verse.” Seeing that he had been had, Bynner exploded, pouring a whole mug of beer over Frost’s snowy head. Far from recoiling, Frost actually enjoyed Bynner’s outburst and remained calm and smiling; he had made his point and provoked a scene. As a friend later remarked, “Robert took great pleasure in setting the cat among the pigeons. He was childlike in this, not really malicious, although sometimes the situation would get out of hand.”14
After reading his poems to a huge audience in Santa Fe, Frost returned to South Shaftsbury, where he began to think about a new book of poems. Thus far, he had put little attention on this subject. Fugitive poems had appeared here and there, but he had not been thinking about the poems in relation to one another. “Two Tramps in Mud Time” had recently been published in the Saturday Review of Literature, “On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind” came out in Scribner’s Magazine, and “Desert Places” appeared in the American Mercury; there were also numerous poems in various degrees of revision. Frost was suddenly quite astonished by how much finished work he had in hand. Since his last collection was published in 1928, it was certainly time for a new book.
Frost spent much of the fall pulling together poems and sending them out to editors at magazines. The fruits of these efforts would emerge throughout 1936, when approximately half of the poems from A Further Range appeared in major periodicals, including “A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury,” “A Record Stride,” “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” and “A Roadside Stand” in the Atlantic Monthly, “The White-Tailed Hornet,” “The Master Speed,” “Voice Ways,” and “Departmental” in the Yale Review, “In Time of Cloudburst” and “The Figure in the Doorway” in the Virginia Quarterly, “At Woodward’s Gardens” and several sections from the aphoristic sequence called “Ten Mills” in Poetry, and “The Strong Are Saying Nothing” in the American Mercury. “You see, I have to keep reminding them I’m here,” Frost told Untermeyer coyly.
The Frosts were still grieving for Marjorie throughout the fall, and they stayed close to home until obligations drew them to such disparate places as Rockford, Illinois (where Lesley was now teaching in the Department of English), and Decatur, Georgia. In Georgia, he read his poems on November 7, 1935, at Agnes Scott College for the sum of five hundred dollars—enormous for a poetry reading in the middle of the Depression. Frost was, in fact, so favorably impressed by Agnes Scott College that he would visit that college nineteen more times, the last in 1962. (Another draw was Emma May Laney, a faculty member at Agnes Scott whom he liked a great deal.)
Elinor found it much harder than her husband to recover her balance, and she began to experience chest pains in October that seemed, to her doctor, more ominous than the previous ones. He urged her to go south again for the winter, and Frost agreed. Having recently fallen prey to another bout of influenza upon returning from Georgia, he could not face the prospect of a bitterly cold winter in Amherst. He wrote to President King to explain the situation, and King was (as usual) sympathetic—even though there was some resistance to Frost on the faculty, a small number of whom felt that he was getting a substantial salary for no work. For the most part, however, there was general support for Frost at Amherst.
Just after Christmas, the Frosts set off for Miami, where they rented a house in nearby Coconut Grove. An invitation to participate in the Winter Institute of Literature at the University of Miami had come, and Frost thought that some minor affiliation would be useful. He agreed to give a reading and a talk, and to meet some of the local writers. But despite the change of climate, he was soon ill, and he spent much of January in bed with a fever and cold. Elinor was forced to look after him, although her own health was hardly resplendent. One cannot help but think that Frost often took advantage of his wife—indeed, he would say as much himself in later years.
Frost had recently agreed to return in March to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard—a major honor, and something that he could not turn down, especially coming from one of his own undergraduate colleges. He was asked to deliver six public lectures that Harvard’s press would publish afterward. Frost was hesitant about the latter part of the deal; he customarily lectured without notes, speaking from the top of his head, and it would be an unusual chore to have to write out the lectures. He decided that the only way he could manage was for a stenographer to take down his talks, which he could then rework into printable shape.
He was also invited to read a Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in the following autumn, as part of its tercentenary celebration. He accepted again, but was not happy about writing a poem to order. As Elinor put it, “he hates to know that he must write.”15 Having to produce something at someone’s request took the mystery out of it, and he liked, even required, that mystery to produce decent work. “You don’t know when a poem will come, or from where,” he said. “And that’s a good thing. A poet doesn’t want to know too much, not while he’s writing anyway. The knowing can come later.”16
By now, Frost had acquired a fairly complete picture of himself; that is, he understood the complex nature of his evolving self-portrait. In March, he wrote to Sidney Cox, “You have to remember I’m a family man, a professor, a farmer, a lecturer, a contributor to magazines, a publisher’s author, and a diner-out when I am where they have dinners. I am also as I forgot to say a resorter northward for hay fever and southward for influenza. I think I keep my head pretty well in all this for such an old slow coach.”17
* * *
The Norton lectures began on March 4, when Frost addressed a crowd of more than a thousand students, faculty members, and others. His talk in the New Lecture Hall, “The Old Way to Be New,” was the first in a series of lectures generally titled “The Renewal of Words.” According to one listener, he “seemed to make it up as he went along, although it was obviously well planned.”18 Frost was at the height of his form as a performer, able to summon phrases that had been gathering on his tongue for decades. He could illustrate points with his own poems or draw on countless others from his favorite poets, often reciting lines from memory. Indeed, Frost had memorized countless poems, in Latin and English.
His familiar brand of raw Yankee humor went down well, and he looked every inch a bard: whitish-gray hair flying in wisps, blue eyes piercing, squinting. His body was thickset, sturdy. His voice was deep, the accent perfectly rural—an act he had long ago mastered. His continuous flow of aphorisms had about them the quality of folk sayings.
Among the enthusiastic audience that night were Harvard President James Bryant Conant and his wife, who found the performance electrifying. Conant invited the Frosts to dinner the following week, and Frost was convinced that Harvard would soon offer him a professorship. Unfortunately, there were extreme political differences between Conant and Frost, and this emerged at the dinner. Frost, at the table, denounced Roosevelt at length, and Conant responded curtly to the poet, “You have a bitter tongue.”
In Florida some months before, Frost had met Bernard DeVoto, a Harvard tutor and novelist-critic. DeVoto now devoted himself to the poet, helping him find somewhere to live in Cambridge and introducing him to the Harvard community. (DeVoto, whose lack of a doctorate made him an unlikely candidate for a permanent job at Harvard, would soon leave to edit the Saturday Review of Literature.)
An older acquaintance, Theodore Morrison, was also on the faculty, and Frost often dined with him and his wife, Kathleen (known as Kay). Morrison was now running the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Frost had often seen him in recent summers. The Morrisons realized that Harvard was not going to play host to Frost in a proper way, so they held a reception for him at their home on Mason Street after five of the six lectures. This gesture cemented a relationship that would become crucial for Frost in his later years.
Kay Morrison, formerly Kay Johnston, had been an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, where she’d served as editor in chief of the student newspaper. She had first met Frost in 1918, and had invited him to lecture there in 1920, during her senior year.19 Since then, she and Frost had remained vaguely in touch; now, the friendship blossomed. Kay was beautiful, charming, and sophisticated in a way that Frost had rarely seen in a woman. She was strikingly independent as well, a “woman of tremendous vitality and strong views, who could hold her own with Frost. She didn’t let him get away with anything, but was always attentive, respectful. He liked the independence in her, and encouraged her to speak her mind.”20 It is worth noting that Frost found Kay’s independence appealing—unusual for this time. She may well, in this regard, have reminded him of Elinor, who always maintained a certain emotional separateness from her husband, even though she observed the traditional role of subservience in public.
Frost had come ahead of Elinor from Florida, but Elinor soon followed. She had not been well throughout the winter, and there was no evidence of improvement in her health—a fact that worried Frost. “A bad cold had housed her for the first weeks [of Frost’s Norton presentations],” recalled Kay Morrison, “but even in the succeeding ones she followed her established pattern of not going to [her husband’s] lecture but waiting up eagerly at home to hear how it had been received.”21
The second Norton lecture was entitled “Vocal Imagination—the Merger of Form and Content.” This theme had interested him for decades: the way a poem comes alive in colloquial intonations, in patches where a poet manages to entangle syntax and idiom in a manner that connects to living speech. In essence, Frost reformulated his old arguments about the “sound of sense.”
The third lecture was called “Does Wisdom Signify?” This topic was so general that it allowed Frost to ramble mightily on subjects dear to his heart. He began with the old notion that the manner of expression is more important in a poem than its meaning; he went on to object to this kind of superficial writing, suggesting that words were deeds, and that trivial arguments in a poem irritated him. According to one reporter who was there, he drifted from joke to joke, from perception to perception, with little in the way of overall pattern or argument, although the audience seemed not to care. There was always plenty to admire.22
The last lectures bore these titles: “Poetry as Prowess (Feat of Words),” “Before the Beginning of a Poem,” and “After the End of a Poem.” Again, the topics were general enough to allow Frost the room he liked for meandering and free association. Having recently given some talks on the craft of poetry at the Winter Institute in Florida, he was prepared to pepper his arguments with deft quotations from a range of English and American poets. He conveyed “the importance of poetry as speech that was somehow essential, and when he recited lines of verse, his own or that of other poets, you understood exactly what he meant. He had a way of ‘saying’ a poem that struck you between the eyes, and in the heart. The audience was appropriately dazzled.”23
Frost also found time to mingle with a small number of Harvard students. One undergraduate who came to see him was Robert Lowell, whose cousin Amy had been among Frost’s earliest supporters. Lowell brought a long poem in an envelope and asked Frost’s advice. Lowell recalled:
I’d gone to call on Frost with a huge epic poem on the First Crusade, all written out in clumsy longhand on lined paper. He read a page of that and said, “You have no compression.” Then he read me a very short poem of Collins, “How Sleep the Brave,” and he said, “That’s not a great poem, but it’s not too long.” He was very kindly about it.… [He then read the opening of “The Fall of] Hyperion”; the line about the Naiad, something about her pressing a cold finger to her cold lips, which wouldn’t seem like a voice passage at all. And he said, “Now Keats comes alive here.” That was a revelation to me.24
As ever, Frost had a good eye for talent, and he followed Lowell’s career closely. When Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize, Frost wrote to Lowell, “Isn’t it fine that the young promise I began to entertain hopes of when it visited me on Fayerweather Street, Cambridge, in 1936, should have come to so much and to so much promise for the future?”25 Later, Frost would prove a sympathetic friend when Lowell was plagued by mental illness. Frost even visited him in a mental hospital outside of Boston in 1949, and in 1957 he played an important role in helping to calm an agitated Lowell. Hearing of his crisis, he came at once to the younger poet’s house to see if he could help; as the poet William Alfred recalled, “Mr. Frost went up into [Lowell’s] study … on the top floor, and tried to engage him in conversation.… He tried to calm him down. That’s what I mean about Mr. Frost. He was just a very good man. He didn’t have to do that.”26
* * *
In June, A Further Range was published. It was taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club as a selection, which meant a sale of fifty thousand copies right off the top; the publisher, Holt, was thus guaranteed a success. It also meant that Frost would have solid royalty payments. But he was more worried about the reception of the book than the sales figures, and he understood that his conservative politics clashed with the prevailing interests in proletarian literature, in socialism, in all manner of progressive thinking. As expected, he did not have to wait long for the attacks to begin.
Newton Arvin, a well-known scholar and critic, launched a major volley in the Partisan Review, suggesting that Frost’s philosophy of “strategic retreat” now seemed “as profitless as a dried-up well.” He took Frost to task for writing once again about a dismal New England full of “unpainted farmhouses and so many frostbitten villages and so many arid sitting-rooms.”27 This was followed quickly by further attacks: a mauling by Horace Gregory in the New Republic, another by R. P. Blackmur in the Nation, and another by Rolfe Humphries in the New Masses. Humphries wrote, “The further range to which Frost invited himself is an excursion into the field of political didactic, and his address is unbecoming.… A Further Range? A further shrinking.”28
The attacks continued into the fall, with a review in New England Quarterly in which Dudley Fitts praised some of the lyrics but derided the political poems; of “Build Soil,” for instance, he commented, “The voice is still the voice of Frost, it is true, and all the tricks are here; but the diction is faded, the expression imprecise, and the tone extraordinarily tired and uneasy. It is a strange thing that Robert Frost, pondering the problem of a sick society, should suddenly become ineffectual, should seem unable to deal abstractly with matter that he has powerfully suggested in many of his best lyrics.”29
Frost recoiled from these criticisms, spiraling downward into depression, even though a number of his friends, including Louis Untermeyer and E. Merrill Root, weighed in with extremely positive reviews. Needing to make another strategic retreat, Frost decided not to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard as promised; he also canceled most of his public lectures and readings scheduled for late summer and early fall. He even ducked out of a fall stint at Amherst that he had promised to President King in exchange for being allowed to give the Norton lectures at Harvard in the spring.
In August, as usual, the Frosts spent the hay-fever season at the Fobes’s cottage in Franconia, and Elinor wrote to Mrs. Fobes, “Robert is awake so late at night, and is apt to feel like a walk even after midnight.”30 Depression often precipitated physical ailments, and soon an attack of shingles brought him tumbling further. Frost’s doctor said he was suffering from “nervous exhaustion,” Elinor reported, and that “if he didn’t stop trying to work he would get into a condition that might take a year to recover from. He couldn’t work, anyway, the pain in his head was so acute.”31
Frost’s dark mood, in late November, is reflected in a letter to DeVoto in which he complains of being unable to write letters. “Too much has happened to me this year. I am stopped in my tracks as if everybody in the opposing eleven had concentrated on me. No, not as bad as that. But I haven’t dared look at paper. This is the first letter I have written in four months—absolutely the first. I prescribed loafing for myself. I may have been wrong. At any rate herewith I start again (though in bed again) and quit whining and shirking.”32 Here is Frost once again pulling himself out of depression, forcing himself into the world: the poet-as-survivor.
The Frosts planned a major family reunion in the South as part of the recovery program. Florida was dismissed as a destination: Elinor had bad memories of the previous winter, when her husband had been ill through most of their stay. They chose San Antonio, Texas, somewhat arbitrarily, on the advice of a friend. Carol, Lillian, and Prescott eagerly came, as did Lesley and her two children, who were living in Mexico City. Irma was still struggling in her marriage, and she decided not to come, but Willard came down from Montana with young Robin. After the holidays, the Frosts and Carol’s family found apartments to rent for the winter.
In the meanwhile, a reaction against the harsh reviews of A Further Range began, with a clutch of extremely positive reviews coming in. More important, Richard Thornton, Frost’s editor at Holt, put together a collection of essays called Recognition of Robert Frost: Twenty-fifth Anniversary. It was a substantial book, containing excerpts of critical appraisals going back to James Maurice Thompson’s private letter of praise for Frost to William Hayes Ward in November 1894. Thompson had found “some secret of genius between the lines, an appeal to sympathy lying deep in one’s sources of tenderness.” He thought Frost’s art “singular and biting.”
But the first essay in the book was of more recent vintage, and suggested the way Frost was taken by his contemporaries. “The Permanence of Robert Frost” offered an overview by Mark Van Doren, an important young critic and poet. He considered Frost’s place in American literature to be “singularly central,” saying that he could be appreciated on many levels. “If he is not all things to all men he is something to almost anybody—to posterity, one supposes, as well as to us.” He concluded by calling Frost “a poet of and for the world” whose voice “is immediately recognizable as a human voice, and recognizable for the much that it has to say.” Essay upon essay celebrated the poet, and the sum was impressive. It was impossible not to realize that Frost had a secure place in the world of American poetry.
This view was confirmed in May 1937 when Frost was awarded his third Pulitzer Prize, for A Further Range—an unprecedented achievement (although Louis Untermeyer’s presence on the prize committee had not diminished his chances). The book continued to sell extremely well, too, making Frost by far the best-selling American poet since Longfellow.
These accolades and affirmations encouraged Frost, and Elinor urged him to go back into the world. Tentatively, he began to accept invitations to read and lecture in New England in the fall of 1937. He had hoped to resume his old relationship with Amherst College, too, but Elinor’s health seemed only to grow worse. Frost wrote to Ted Morrison on October 2, “You haven’t heard, but Elinor has been very seriously ill. She is home from the hospital and about the house a little. That’s all that can be said for her. I shall be taking her south soon. She needs a long long rest.”33
The Frosts had, in retrospect, been disappointed by the sojourn in Texas, and they decided to return to Florida and to rent an apartment at 743 Bay Street in the university town of Gainesville in early December. They had visited there before and liked its openness and accessibility. Lesley had agreed to take a neighboring apartment so that she could help her mother, who was in no condition to look after the apartment by herself or prepare meals. A nearby house for Carol and his family was soon found, too. As usual, the Frosts footed the bill, and did so willingly.
Christmas of 1937 went well enough, despite Elinor’s bad health. A large Christmas dinner was served at Carol’s house, and the children “played all day without quarrelling,” Elinor wrote to a friend. “We have all been very well so far. I rest a great deal, of course. The nights here are cool, almost cold, even after warm days.”34
In the first week of January, Frost received from Bernard DeVoto a long-awaited article he had written for the Saturday Review. DeVoto used the Thornton collection as an occasion to strike a blow at Frost’s most recent critics. He described some of these reviewers as “screamingly silly.” Arvin, Gregory, and Blackmur were characterized as “a group of muddled minds” who deigned to “tell us about Mr. Frost without bothering to read him.” Blackmur’s piece was singled out as “the most idiotic review since the invention of movable type.” DeVoto separated the critics of Frost into various camps. Some “see Mr. Frost escaping from reality into nature or idea or distance or the unknown.” Others “assert that he never escapes but instead holds fast to the fact which is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Another contrast was developed between the left-wing critics for whom “the only right way to write poetry now was to revolt in it against private ownership of the means of production” and those who regarded Frost as “a complete proletarian” himself. Frost was, according to DeVoto, “the only pure proletarian poet of our time. His is the only body of poetry of this age which originates in the experience of humble people, treated with the profound respect of identification, and used as the sole measure of the reality and value of all experience.”35
According to Elinor, her husband was “deeply gratified and relieved” by the DeVoto piece, but he was also savvy enough to see that DeVoto had gone overboard, writing in the manner of his hero, H. L. Mencken, without Mencken’s wit or genuine originality of style. Nevertheless, the piece offered Frost a counterbalancing voice to play in his head and helped to muffle the noise of the critical voices against him. By March, in fact, Frost told Untermeyer that he felt “quite himself again” and was eager to begin writing.
He was also pleased by Gainesville. Carol often took him on long drives in the surrounding countryside, which was flat but agreeably rural. There were warm lakes for swimming, and lots of woods for “botanizing.” Frost became excited about the prospect of learning to identify a whole new range of flora and fauna. He drove with Lesley one day in February over to Stetson University, where he addressed a packed auditorium. When one student quizzed him about the underlying politics of his work, Frost told him “not to attach to his poems undue political and philosophical importance.”36
As often happened, his mania for real estate reappeared, and he decided to buy a house in Gainesville so that he and Elinor could be assured of a regular place to go back to each winter. After a careful search, he and Carol found a likely property and took Elinor to inspect it; she liked it very much, and they discussed making an offer on the way home.
On their return to Bay Street Elinor walked ahead of her husband up the stairs to their second floor apartment, but halfway up she suffered a severe heart attack and dropped to her knees. Frost and his son carried her to a bedroom, where she quickly lost consciousness. A local doctor, John Henry Thomas, was summoned, and he pronounced the situation grave. Elinor was not to be moved. Frost became so agitated that the doctor banished him from the room, forcing him to stand outside the door.
A sequence of seven further attacks occurred in two days, and Frost was kept away from his wife, although he could hear her muffled responses to the doctor through the closed door. It was feared that contact with her obviously agitated husband would drain what little energy she had left. But this was all to no avail. Elinor died on March 20, two days after the first attack, of “an acute coronary occlusion.” Frost’s wife of forty-three years, and the only woman he had ever loved, was gone.