(paper) The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography of Robert Frost(1986)

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(paper) The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography of Robert Frost(1986) - Donald G. Sheehy

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American Literature, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Oct., 1986), pp. 393-410

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Thompson의 프로스트 전기를 읽은 후 당시 소회.

"프로스트 시의 아름다운 깊이와 개인삶 역정의 다소간 차이로 좀 혼란스러워졌다고 할까, 이걸 어떻게 감당해야 하나."

그 잔향이 아직도 남아있다 싶었는데, 이 paper를 통해 Thompson이 왜 그러한 방식으로 전기를 썼는지 그리고 프로스트의 다소 어두운 측면에 대해서 좀 더 공감할 수 있게 되는 듯. 

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The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography of Robert Frost

DONALD G. SHEEHY

Queens University, Kingston

The ultimate problem of a Frost biographer is to see if the biographer can be enough of a psychologist to get far enough back into the formative years of Robert Frost to try to understand and explain what forces were operative, back there, to create the curious forms of neurosis which Robert Frost had to struggle with throughout most of his life.

Of course such an approach, on the part of the biographer, is dangerous-very dangerous.

-Lawrance Thompson, notes for a lecture to the Literary Fellowship in October I968

I

THE life of Robert Frost is among the most amply documented in American literary history, and yet more than twenty years after Frost's death it remains controversial. At the center of the dispute stands not only the poet but his official biographer, Lawrance Thompson. The publication of Robert Frost: The Early Years in I966, followed by The Years of Triumph in I970, effectively shattered the popular image of Frost as kindly New England sage, prompting a pervasive sense of the poet as "monster." Indeed, Frost's advocates have argued that the official biography represents nothing less than a deliberate character assassination. A reading, however, of Thompson's unpublished, and until recently restricted, journals sheds new light on his biographical strategy and intent.1 Doubting his own objectivity and troubled in his relation with Frost, Thompson developed a psychological paradigm influenced significantly by Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth. Concealed within the traditional chronological narrative of the official biography is a case-study of the poet as neurotic.

Frost posed a particular problem as a subject for biography. A history of uneasy alliances between Frost and a succession of biographers including Gorham Munson, Sidney Cox, Robert Newdick, Louis Mertins, and Elizabeth Sergeant reveals Frost's vacillation between intimacy and antipathy. His profound distaste for personal biography and discomfort with meticulous research into his past reflect Frost's strenuous objection to being "Boswellized." He warned Sidney Cox, for instance, "either the ideas for the ideas' sake and without the dirt and dross of me or no book at all ever while I live or after I die."2 Nevertheless, Frost revealed in conversation with each biographer intimate details of his life.

The politics of Frost biography were complex. His autobiographical reminiscence and the biographer's research, Frost suggested, should serve merely to prepare the biographer to see in the work the development of the poet's ideas. To Louis Mertins he observed, "I want them to read and study my poetry, not myself. I'm transient-incidental. It's my poetry that counts."3 Assuming artistic license in telling his life, Frost did not wish to have his stories verified. Robert Newdick worked under Frost's terms, privately compiling a list of "things that must be passed over," but died before completing more than a fraction of his project.4 In late life and long after the appointment of Thompson as official biographer, Frost cooperated with Sergeant on a biography which, in its focus upon the poetry and idealistically rendered outline of the life, most closely fulfilled, I believe, his conception.

In his recent Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, William H. Pritchard grants Frost considerable license. He allows the life to go poetically by arguing, often persuasively, that the rhetoric of Frost's retelling of his life is a natural extension of the poetic mind at play. As a corollary, however, Pritchard liberates the poet's behavior from the context of social or moral responsibility. Pritchard avows that he will refuse to engage in what he considers pointless speculation about Frost's motives for behavior, but his account occasionally verges on rationalization and apology. While Pritchard acknowledges Thompson's official biography as an invaluable repository of factual information, his argument and method are predicated on a rejection of Thompson's interpretations as reductive, literal-minded and finally mean-spirited.

As corrective notes in the margin, Pritchard's work is a welcome addition to the body of Frost biography. While Frost's advocates have good reason to find such reeval‎uation long overdue, it is fruitless to follow Donald Hall's lead, in his review of Pritchard's book, and dismiss the official biography as Lawrance Thompson's "muffin-headed revenge." Rather this is an opportune time to reexamine Thompson's work, for it offers an insight into some essential problems of biography.

Twenty-seven years passed between Lawrance Thompson's assumption of the role of official biographer in I939 and the publication of the first volume of the biography in I966. The job had been offered and accepted under unusual circumstances. Years before, Frost had rejected a draft of a book by Sidney Cox, finding that Cox had been rendered rather too subjective by his long- standing affection for his subject. Gorham Munson, chosen by Frost as biographer on the basis of an article about Frost's "classicism," had published Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense in I927, but the book disappointed its subject. Robert Newdick's untimely death in I939 aborted a project with which Frost had already become disenchanted. Motivated partly by a desire to forestall other approaches, Frost invited Thompson, who had recently requested permission to begin a critical study of the poetry (published in I942 as Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost), to undertake a biography. By his own account Thompson demurred, suggesting that others, Louis Untermeyer and Bernard De Voto among them, were far better suited to such a task. Frost, however, argued that Thompson would be more objective. With some misgiving, but with understandable excitement, Thompson accepted the offer.5

In I939, Robert Frost was sixty-five and in the wake of the recent death of his wife painfully aware of his mortality. When Frost requested that Thompson not publish a biography until after his death, neither poet nor biographer could have anticipated that their conversations would stretch across more than two decades. Over those years, Thompson visited Frost frequently, spent summers on his farm, and accompanied him on a number of trips. He amassed thousands of pages of notes from conversation with Frost and kept a journal of his experiences as biographer. His patient research, which far exceeded of course what Frost had seen as Newdick's literary sleuthing, took him deeply into the poet's past. In short, circumstance conspired against the very objectivity that Frost had sought in choosing Thompson and brought them into a relationship far closer than either had expected. Such a relationship precluded the impersonal biography of ideas that Frost had originally hoped Thompson would write.

Critics of Thompson's biography have suggested that biographer and subject had become estranged by the end of Frost's life, and certainly the relationship had its vicissitudes. On a number of occasions, both seriously considered abandoning the project. Thompson was troubled by what he considered the excesses of Frost's self-interest at the expense of family and friends, while Frost feared, with some justification, that Thompson's pursuit of fact might blind him to the spirit of Frost's accounts of his life. Frost's zest in retelling his life was not matched by a zeal for accuracy or consistency, and thus Thompson, after hearing many of the same episodes recounted over a long period of years, found himself with a body of contradictory evidence. His attempt to reconcile Frost's accounts, both one to another and to evidence gathered from other sources, including his own experience of the poet, is the problem at the center of the biography.

Again, it would be easy to attribute all the flaws of the biography to personal animosity on Thompson's part; indeed he had some reason for discontent. Conflicts in personal and moral values aside, Thompson had suffered what he believed to be a personal and professional slight when Frost cooperated with Elizabeth Sergeant, and permitted her to publish Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence in i960.6 Thompson's detractors may argue that Frost foresaw the need to counterbalance Thompson's work; Sergeant's book was nonetheless an affront and one compounded by the fact that Thompson himself cooperated with Sergeant under her assurance that the work was a critical study of the poems and not biographical. Frost wrote a conciliatory letter to Thompson in I959 that offers a sense of the durability of their relationship:

It won't be long before you see me again to assert your right to get me right or wrong in our long continuum. It's odd. We've managed each other so well in a situation that has its perils. It does us both credit. (Listen to me taking my share of the credit.) I've meant to give you all the advantages, supply you with all the facts, and keep nothing back, save nothing out for my own use even in case I should ever write my own story. And I have left entirely up to your judgment the summing up and the significance. You've had a long time to turn me over in your mind looking for some special phrase or poem to get me by. By now you may think you have plucked the heart out of my secret and I don't care if you have. All is easy between us. We have sized each other up without disillusionment. I state the case thus for the purpose only of making it conclusive that any disturbance you felt from Elsie's [Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant] getting ahead of you in time was foolish. You are ahead of her in plenty of other ways.7

Thompson believed that Kay Morrison, Frost's personal secretary, had conspired in the episode, and while he never fully forgave anyone involved, he compromised sufficiently to review Sergeant's book favorably.

Against the charge that Thompson's work is an unmitigated assault based on personal dislike, one could summon sufficient evidence of a genuine, if not always acute, appreciation of the poetry and a sincere, if troubled, admiration for the man. Thompson was wary of his own subjectivity and the extent of his emotional investment in Frost. Faced with unraveling the complexities of his subject, he finally adopted a psychological paradigm not only to inform his chronological account but to alleviate his own doubts about his objectivity.

The touchstone for criticism of Thompson's biography has always been the lists of "vices" which constitute a major part of the Frost entries in the indices of the Selected Letters and the first two volumes of the biography. At first glance, the summary groupings of character flaws are indeed damning. The index to The Years of Triumph is most comprehensive and includes entries under such headings as "Brute," "Cowardice," "Fear," "Hate," "Jealousy," "Murderer, " "Myth-Maker," "Pretender, " "Rage," "Retaliation," "Revenge," "Self-Centeredness," "Spoiled Child," and "Vindictive." Taken out of context, such a list smacks of extreme prejudice. In the context of psychoanalytic theory, however, it could well provide chapter headings for a textbook study of neurosis.

In October 1965, Thompson made a lengthy entry in the journal he had kept since becoming Frost's biographer. He had by this time published the Selected Letters and written and submitted to Holt the first volume of the biography. Labelling the entry "Karen Horney on Robert Frost," Thompson begins by noting that he had recently made "an odd discovery of kinship between my approach to Frost's psychological dynamics and Karen Horney's approach in a book entitled Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Se/f-Realization." Horney, among the most prominent of neo- Freudian psychoanalytic theorists, had published her influential study in I950. As he read it, Thompson's excitement had grown: "[I]f it had mentioned Frost on every page it couldn't have come closer to giving a psychological framework to what I've been trying to say in the first volume of the biography." Beyond confirm‎ing his approach, however, the book offered "certain elements" which Thompson felt he might "want to consider while writing the second volume of the biography." Thompson's notes on those "certain elements," which form the remainder of the entry and cover approximately one hundred and thirty double-spaced typed pages, consist of a chapter-by-chapter outline of Horney's work with interpolated commentary on the pertinence of her arguments to Thompson's own profile of Frost. These notes would, however, provide far more than a clearer perspective for the second volume. After his reading of Horney, Thompson revised the first volume.8

II

Thompson had first revealed his own approach to "Frost's psychological dynamics" in the introduction to the Selected Letters. Suggesting in the introduction that his subject was a man of many ''masks," worn not least to protect ''excruciating sensitivities," Thompson believed that readers would be prepared by the letters for the unmasking that biography would eventually entail: "[When approached as the raw materials for biography, they [the letters] enable us to challenge the poet's explanations and to draw our own independent conclusions."9 Assuming the reader's familiarity with the "public" Frost, Thompson warned that the correspondence would reveal in the private man "periods of gloom, jealousies, obsessive resentments, sulking, displays of temper, nervous rages, and vindictive retaliations," and offered a brief biographical sketch by way of context:

Permit any excruciatingly sensitive young man to develop all the ambitions and drives of an incipient artist. Let early failures make him self-protectively proud and scornful of scorners. Add extra measures of physical illness, often inseparable from emotional and mental anxieties. Enable him to succeed at nothing he thinks important through years of more intensely ambitious effort than he would ever be willing to acknowledge afterward. Give him enemies enough; and even give his enemies reasons to mock him for his pride, arrogance, and failure, until he is nearly forty years old. Then suddenly grant him unexpected attention and fame-abroad. Let him come home to the vicissitudes of criticism and praise, but let him keep trying, striving, driving until he has earned a steadily increasing recognition and adulation. Under these circumstances anyone might become unbearably vain. Robert Frost did not; but his later letters indicate an unquenchable thirst for honor and glory, as though the ultimate balm of innumerable tributes could never quite heal the wounds he suffered in those agonizingly long years of failure and neglect.'?

Thompson insists, nevertheless, that the letters "should not seriously diminish our admiration of Frost's gifts, strengths, and attainments," noting that Frost was "the first to acknowledge his limitations as a human being" and suffered "recurrent self-doubt and intermittent lack of confidence." Frost, Thompson believes, was fascinated by the human capacity to integrate ambivalent forces of personality and, while stopping short of a belief in the "therapeutic value of ordering words," discovered in his art a means of bearing up under the "unbalancing emotional storms" born of his guilts and griefs.

The introduction to Robert Frost: The Early Years charts much the same course but on a very different tack, one clearly influenced by Horney's comprehensive delineation of neurosis. The dramatic "masks," with their implications of the self-protective deception of others, are absorbed into the larger process of what Thompson describes as "myth-making," which entails a large measure of self-deception as well. Accounting for the discrepancies in Frost's accounts of his life, Thompson describes Frost as "a good raconteur," who when troubled by the bare facts discreetly clothed them with fictions. This imaginative process, Thompson suggests, "caused him to mingle self-deceptions with little falsehoods; it even caused him gradually to convince himself that some of these fictions were genuine truths." Thompson notes that this process allowed Frost to use his life story to "dramatize the fulfillment of ideals he had cherished since boyhood.""11

Having thus outlined the symptoms, Thompson turns his attention to the cause: "Back in his childhood, his vivid and undisciplined imagination could easily have jumbled the opposed notions of who he was and what he wanted to become; could easily have confused the ideal with the actual."12 Thompson attributes Frost's sense of the "ideal" to the tales of heroes with which his mother nurtured him and finds in Frost's juvenilia a propensity to imitate his mother's self-protective retreats into imaginative sanctuaries. Frost's sensitive nerves were further tried, Thompson suggests, by the frequent estrangements between his parents and by his father's harsh and sporadic discipline, which was countered by an over-indulgence on his mother's part. The pattern of behavior which resulted-jealousy, sulking, temper tantrums, vindictive retaliations and self-pity in the guise of threatened suicide-indicates a fierce resentment of those responsible for shattering his childhood daydreams. It is a neurotic pattern, and one, Thompson believes, that persisted throughout Frost's lifetime.

Before moving from the incidents of Frost's early childhood in San Francisco, which he had used to document the origins of Frost's "trouble," to an account of the "first serious trouble" which accompanied the death of Frost's father and the family's move to New England, Thompson interrupts his narrative to note a subtle distinction: "Any idealist, young or old, may confuse the ideal and the actual in ways which are not necessarily dangerous even when they are self-deceptive. It sometimes happens, however, that such a person gradually needs to invoke supporting figments and self- deceptions which do become injurious. Many of Frost's later puzzlements, confusions, and predicaments seem to have developed in this way, as a consequence of his innocent childhood impulses which blended idealism, imagination, belief, and self-deception.

The movement from the "trouble" of childhood to the "serious trouble" of adulthood implies the development of neurosis. However, despite his growing certainty that Horney's theoretical profile perfectly suited his own observations of Frost, Thompson made a notation about his choice of euphemism over precision in describing Frost's "troubles": "So far as Frost is concerned, I don't see any reason for even bothering to use the word neurotic. The boundary-line between the healthy individual and the neurotic individual is too constantly fluctuating. We all cross that line into the neurotic realms, quite often. The only question is whether we are able to get back and recognize where we've been. Horney would say it's a question of knowing ourselves well enough to recognize an aberration as such" (Notes, p. I 543).

In her introduction, Horney had emphasized the significance of self-knowledge in the process of outgrowing a childhood obsession with self and moving toward a healthy self-realization. Frost, Thompson notes, "hated the term self-knowledge" and denigrated it by punning in Biblical terms that it was a form of masturbation. Thompson, at this point, is still uncertain about how well Frost "knew himself," whether his deceptions were truly self-deceptive to the extent that Frost could not recognize the actual from the idealized. Even as his conviction about Frost's neurosis grew and his will to diagnose strengthened, however, Thompson remained reluctant to adopt the term "neurotic."

In I967 Thompson made another entry in his notes similar to that on Horney's text while reading The Creative Imagination: Psychoanalysis and The Genius of Inspiration, a collection of essays edited by Hendrick M. Ruitenbeek. In his introduction, Ruitenbeek quoted from one of Freud's "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis": "There is in fact a path from fantasy back again to reality, and that is-art. The artist has also an introverted disposition and has not far to go to become a neurotic. . . . So, like any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and all his libido, too, to the creation of his wishes in the life of fantasy, from which the way might readily lead to neurosis. "14

Thompson's response bears directly on the strategy of his biography: "It's easy enough to call Freud 'too reductive,' there. But in Frost's case, there is sufficient pertinence to justify keeping Freud's view in mind. First of all, the whole point of my concern, here, is to write my biography of Frost in such a way as to avoid calling him a neurotic, or in such a way as to avoid using Freudian terms. But the simple fact remains: Frost was a neurotic, most of his life, and he did make some extremely useful demands on his own fantasies for purposes of creating literary art" (Notes, p. I704). Thompson had noted with some satisfaction in his entry on Horney that Merrill Moore, the psychiatrist and poet, had confided to him his own sense that Frost was neurotic (Notes, pp. I603- 05).

Horney entitled her introduction "A Morality of Evolution," and the phrase immediately stirred Thompson's interest. In laying the groundwork for her thesis, she suggests that under "favorable conditions man's energies are put into the realization of his own potentialities," while under inner stress "a person may become alienated from his real self." The neurotic person shifts the "major part of his energies to the task of molding himself, by a rigid system of inner dictates, into a being of absolute perfection," and "nothing short of godlike perfection can fulfill his idealized image of himself." This trend in neurotic development, she suggests further, "involves a fundamental problem of morality-that of man's desire, drive, or religious obligation to attain perfection." 15 This movement beyond clinical or theoretical implication triggers a remarkable response in Thompson because, he implies, it establishes a context for many of his own assumptions:

Notice that Horney isn't mentioning the obvious fact that such a procedure involves a tremendous amount of very successful and unconscious and unintentional self-deception. This is a subject which fascinates me. But later on, she gets to make the point that the neurotic person, unconsciously thus self-deceived, unconsciously (or consciously) becomes a deceiver. He is first of all unintentionally dishonest with himself and then he is dishonest with others. Now it pleases me to have her say that her concern here "INVOLVES A FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF MORALITY." Frost has troubled me on this point ever since I got to know him well. (Notes, p. I5I9)

Horney argues further in the introduction that the normal outgrowing of a childish obsession with self frees one to wish to give others the opportunity of unhampered growth. In response, Thompson marshalls his first biographical evidence against Frost by recounting Frost's negative attitude toward Elinor Frost's artistic aspirations during their courtship and early marriage and Frost's later failure to encourage sufficiently, in Thompson's eyes, the literary interests of his children. "Why," Thompson asks, did Frost insist that " 'One artist in the family is enough' "; he answers his own question: "It doesn't matter why, yet: we don't have enough framework to go on. But hang in there" (Notes, p. I 524). Horney would provide the framework.

III

Thompson's notes on the first chapter of Neurosis and Human Growth, "The Search for Glory," reveal that his original assessment of "kinship" between Horney's theory of neurotic development and his own conclusions about Frost had rapidly become an understatement. Horney's theory, as elaborated particularly through her first seven chapters, provided a perspective for the biography. Reading Horney had not only offered Thompson a means by which to organize his own perceptions of Frost but, more important, it prompted further and selective explorations into certain dimensions of Frost's character and consequently established a particular focus. In short, it formed the skeletal structure that underlies the chronological organization of the biography-a structure to which the indices refer-and profoundly affected the thrust of Thompson's biographical interpretation. Those events, situations, and characteristics which conformed to the pattern of neurotic development took precedence over those which did not, and the documentation of the "neurotic" Frost thus became the unspoken principle governing the biography.

Noting Frost's "preoccupation" with the word "glory," Thompson enters Horney's first chapter and discovers that the neurotic "search for glory" begins in the child's reaction to distorting elements in the family environment. Horney suggests that the people in the child's environment may themselves be governed by neurotic needs and responses that cause them to be over-protective, over-indulgent, intimidating, or simply erratic. Thompson notes that this completed portrait of an over-exacting father and an over-indulgent mother in the first chapter of the biography offers a prototypical example.

Horney further explains that a child's strategies for coping with anxiety-to rebel, to cling to the most powerful person in the environment, to shut others out of his inner life, or to withdraw emotionally-become extreme in the case of the child on precarious ground. In such cases, affection becomes clinging, compliance becomes appeasement. While these three motions (toward, against, away) are complementary in normal human relations, when rigidified they create a conflict which the child attempts to solve by making one of these motions predominant. Thompson concludes that "Frost's pattern involved all three responses: an affectionate clinging to his mother; a fear of beatings (which he got) from his father and a consequent attempt at compliant appeasement; but more than these, his 'conflict' caused him to 'keep aloof.' The first story he ever tried to write, he said, was the story of his running away to the Happy Valley where the Indian tribes were so nice to him" (Notes, p. I528).

As Horney proceeds to note that such a child has not had the chance to develop real self-confidence and thus develops a substitute for it, she concludes that "living in a competitive society, and feeling at bottom-as he does-isolated and hostile, he can only develop an urgent need to lift himself above others" (p. 2I). Having typed out this statement in upper case and underscored the last phrase, Thompson makes a significant note to himself:

I understand this quite well as an early phase of Frost's obsessive- compulsive "need to lift himself above others." The place which needs revision in Vol One, on this point, is when he started high school. At present you have it that he was driven by fear. Okay, don't change that. But say it was more complicated than that, and get this in. You already have it pretty much; just sharpen it. (Notes, p. I529)

The connection between the "Happy Valley" story and Frost's ''habitual responses" is made in the introduction to the first volume of the biography. The account of Frost's freshman year of high school is not only "sharpened" in the first volume but also plays a crucial role, as an example of Frost's desires for "self- vindication" and "retaliation," in the introduction to the second volume.16 The causes and ramifications of the "search for glory" and the need for vindication and vindictive retaliation are two of the "certain elements in the Horney book" which Thompson went to great lengths to "nail down."

The neurotic search for glory begins, Horney notes, in an imaginative self-idealization, made necessary by a defensive alienation from the real self, that provides a sense of power and significance. Eventually, she continues, the idealized self becomes more "real" than the real self, and the individual is driven to express it. Self-idealization thus grows into the more comprehensive drive, "the search for glory," which subsumes other elements: a need for perfection, a neurotic ambition, and a need for vindictive triumph (p. 24). Having vigorously underscored these elements, Thompson proceeds in his notes to find in them the sources of Frost's desire to excel in sport and in study at school, to win at all games, and, most significantly, to overcome Elinor White's resistance and "bend her to his will" in the course of their courtship. Leaping from Horney's assessment of the search for glory as indiscriminate and by necessity self-deceptive (in that the neurotic fails to realize that the shifting objectives of his determination to excel are all subordinate to the goal of excelling itself), Thompson concludes that the desire to excel also overrides moral compunction:

This takes us all the way back to San Francisco, and to the Washington Street gang, and to Frost's playing cat's paw for Seth Balsa. He was anxious to excel, to earn praise. The praise was so important that the share in the loot didn't matter. Nor did the moral values matter. He had been taught that stealing was wrong; but something more important had developed and if he had to steal to excel, then he was willing to steal. It didn't bother him then. Later, when his stealings began to take on protean changes, he kept right on stealing. Why? Because the moral elements were not so important as the desire to excel. (Note, p. I533) Thus, the "problem of morality" is redefined in a fashion that bears on the shape of the entire biography. Thompson is free to be judgmental without believing himself to be hostile.

The "drive toward a vindictive triumph" is, Horney suggests, the most destructive element in the search for glory because when closely linked to the drive for actual achievement its "chief aim is to put others to shame or defeat them through one's very success." On the other hand, Horney notes, "the drive for excelling may be relegated to fantasy, and the need for a vindictive triumph then manifests itself mainly in often irresistible, mostly unconscious impulses to frustrate, outwit, or defeat others in personal relations." Horney calls the drive "vindictive" because "the motivating force stems from impulses to take revenge for humiliations suffered in childhood." The degree of the strength of the drive, she notes, varies widely and most people are only fleetingly aware of it; for the neurotic, however, it becomes "the barely disguised mainspring of life" (pp. 26 -27).

"Frost's vindictiveness," Thompson notes, "was extreme: obsessive and compulsive. It was nasty, sometimes petty, sometimes ridiculous." After offering examples of Frost cheating at tennis and card games, however, Thompson realizes "that's not 'vindictiveness,' which means 'revengeful in spirit; inclined to vengeance.' The idea of revenge is implicit and basic in the usage of 'vindictiveness,' The word stresses the unforgiving nature of one who is animated by a desire to get even with another, for a wrong or injury done or imagined. And Frost was terribly vindictive in that sense. He liked to boast that he never forgot and never forgave a wrong or injury done him, and he always got back. His idea of forgiveness was that as soon as he had clobbered somebody for what somebody had done to him, then he could forgive him! There's a quaint definition of forgiveness" (Notes, p. I 5 36). Noting the similarity between the words "vindictive" and "vindicate," Thompson states that Frost got the "two words pretty close together," and reaches a conclusion: "Ah, the ways of striking back-for purposes of humiliating. 'The barely disguised mainspring of life'? Yes, in a sense, for Frost" (Notes, p. I537). The attention devoted in the biography to Frost's retaliations, both actual and poetic, for slights "real or imagined" is considerable.

This pattern of application continues throughout Thompson's note-taking. His conclusions range from connecting Frost's zest for and dread of public readings to "neurotic pride," to Frost's preoccupation with the concept of justice as a function of the insatiable "claims" of a neurotic, or the use of humor as a face-saving device of neurotic pride. Many of the crucial events of Frost's life are cited as evidence in the course of the notes, from his argument with his grandfather to his response to the suicide of his son. When Horney states that one of the elements of self-hate is self-doubt, which may result from "inner conflicts and may show in endless and inconclusive inner dialogues, in which a person tries to defend himself against his own self-accusations" (p. I45), Thompson suggests that many of Frost's poems can be "best understood as 'inner dialogues' held to resolve inner conflicts." In all, Thompson summons evidence to support a contention that Frost's attitudes toward concepts as varied as publicity, suicide, marriage, and religion are based in neurotic development.

IV

Certainly, Thompson had come to his reading of Horney's work with biases in his attitude toward Frost. Resentments had been harbored; anger suppressed. The facility with which Thompson accepted Horney's theory as a paradigm is no doubt partly a function of his own sense of vindication. Faced with what he believed to be the unenviable obligation to dismantle the "public" Frost, Thompson struggled to establish some perspective. Throughout the notes one discovers a continual attempt to maintain emotional balance, an attempt which succeeds fully neither in the notes themselves nor in the finished biography. Horney notes the necessity of sympathetic understanding: "When we realize how deeply he [the neurotic] is caught within the machinery of his pride system, when we realize the efforts he must make not to be crushed by his self-hate, we see him as a harassed human being, struggling for survival" (p. 209). Thompson's response is revealing:

[I]t is tremendously important to me as biographer of Frost. It's easy enough to get mad at that old bastard, but when you get down deep enough to understand that he was victimized by a whole set of drives which he couldn't control, then the value of explaining the complication is the value of treating them sympathetically and of giving him credit for having intermittently triumphed over his troubles as well as he did.

It's easy enough to drag out all the faults of anyone. The point is that here was a man who actually achieved a well-deserved and lasting fame as an artist-poet; a man who in spite of his flawed human qualities, was at times extremely lovable; a man who, in spite of his meanness to so many people, really went out of his way to help certain people-and did help them. I must keep reminding myself of this. In fact, I must put it right into the 'Introduction,' somehow. I already said it in the 'Introduction' to SLRF [Selected Letters of Robert Frost]. Why don't I take my bearings from that again, before I return to the problem of writing this Intro. (Notes, p. I6I4)

Thompson did indeed, "put it right into" the introductions of the first two volumes of the biography, but his strategy betrayed him. By portraying Frost as a neurotic, he evidently had hoped to emphasize the dignity of the poet's struggle against severe odds; his readers instead perceived a monster. In a number of lectures following the publication of The Years of Triumph, Thompson insisted that his readers be patient, that in the third volume, tentatively entitled "The Glory Years," Frost would win out in the end. Thompson did not live to complete the task.

Ironically, Thompson's conviction that Frost was neurotic had led to genuine sympathy, while the massing of evidence to support such a diagnosis suggests in the biography a deep animosity. Confused in his own feelings about his subject, he had assumed the role of psychoanalyst without fully articulating his intention or certifying, even to himself, his qualification for doing so. Thompson struggled quite sincerely, I believe, to balance sympathy against censure, but in that struggle he lost, as he had often feared, the sense of perspective necessary to either analyst or biographer.

A pursuit of objectivity had spawned a far more subtle subjectivity, which Thompson, in his enthusiasm for a schema for understanding Frost, did not fully recognize. He was not, however, insensitive to the dangers. While reading in the Ruitenbeek collection, Thompson found in an essay by Phyllis Greenacre a pertinent warning: "[T]he individual memory is a great remaker of events, modelling and remodeling them throughout life with an extraordinary plasticity to make the cloak of remembrance do duty for one occasion after another, to meet both needs and fashions- with all of the skill and less noise than a good tailor."'7 He paid careful heed by noting that the passage applied equally to "biographer and biographee": "The biographer can (in the present problem) be decoyed or seduced by his own 'illusion' that he has an accurate 'individual memory' of what Frost said and meant in a particular conversation which was recorded soon after the event. I've noticed that when I tell a story of something Frost told me years ago, I feel quite sure that I can quote him verbatim on a little phrase, because the phrase has such pertinence. But later, when I happen to be in my 'Notes on Robert Frost,' I frequently come across my first recording of the event-the recording made immediately after the conversation. And I find that there I quote him verbatim in a way which is quite different from my later quoting! Oh dear! There's the possibility that I'm wrong twice. I say, at the end of the preface to RFTEY that my statements and findings and interpretations should all be taken provisionally and tentatively. Well I can say that again!" (NOTES, p. I725)

The Poet as Neurotic The Official Biography of Robert Frost - Donald G. Sheehy.pdf

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Robert Frost A One Volume Edition of the Authorised Biography(1981) - Thompson Lawrance Roger, Winnick R. H.

Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874- 1915(1966) - Thompson Lawrance Roger

Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915- 1938(1970) - Thompson Lawrance Roger