17

DEPTHS BELOW DEPTHS
1939–1940

The poem must have as good a point as an anecdote or a joke. It is more effective if it has something analogous to the practical joke: an action, a “put up job” such as being carried out as a serenade or valentine or requiem.… The sentences must spring from each other and talk to each other, even when the thing is only one character speaking.

—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1939

Frost was pitched into turmoil by Elinor’s sudden death in Florida. Making things worse, Lesley now accused him of hastening her mother’s death by allowing her to live in the upstairs apartment in Gainesville, rather than insisting that they take the ground floor—thus forcing her to climb stairs several times each day. Lesley also suggested that her father had selfishly put his own career before Elinor’s welfare. Frost was unable to defend himself or do much of anything as Lesley and Clifford Lyons, a recent friend, took Elinor’s body to Jacksonville for cremation, leaving Frost to sit in his apartment with the shades drawn. As often happened when depression struck, Frost succumbed to a racking cough and fever; he was so ill, in fact, that the memorial service that had been planned was postponed, and the doctor warned that he might easily lapse into pneumonia if he didn’t have a period of complete rest.

In a notebook, Frost had recently mentioned “Elinor’s wish that our hope of life hereafter depended on something else as well as religion.”1 Although he was a man of deep spirituality, and always spoke well of conventional religion, he was not himself conventional in his beliefs. He could not, in other words, rely on any literal belief in the hereafter to comfort him after Elinor’s death. The Swedenborgian faith of his mother was of no use to him now.

By any standards, Frost’s dedication to his wife and family were extraordinary. With regard to Elinor, he was positively uxorious. Most of his poems, he said, were written to her; all of his books thus far had been dedicated to her. That he had been a devoted father cannot be questioned: the children had grown up with him in the house as a vivid, consistent presence. Even into adulthood, they had spent unusual amounts of time with their father, who showed continued interest in their lives and fortunes. Unfortunately, the impression that Frost was a bad father has spread widely, largely because of Lawrance Thompson’s biography, which quite distorts the overall picture by placing undue emphasis on Frost’s failures despite the fact that they were within the range of normal behavior. No parent or spouse is ever perfect, and Frost—a man who fought with depression and anxiety throughout his life—struggled with his family responsibilities; for the most part, he bore them well.

After Elinor’s death, he found himself surrounded by friends wanting to help. Hervey Allen, a popular novelist, rushed up from Miami to assist in any way he could. Untermeyer came down from New York. Even Stanley King, the president of Amherst, came to Florida to offer emotional support—a remarkable fact, given Frost’s lack of enthusiasm for the King presidency. With King’s help, arrangements were made for a memorial service to be held in the Johnson Chapel at Amherst.

Frost wrote to his son on April 15, “Well, you’re hard at work up there and that must be some comfort. I hope you have an interesting summer. You’ll be getting new trees and baby chicks and I suppose putting on the dormant spray. There was nothing Elinor wanted more than to have you take satisfaction out of that home and farm. I wish you would remember it every day of your life.”2

To Benny DeVoto, Frost wrote movingly about the role Elinor had played in warding off his loneliness: “I expect to have to go depths below depths in thinking before I catch myself and can say what I want to be while I last. I shall be all right in public, but I can’t tell you how I am going to behave when I am alone. She could always be present to govern my loneliness without making me feel less alone. It is now running into more than a week longer than I was ever away from her since June 1895. You can see how I might have doubts of myself. I am going to work very hard in May and be on the go with people so as not to try myself solitary too soon.”3

Frost would make being “on the go with people” the rest of his life’s work, and would fight his loneliness by “making sure that there were people around, lots of people, and that somebody was there at night so that he could talk himself to sleep.”4

The memorial service at Amherst closed a chapter in Frost’s life. He had told President King of his intentions to resign, and King had tried to dissuade him, but Frost was more determined now than ever. He did not want to live in the house on Sunset Avenue any longer, nor did he want any formal relationship with Amherst College. He was aware that several faculty members believed he had shirked his duties, and he wanted not to have to worry about this. Elinor’s death had, in a sense, changed everything; Frost wanted to make some public split as a way of recognizing an inner truth. Things would never be the same again.

To make it easy for Frost, Stanley King agreed that Amherst College should acquire the house, and at a price higher than he had paid for it. Frost’s resignation was accepted with regrets, and he was told to “come to Amherst as frequently as possible.” King was effusive in his letter: “Personally, I shall miss you keenly as a member of our college family. I have often said that in the field of human understanding you are one of the wisest men I have ever met. Our talks together at your house and at our house are one of the happiest memories of the six years I have spent at Amherst. I have learned from you many things which I cannot put on paper.”5

Frost returned to South Shaftsbury, going first to the house he called Gully Gulch, the last dwelling that he and Elinor had shared in Vermont. He found it impossibly lonely there, “too full of Elinor to withstand,” and moved temporarily into Stone Cottage with Carol and his family. In June, he made a private excursion to Derry to visit the farm that had provided so much inspiration for so many of his best poems. Elinor had wished to have her ashes spread along Hyla Brook, and Frost was hoping to arrange for this with the current owners; he was, however, met with indifference at the Derry farm, and did not have the heart to bury Elinor there. He would bury her ashes in Vermont, which now felt more like home than New Hampshire.

The death of Elinor is a major curtain that fell in the play of Frost’s life, signaling the final act. The conditions, even the setting, for his life changed significantly from this point on. Instead of moving between South Shaftsbury and Amherst, he would shift among three residences: the Homer Noble farm in Ripton, an apartment in Boston (later, a duplex in Cambridge), and South Miami, where he would spend the worst months of winter.

The relationship with Bread Loaf began in earnest after Elinor’s death in 1938. Through the late spring and summer, Frost was wild with grief. He wrote to Untermeyer from Amherst in May, “I don’t know myself yet and won’t for a long time, if I ever do. I am so quickened by what has happened that I can’t touch my mind with a memory of any kind. I can’t touch my skin anywhere with my finger but it hurts like a sad inspiration. In such like condition I spent all of yesterday packing deadly personal things in the desolate house on Sunset Avenue.”6 He was intent upon staying with his children “till I can decide who I am now, and what I have to go on with.”7

Frost’s letters from this summer suggest that he was in a deep state of self-recrimination with regard to Elinor: “I’m afraid I dragged her through pretty much of a life for one as frail as she,” he confessed to J. J. Lankes. “Too many children, too many habitations, too many vicissitudes. And a faith required that would have exhausted most women. God damn me when he gets around to it.”8

In “(Re)Figuring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 1938–1942,” Donald G. Sheehy writes brilliantly about this horrendous period, when Frost sailed close to the shores of madness. It was Sheehy, in fact, who first discovered the extent of Frost’s relationship with Kay Morrison, who signed on during the summer of 1938 as his secretary and would remain his closest companion until his death twenty-five years later. Sheehy comments, “Grief had been compounded by guilt. Disturbed by Lesley’s emotional indictment that his artistic self-interest had caused much of her mother’s suffering, Frost retrospectively heard in the silence of Elinor’s final hours a tenor of renunciation.”9

As Sheehy notes, Kay Morrison (whom Frost had grown exceptionally fond of during the recent stint at Harvard) was visiting friends in Vermont in July 1938 and came to see him in South Shaftsbury. Seeing that he was in rough emotional shape, she invited him to spend some time with her and her children at the house where she was staying. He accepted, and soon fell utterly under her spell. “Their relationship had an original flash point, which was probably sexual,” says Lesley Lee Francis, the poet’s granddaughter. “But too much can be made of that. The relationship very quickly subsided into one of close friendship and mutual respect.”10

In an unguarded moment, Frost asked Kay Morrison to marry him: the impulsive behavior of a grief-stricken man. Kay was already married, of course, and not unhappily so; she patiently explained this to Frost. “She was a tremendously sophisticated and usually sensible and sensitive woman,” recalls Louise Reichert, a friend of Frost’s, “but probably should not have gotten involved with Frost in an intimate way. I think she regretted this, but she was devoted to him, and to her husband. A peculiar triangle was in place there, with Ted and Kay definitely married, looking after their children, but with Frost on hand as a kind of uncle, as a close relative. They made up a family of sorts. Ted was a gentleman, and he must have known what was happening—or had happened—between Frost and his wife, but he trusted Kay. He was also deeply respectful of Frost’s genius, and he was willing to let a great deal pass unnoticed, unremarked on.” She adds, “I don’t think that Ted would have let the relationship continue if he thought Kay was physically involved with Robert. I spent a lot of time in their company, and that tension just wasn’t there. It was full of mutual respect.”11 Peter J. Stanlis adds, “As far as one could tell, there was no visible tension between the Morrisons and Frost. On several occasions when I came to the farm for an evening talk with Frost, if I arrived a bit early, and they were finishing dinner, they would invite me in for dessert and coffee. They always appeared to be in close harmony.”12

Ted Morrison had invited Frost to lecture at the Writers’ Conference that summer, and the poet eagerly accepted now that he and Kay were involved. But Frost understood on some deep level that Kay was devoted to Ted, and his attitude is reflected in a letter written shortly after the conference ended that August: “You two rescued me from a very dangerous self when you had the idea of keeping me for the whole session at Bread Loaf. I am still infinitely restless, but I came away from you as good as saved. I had had a lover’s quarrel with the world. I loved the world, but you might never have guessed it from the things I thought and said. Now the quarrel is made up.”13

The notion that the quarrel was made up might be placed in a folder called “wishful thinking,” but Frost was definitely feeling better, however temporarily. The grieving over Elinor’s death would, indeed, take years. Deep inside, he would never get over it. But Kay Morrison’s intervention could not have occurred at a more critical moment.

While the relationship between Frost and Kay appears to have slipped into the platonic realm rather quickly, Frost could not abide the concept. His fury over the notion of a “platonic” affair was on his mind throughout the conference at Bread Loaf, and he could often be overheard in the dining hall on the subject. Indeed, over dinner he told the young poet Charles Foster (who had recently become a regular correspondent and friend) that “he was against Plato—declaiming that Platonism came down to preferring the woman in somebody else’s bed to the wife in your own.” Frost had the idea of married love heavily on his mind—a thing he had valued and lost so recently—and he said to Foster, “Man and woman are married by lasting affection or they are never married. Only such a humanly beautiful tie deserves respect. All others are mockeries of it, hypocrisies to hide some base gain.” Somewhat shockingly, he added, “Adultery and fornications are generalizations. Each human case should be tried independently. And does this lead to license? I do not think so. Let the affection be deep and it can only be for one person.”14 Frost was thinking of both Elinor and Kay here, celebrating his long marriage to Elinor, and wishing he could marry Kay.

The experience of being with the Morrisons at Bread Loaf renewed Frost. Foster wrote in his journal, “I noticed all the old wit and richness back again. Yesterday morning, I took him for a long ride.… He sees that the world is not frozen mentally, but is moving and growing like him.” Frost turned to Foster and said, “Only poetry comes close to catching the fast flowing world and holding it. Poetry is the height of knowledge.” And he was ready to plunge into this kind of knowledge again.

Nevertheless, Frost was sailing between sharp rocks every day now. A certain wildness was evident in his manner at Bread Loaf; he behaved oddly, even outrageously, at times. In his biography of DeVoto, Wallace Stegner recounts an infamous scene where Frost began “playing around like an idle, inattentive schoolboy in a classroom.”15 During a poetry reading at the Little Theater by Archibald MacLeish, Frost lit a match, setting fire (accidentally on purpose) to a wad of papers that he had crumpled on the chair beside him. He thus drew attention away from MacLeish, whom he had always considered pompous and second-rate. Later that same night, in Treman Cottage (where the faculty at Bread Loaf often retreated after a reading for further conversation), Frost baited MacLeish by making rude remarks as the latter attempted to read aloud from a new play. An angry DeVoto shouted at Frost, “You’re a good poet, Robert, but you’re a bad man.”16

It was Stegner’s opinion, some years later, that Frost was clearly in distress that summer of 1938. He was doing everything he could to draw attention to his pain. It was his odd, even impossible, way of grieving. He hated himself that summer, and he wanted “those around him to hate him,” and this acting out with MacLeish was part of the perverse process. Stegner noted, “One knew that Elinor had just died, and felt pity. There was that halo of sadness on Frost. He had been singled out that year for particular anguish, and most of us understood this.”17

As often before, Frost sought comfort in his art, writing “Carpe Diem” and “The Wind and the Rain” in the harrowing months after Elinor’s death. The former (an echo of poems by Horace and Herrick) describes the present moment as “too much for the senses / Too crowding, too confusing,” while the latter is elegiac in tone, with its title reminiscent of Thomas Hardy. “That far-off day the leaves in flight / Were letting in the colder light,” Frost says, recalling the way he would rashly thrust himself into the destructive element as a young man:

I leaned on with a singing trust

And let it drive me deathward too.

With breaking step I stabbed the dust,

Yet did not much to shorten stride.

I sang of death—but had I known

The many deaths one must have died

Before he came to meet his own!

Oh, should a child be left unwarned

That any song in which he mourned

Would be as if he prophesied?

“There is no more naked an exclamation or unanswerable a question to be found in Frost’s poetry,” William H. Pritchard says.18 The mere act of writing poems (“song”) would seem to tempt fate—a point made explicitly by the last three lines of the first part:

And yet ’twould seem that what is sung

In happy sadness by the young,

Fate has no choice but to fulfill.

As Emerson suggested in his essay “Fate”: “They who talk much of destiny, invite the evils they fear.”

The first of the two sections is centered on wind, the second on rain. In the second, Frost observes that “there is always more than should be said.” He was, as he once said, “a believer in silences.” The poem ends, hauntingly, with internal and external realities strangely interacting:

I have been one no dwelling could contain

When there was rain;

But I must forth at dusk, my time of day,

To see to the unburdening of skies.

Rain was the tears adopted by my eyes

That have none left to stay.

After the Bread Loaf Conference of 1938, Frost visited Untermeyer at his farm in upstate New York, then returned to Amherst to settle his bank account and say good-bye to various friends before moving to Boston, where he could be near Kay. She had agreed to act as his secretary, and the arrangement was a unique one. Kay would serve as business manager, agent, closest friend, object of adoration, scold, and typist. To take on these multiple tasks, she quit her part-time job as a reader for the Atlantic Monthly Press.

At first, the job was established on a trial basis, although it was soon apparent to everyone that she was here to stay. “I don’t think he could have managed without her,” Hyde Cox recalls. “She knew where everything was, where he had to go next, who was expecting him to give this reading or that lecture. Frost’s correspondence had grown unmanageable, and Kay was able to bring some discipline to bear.”

In Boston, Frost moved from the stuffy St. Botolph Club on Newbury Street to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which overlooks the Public Garden. But his old pulmonary troubles started up again, and he was briefly hospitalized in September. Kay had found him an apartment at 88 Mount Vernon Street, and this was being refurbished. It was small, but Frost considered it no more than a base from which he could pursue what would be his last career, that of full-time bard. He expected now to earn a living by lecturing and reading—a role he had virtually invented for himself. “A few poets may have traveled the country and read their poems aloud,” said Allen Ginsberg, “but Frost was relentless, and professional. He created an audience for poetry readings, and a role for the poet, that hadn’t been there before. It was easier for those who came after him. He was the first voyager, a kind of pioneer, the original entrepreneur of poetry.”19

Frost liked the idea of being attached to some college or university, and he was now keen to make contact with Harvard. Several friends in Cambridge—David McCord, Merrill Moore, and Robert Hillyer—approached some wealthy alumni to see if a fellowship for Frost might not be funded from without. Moore wrote to an influential member of the Harvard board, “Here is what might be considered a golden opportunity [for Harvard]. Here is the greatest living poet writing in English, in his declining years, it is true, but sane, mellow and sound. He is alone now and his needs are simple. He has a great deal of usefulness and a great deal of charm. Might it not be possible that some one single person would ‘grubstake’ him for the University for a number of years or something like that? He brings great credit wherever he comes and has a gift of stimulating people in a way that is creative and nonacademic.”20

Not long after moving into the new apartment, Frost set off for Columbus, Ohio, where he stopped to visit with Robert S. Newdick, his biographer. He gave readings and lectures at Ohio State (where Newdick taught) and other colleges in the Columbus area. He then traveled to Iowa City, where he spoke to a group of writers at the University of Iowa. Charles Foster was present and wrote in his notebook, “Robert Frost was here yesterday and spoke to the writers. He was a tired man; the old snap was gone.”21 Even so, the poet returned to Boston by way of Buffalo, where he gave another reading to a large crowd.

Frost was eager to settle down to writing again. He had a solid file of poems in draft that needed revision, some of them dating from many years before, and he had several new poems in rough form. One of the finest poems written (or revised) somewhere in this period was “The Silken Tent,” which he gave to Kay as though it was written for her, although Lesley later claimed to have typed a version of this poem while her mother was still alive. Jeffrey Cramer notes, “Although Kay Morrison was indeed presented with the poem, there is no reason to believe that she was ultimately its original inspiration. In all likelihood, the poem was written to Elinor, but after Elinor’s death, the increased respect and love he felt for Kay prompted Frost to present this sonnet to her.”22 Given Frost’s habit of putting poems away for months, even years or decades, before revising them, it seems quite possible that this poem was written earlier, then revised for Kay. In any case, it remains a centerpiece of Frost’s poetry and one of the finest sonnets written in English in this century. The whole is a single, gorgeously elaborated, sentence:

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,

And its supporting central cedar pole,

That is its pinnacle to heavenward

And signifies the sureness of the soul,

Seems to owe naught to any single cord,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound

By countless silken ties of love and thought

To everything on earth the compass round,

And only by one’s going slightly taut

In the capriciousness of summer air

Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

As Richard Poirier remarks, “The whole poem is a performance, a display for the beloved while also being an exemplification of what it is like for a poem, as well as a tent or a person, to exist within the constrictions of space (‘a field’) and time (‘at midday’) wherein the greatest possible freedom is consistent with the intricacies of form and inseparable from them.”23

The sentence, as a syntactic unit, is grammatically complete after the first two words: “She is.” The poet matter-of-factly declares her presence, her being: the idealized lover who needs no elaboration. But as the impulse toward figurative thinking quickly overwhelms, the third word of the poem, “as”—perhaps the most important word in poetry—takes over, and the conceit begins. The tent is mysteriously “silken,” giving the metaphor a vaguely biblical feel, as in the “Song of Songs,” where the bride is beautiful “as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.” (One would not literally expect to see a silken tent, unless one thinks of silken as meaning “shiny” or “shimmering.”)

The action of the poem (or nonaction) takes place at high noon, in the prime of the love object’s life, so to speak; the “silken ties of love and thought” that bind her to “everything on earth” are loose, although the crucial point is that they are loosely bound. The phrase indirectly celebrates a married love in which the beloved is “tied” but not “tied down,” just as in a poem one encounters limits, but these limits are liberating. Indeed, the poem, as a poem in form, enacts the limits of the sonnet and demonstrates by its very performance the act of being freed by strictures: the marvelous paradox of poetic form.

The woman-as-tree is an interesting figure in the poem: the cedar pole that supports the tent is both a correlative evoking the “soul” of the woman and “is its pinnacle to heavenward.” This line reaches back to “Birches,” where the boy-hero climbed heavenward on the trunk of the tree but was ultimately dropped back to earth, “the right place for love.” Here, too, Frost does not want his love object to get too platonized; “airy nothings,” as Shakespeare suggests, must give way to “a local habitation and a name” for love to occur in its proper fullness. Hence, at the end of the poem, when the breeze strikes—a metaphor for the tugs of pain, loss, grieving, and all forms of resistance in life that one necessarily encounters as the precondition of being alive—the “silken ties” are drawn ever so slightly, suggesting the form of this particular love (much as the lines of the poem are made visible by the flexing in form that occurs through the writing of the sonnet). Frost’s gift for finding the right, as well as unexpected, word is never more visible than in that penultimate line, when he writes about the “capriciousness” of summer air, with its aura of malicious abandon tempered by that sense of sprightliness which is part of its connotation. The figure of the wind tightening the “silken ties” and making “the slightest bondage” visible itself embodies the paradox of freedom and control.

Frost regarded the ties of community as well as the ties of marriage as productive, liberating attachments. “What is man but all his connections?” he said elsewhere. “He’s just a tiny invisible knot so that he can’t discern it himself: the knot where all his connections meet.”24 And in his notebooks, he wrote, “Connections and community—the basis of love, and the product.”25

The poem slithers through its form, the lines quietly enjambed so that one is only slightly aware of the five-foot line or the strict rhymes. The form is a classic Elizabethan sonnet, and this particular example owes a good deal to the love sonnets of Shakespeare, which Frost admired. (“He often quoted the sonnets,” recalled one friend, “and always from memory. He said he could happily pass the time on train or car journeys by reciting these poems in his head.”)26 “The Silken Tent” also owes something to Frost’s consistent interest in form itself, which gives shape to or “informs” ideas and experience. As Frost wrote in his notebooks, “Inform is a good word. Let us inform with idea and measuring all we can of works and life.”27

While “The Silken Tent” is a crest in this period of Frost’s writing, there is also “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” to consider, a poem that was certainly written for Kay. It opens grandly:

He would declare and could himself believe

That the birds there in all the garden round

From having heard the daylong voice of Eve

Had added to their own an oversound,

Her tone of meaning but without the words.

The influence of Shakespeare’s love sonnets is again present here, especially in that first line, which echoes a line from the first scene in Hamlet: “So have I heard and do in part believe it.” (Frost once called this line “the most beautiful single line of English verse.”)28

Pritchard has called this poem “the quietest and most discreet of his sonnets,” saying that it “has about it the air of a tour de force.”29 Like all of Frost’s best poems, it is at least on some metaphorical level about poetry itself. Like Eve, or the subject of the poem (Kay?), Frost has himself created “an oversound,” adding something to the universal bank of emotional and verbal music. The poem is also a fascinating account of how human language and nature’s nonhuman sounds intermingle to forge meaning:

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed

Had now persisted in the woods so long

That probably it never would be lost.

Never again would birds’ song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

The witty couplet that brings the sonnet to a close might well be taken as a gloss of Blake’s famous observation that “Without man, nature is barren.”

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Frost’s editor at Holt, Richard Thornton, fell out of favor with Herbert G. Bristol, the chairman of the board. The ramification of this corporate squabbling was felt by Frost. Thornton was urged to reduce the poet’s guaranteed monthly payment of $250, though he refused to do so. Frost came close to leaving Holt when Thornton was fired, but he was quickly appeased by Bristol and a new editor, T. J. Wilson. A fresh contract was drawn up that pleased Frost immensely: he was guaranteed $300 monthly, for life. He would also receive a 20 percent royalty payment on future work—a rare accession to a poet.

Frost was also pleased that Holt wished to bring out a volume of his collected poems in 1939. A cheaper version of this collection would be coming out with another publisher, under a special arrangement with Holt—an arrangement that would “widen the circle of your readers considerably,” Bristol suggested to the poet in a conciliatory letter. To distinguish the cheaper edition from Holt’s more expensive version, Frost was asked to supply a short preface. What he provided was entitled “The Figure a Poem Makes.”

This brief, charming essay brings into play many of the notes Frost had been sounding for years as he mined his lectures and notebooks for ideas and particular phrases. In its most widely quoted paragraph, the poet declares that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Frost finished this memorable, intensely suggestive, and compact essay in January, and was aware he had succeeded in bringing together in a short space many of his favorite notions, such as the idea of “wildness”—a subject much on his mind since Elinor’s death, which had brought him into a wild space of his own. The poet’s wildness must be “pure,” he wrote, the poet “wild with nothing to be wild about.” T. J. Wilson was delighted to have the essay, and he reassured Frost that it was “a perfect preface for the Collected, and a fine piece in itself, almost a poem in prose.”30

Frost was making plans for going to Florida for the winter, and was already scheduling lectures and readings in the South, when he received word that he would be awarded the Gold Medal “for distinguished work in poetry” by the National Institute of Arts and Letters at their annual banquet in New York on January 18. This meant he would have to hover in the Northeast for longer than usual.

Soon after the award ceremony, he set off for Key West, where he joined the Morrisons at the Casa Marina Hotel. From there, he returned to the Miami area, where he stayed with Hervey Allen, whose company he found highly entertaining. Allen was a voluble, large man with a huge income from his best-selling novels, such as Anthony Adverse. Frost’s friendship with Allen, whom he first met in 1927 at Bread Loaf, would figure increasingly in his life in Florida.

Frost was joined in early February by Carol and his family, who rented a house near the Allens, in Coconut Grove, for two months, through March. It gave Frost considerable pause to see, and fully understand, the extent to which Carol was suffering from psychological problems. Subsistence farming in New England had done nothing to bolster his ego, and he felt embarrassingly dependent on his father, who continued to pay for such things as this winter trip to Florida. Carol was, in fact, eager to abandon the life of a Vermont farmer and move to Florida, where he imagined he might be able to break free of what felt to him like overwhelming ties to his father and his past. Somewhat disastrously, he also hoped to pursue a career in writing poetry.

After the Morrisons left for Cambridge in early February, Frost became increasingly gloomy. Hervey Allen grew quite panicky about his condition and suggested that his other houseguests, the poet Paul Engle and his wife, Mary, take Frost by seaplane to Cuba. Grimly, Frost acquiesced. “We went down to Camaguey, saw several cities besides Havana and plenty of sugar cane and royal palms,” he wrote to Lesley. “The land is rich: the people are miserably poor. Everywhere beggars and beggar-vendors. We saw one great beach to beat the world and on it a car with a Vermont license which on inquiry proved to belong to a friend of yours, the head of the art department at Bennington College.… I am not much on foreign parts.… To me the best of the excursion was the flight both ways in the big Pan American plane and especially the swoop and mighty splash into the bays on arrival.”31

Frost wrote to Lesley in late February about Carol’s condition, which seemed to be improving, although he worried generally about the survival of his son’s family: “Carol came down perverse and surly, but he improved on being let alone. Or so I imagine. I have played cards with them [Carol, Lillian, and Prescott] six or eight nights and had a couple of long rides with them. They have been fishing on their own considerably. They are not lucky so far in life. They catch no fish. The mongrel dog has just brought forth eight more … mongrel pups for them to drown. Nobody else’s experience profits them the least. I told them they couldn’t take care of a bitch. I couldn’t.”32

Frost returned to Cambridge in March, although he soon traveled to his old hometown of Lawrence to give a series of lectures. In April, he read his poems at the University of Iowa, where he visited both Charles Foster and Norman Foerster. The latter was host of the event, and he incurred the wrath of Frost for scheduling the reading in a room that held only three hundred people. The place was so overflowing that Frost had to fight his way to the podium; after the reading, he vented his frustration to Foerster, demanding, “Who do you think I am, a rural schoolteacher that nobody wants to hear?”33 Foster, in his notes, recorded this impression: “Frost highly irritable, though always interesting to hear.” He discerned “a look of exhaustion in his eyes, in his voice,” wondering “what pressures he must be under.”

Though obviously exhausted, Frost pressed on to visit the Bartletts in Colorado, then on to further lecture assignments in the West. It was May before he arrived back in Cambridge. Much to his surprise, there was a letter awaiting him from President Conant of Harvard, inviting him to become Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellow—a two-year appointment invented specifically for Frost and paid for by a number of Harvard alumni who called themselves the “Friends of Robert Frost.” President Conant later recalled that he noticed some reluctance in Frost about accepting this position, a feeling that to get involved in another responsibility might not be the best thing for him. Frost had, of course, been attached to colleges and universities for many years. It was, perhaps, time to break free.

Aware, however, that several friends had gone to considerable lengths to create this position, Frost decided to accept it. His misgivings are nevertheless evident in the letter he wrote to Conant, wondering if he were really “fitted for the duties of a fellow.” He felt free to express his general anti-academic bias: “I am a peculiarly advanced case of what I am, good or bad. Much of education in school I have never believed in. At the first serious suggestion of my pretending to Latinity or any other kind of scholarship I am struck as school-shy as in the nineties when I fled uneducated to the Philistines. What has brought me back in and partly disarmed me is the kindness the colleges have shown my poetry. I find myself even anxious to be useful to them in requital.”34 Nevertheless, he did accept the appointment, especially since Conant had made it clear that there were no formal duties attached to it. It was merely hoped that Frost would occasionally meet with students and offer public lectures now and then.

That summer, Frost returned to Bread Loaf, “teaming up” (as he put it) with Louis Untermeyer to teach a class in the criticism of poetry. He also bought the house that would remain his summer home until his death over two decades later: the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, two miles from the Bread Loaf campus. Mrs. Noble had been renting the farm to faculty members at Bread Loaf for several years, and she was willing to sell it. The property delighted Frost: a small, wood-frame farmhouse on just over 150 acres surrounded by the Green Mountain National Forest. The privacy of the place was perfect: the gravel drive leading to the farm was itself over half a mile long, so that nobody would stop by accidentally. There were open fields behind the house, with an astounding view of the mountains. A few minutes’ walk uphill, on the edge of the woods, was a self-contained cabin with a living room, a bedroom, a bath, and a kitchen. The stone fireplace in the living room was alluring, and there was a pleasant screened-in porch with dramatic views to the southwest across a meadow.

Frost knew that the Morrisons loved the farmhouse and would be happy to live there while he occupied the cabin. There was a phone in the main farmhouse communicating with the cabin—an early version of an intercom; Kay could cook the meals and ring Frost to come down. The three of them would form a unique clan. One friend remembers, “It was an odd but interesting arrangement. The three of them actually got along very well, and the house and cabin were close enough yet far enough apart so that everyone was happy. Kay would come up in the morning and work with Robert on his letters and arrangements. There was plenty of solitude for Robert, but when he needed company, it was there.”35

The proximity to Bread Loaf was a bonus. Over the years, a steady stream of young writers made the pilgrimage to the Homer Noble Farm and, often with their own manuscripts in hand, walked along the maple-lined path to the cabin, where Frost sat in his Morris chair, usually with a glass of iced tea in hand. But one Bread Loafer of this era registered the downside of a visit to Frost: “His love of conversation was such that you might go to visit him at eight, just after dinner, and find yourself listening to him talk until two or three in the morning. He would get wound up, and keep talking. It was marvelous talk, but there was a lot of it. Sometimes there was a little desperation there, as if a lapse into silence would have terrible consequences.”36

Frost returned to Boston in the fall of 1939, plunging headlong into teaching at Harvard. His single course was called Poetry. The first classes went well, but he soon developed a severe infection of the kidney that interrupted the term; indeed, he was forced to move temporarily into the Morrison home on Walker Street, where Kay employed two nurses to help look after him. He was also, as he readily admitted in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, suffering from depression.37

Having sold the house in South Shaftsbury, Frost was easily able to afford the Homer Noble farm. With his usual mania for real estate, he was also intent upon buying something in Florida, where he had been forced to depend on the hospitality of friends. His finances were more than ample for these needs, but he felt the urge for more security. He had, after all, a large family to think about.

A temporary financial boost came in the shape of one Earle J. Bernheimer, a wealthy collector. Bernheimer had been collecting Frost’s books and manuscripts since 1936, and he visited Frost at the Homer Noble farm in the summer of 1939 to ask if he might “rent” the little volume called Twilight that Frost had had privately printed as a gift for Elinor in 1894 (in an edition of two copies). He explained to Frost that upon his (Bernheimer’s) death, the book would be given to any library that Frost designated. The concept of “renting” a book for one’s own lifetime was a peculiar one, and Frost at first balked; he distrusted Bernheimer, but eventually decided that if the man would pay enough “rent” on the book, he was willing to part with it. For remuneration, he asked the collector to give a thousand dollars to each of his four children, and Bernheimer quickly agreed. To possess this one-of-a-kind object was a collector’s dream.

As winter approached, illness followed illness, and Frost wound up in Massachusetts General Hospital in the second week of the new year. It was a bad start to what would seem, in retrospect, a particularly dark year. Explaining his illness to Sidney Cox, Frost said: “I have been very sick largely we now think from some very drastic medicine that doctors tried on me for cystitis. I went crazy with it one night alone and broke chairs ad lib till a friend [Merrill Moore, who was a poet-psychiatrist] happened to save me.”38 Moore had stopped in to see Frost, quite by chance, and found him barely conscious in his apartment; he called an ambulance, and Frost was hospitalized for a week.

On February 1, later than usual, he left for Key West with Kay Morrison and her son, Bobby. They stayed as before at the Casa Marina. Kay was planning to remain with Frost for two weeks, to be replaced by Lawrance Thompson, who would look after the ailing poet for another month. Thompson, who taught at Princeton, had recently been named by Frost as his official biographer—a relationship that would last until Frost’s death, with many repercussions, not least of which was a three-volume assault on Frost’s character in the shape of a literary biography.

In the dining room at the Casa Marina, Frost encountered a soft-spoken, highly intelligent man in his early twenties. Frost had been standing beside the stone fireplace in the main dining room when the fellow approached and introduced himself as Hyde Cox, a Harvard graduate who had attended Frost’s Norton lectures in 1936. “I explained to him that I had inherited enough money from my grandfather so that I didn’t have to worry about making a living,” Cox recalls.39 He further explained that he had sought “real experience of the world” by hawking newspapers on street corners and taking other similar jobs around the country. He had been traveling for the past six months in a brand-new Chevrolet coupe, but recently a bout of influenza had laid him low, and he’d decided to recover by spending a few days at the Casa Marina.

“Mr. Frost took me on a long walk,” Cox remembers. “We talked well into the night, and found that we shared many experiences. I was, of course, four decades younger, but we were both at loose ends just now.” Cox was invited for breakfast the next morning, and Frost insisted that the young man call on him when he returned to the Boston area. (Cox lived on the north shore, in Manchester, in a magnificent house on the sea called Crow Island.) This friendship would continue until Frost’s death and would be extremely important to both men. Indeed, Cox became a surrogate son of sorts.

Frost also saw Wallace Stevens again at the Casa Marina, and they exchanged some teasing remarks. “The trouble with you, Robert, is that you’re too academic,” Stevens remarked. Frost replied that Stevens was, indeed, “too executive.” Then Stevens said, with mock horror: “But you, you write about … subjects.” Frost came back: “And you, Wallace, you write about bric-a-brac.”40 The fact is, these two major American poets of the first half of the twentieth century worked from such contradictory, even exclusive, aesthetics that neither could really read the other with much satisfaction.

Frost spent the rest of his time in Florida with Hervey Allen, who encouraged him to look for local real estate. Always eager to buy another house, Frost spent several weeks with realtors. After many disappointments, he finally agreed to purchase a five-acre plot of scrubby pineland in Coconut Grove. It was undeveloped land, so it cost only $1,500. There were some legal problems, but these were resolved within a few months, whereupon Frost would begin building two small, prefabricated houses there that he called Pencil Pines.41

*   *   *

One reason Frost determined to build in Florida was that Carol still planned to move there for good. The farm in South Shaftsbury had not been financially viable, and Carol had been forced to borrow more and more money from his father. Frost’s hope was that his son, who had acquired construction skills over the years, would supervise the building of the houses for him. This would provide a legitimate form of work and, of course, an income, a maneuver designed to increase Carol’s self-respect. Soon after taking possession of the land, Frost wrote eagerly from Boston to Allen, asking about the best places to buy lumber and other building supplies.

But Carol was in no position to build houses for his father, or even to maintain his own household. For many years now, he had been plagued by wild fears, anxiety attacks, and bouts of depression. He had grown increasingly paranoid over the years as well, complaining that his neighbors and friends were plotting against him. His wife’s health problems, which kept shifting (she was soon to undergo a hysterectomy), frightened him; he could not imagine looking after teenage Prescott by himself. On top of everything, the death of Elinor, who had been his protector for so many years, had cruelly undermined his confidence.

Frost was summoned to South Shaftsbury by Lillian in early October. She was going into the hospital for her operation and was afraid to leave Carol on his own with Prescott. Frost dutifully arrived, finding his son in a state of unusually deep depression. Having regularly experienced depression himself, Frost at once understood the seriousness of the problem. When Lillian explained that Carol had spoken of suicide several times, he grew alarmed.

He stayed with his son for several days, talking to him, often late into the night. Convinced that Carol had pulled himself together, he returned to Ripton. A day later, on October 9, he received a call from his grandson at seven in the morning. Prescott said that Carol had shot himself in the head with a deer rifle early that morning. He had been wakened by the shot, and had discovered his father sprawled in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor.

Prescott had, in fact, stayed up most of the night with his father, aware of the precarious state of his mind. But exhaustion had forced him to bed. When he heard the rifle shot, soon after dawn, he knew what had happened. With admirable cool, he had telephoned the police first, then his grandfather, then the family doctor. While waiting for his grandfather to appear, he had called a family friend, Floyd Holliday, to make arrangements to move in temporarily with that family while his mother was recuperating in the hospital. Frost later wrote to Prescott to praise him for his mettle: “Disaster brought out the heroic in you,” he said. “You now know you have the courage and nerve for anything you may want or need to be, engineer, inventor or soldier.”42

To Untermeyer, Frost bared his soul: “I took the wrong way with [Carol]. I tried many ways and every single one of them was wrong. Some thing in me is still asking for the chance to try one more. There’s where the greatest pain is located. I am cut off too abruptly in my plans and efforts for his peace of mind.” His son, he explained, had failed at farming and failed in his occasional attempts to write poetry. “He was splendid with animals and little children,” Frost recalled. “If only the emphasis could have been put on those. He should have lived with horses.”43

It had been a dismal decade for Robert Frost. The death of Marjorie in 1934 had stunned him, and Elinor’s death had nearly undone him. Now he would have to cope with the loss of a beloved son whose sense of failure in life he could not, despite his consistent efforts, undo. In his notebooks, Frost wrote, “Nature is chaos.”44 And now he had to find a way out of the chaos.