While I was traveling from Boston to Middlebury, Frost got on the coach at Rutland and I sat down with him and talked until we arrived at Middlebury. He was in a very congenial mood and talked about poetry, education, the arts, and writers.
He spoke about how men are drawn into life; how some are affected by luck and others by what he called "a lure." When I added that the success would depend upon the nature of the lure, he agreed, repeating the phrase "nature of."
He referred to people who are too much out in society as tending to become like "variorium editions" of other people. He said significantly: "You have to secrete in order to secrete."
He referred to "The Thatch" (West-Running Brook, 1928). He said it evoked a memory of England in what he called "those black pre-war days" in the black country (near Malvern Hill) where he lived in a straw-thatched cottage, at "Little Iddens," in the Dymock region, Gloucestershire. (See L.Thompson: Robert Frost I, pp. 445-56) At night he walked the floor in the dark room where the thatch fell to his elbows, and brushing by and trampling about, he frightened the birds that sheltered there, scaring them out into the strangeness of the night. This helped to settle his own melancholy—that some other living thing had to face its kind of blackness while he faced his kind.
He recalled things that had come as "favors": (1) Once he came upon purple cliff brake (Pellaea atropurpurea) on a dry cliff's edge over a favourite vantage spot. (2) Out of a great New England sunset an owl banked in the wind and spread itself across the window in a sudden Shadow and then fell away. (See "Of a Winter Evening," Saturday Review of Literature, April 12, 1958; title changed to "Questioning Faces" in In the Clearing, 1962.)
Education, he said, is "turning things over in my mind."
Of his poetry, he remarked: "I don't seem to have some big piece of resistance."
Those who get a great deal from reading and literature, he described as "people who know how to lend themselves to the great fears." Arts are "scares," because there is within us a need to have "scares." An incident or event scares us to some disciplined emotional response.
Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven" is the "escape of a person who needs to be caught."
Life is "a pursuit of a pursuit of a pursuit." (See "Escapist-Never" in In the Clearing.)
Of Longfellow—"He hasn't been thought thick enough. He is more like water color than oil."
Santayana's "high priest of Beauty is Truth."
Goodness and badness he called "pigments" in the arts.
He liked the philosopher-poet Santayana's little piece on Mercury. (Later Soliloquies, "Hermes, the Interpreter," 1918 – 1921. Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1967.) Santayana analogizes with "ulteriors or ulteriorities."
A poem, he said, gets started and develops from "ecstasy at some surprise in your mind," and ideas, emotions, words are already present which you hadn't suspected.
One of his locutions: "and near as I could come to tell you…"
Before mid-May, 1931, on a buoyant, sunny spring day, Nita packed a lunch and we drove the back way, via Poultney and Dorset, to South Shaftsbury, Vermont, to visit the Frosts.
Arriving at South Shaftsbury about two-o'clock, we phoned the Frosts from the General Store. Mrs. Frost answered and, after making sure that a call would not disturb Robert Frost, we headed for his farm off the main drag. At the center of South Shaftsbury town, we made a sharp turn by the General Store, and his turnoff was about a mile up a dirt road. We followed a cart path for a couple of hundred yards, and there, sheltered in a notch of the folding hills—hence "The Gully"—was the farm.
A large dog ran towards us barking excitedly. Small wonder for the farm was remote and cars were seldom seen. Frost came to meet us. As the porch is not high he seemed tall and broad. He greeted us with familiar cordiality and informal hospitality and appeared sincerely glad to see us.
Mrs. Frost greeted us inside, shaking our hands cordially, quickly putting us at ease. We passed through the dining room and into the sitting room. It is a long room with a southern exposure and with a fine large fireplace directly in the center on the northern side. From the walls hang J.J. Lankes' woodcuts and modern paintings, including a portrait of Aroldo du Chêne's head of Mr. Frost sculptured in 1920. The western wall is flanked with bookcases with full shelves. Cut in the western wall is a large window. A door opens into a northwest room against whose walls are many more bookcases and another fine fireplace. This, said Frost, was his study or work room. In the pauses of our talk, I felt how delightfully home-like it was here, and how persuasive the cordiality. Frost talked vigorously.
Conversation does not perceptibly tire him, but rather seems to enliven him. I had the impression ideas had been stored up for such occasions. One thing reminded him of another; he divagated; he skimble-skambled.
What happens to words in poetry? he asked. The difference between the words of prose and those of poetry consisted in the renewal of words. which took place when these words were aroused by emotion. In poetry there was a "suggestion of making" in the words.
A poem, he said, was like an "angle-iron"; suggesting that it had different slants and each reader took what he wanted from it. He praised Emily Dickinson highly, calling her poetry "gnomic." Emerson he referred to as "the father of them all"; he "commissioned more men to their work than any one else." He praised highly Emerson's "Uriel" and "Musketaquid."
Frost's conversational range has a wide arc. Tagore suggested the problem of internationalism. Though he acknowledged the significance of internationalism he thought each nation should keep its identity like the pigments on an artist's palette, each original, distinct, and inimitable in its own right. John Gould Fletcher and Ezra Pound were summarily dismissed as "incorrigible expatriates," and Masefield's name suggested the disappointing later work. Frost lambasted Sandburg's "awful sentimentality." Poe lapsed too frequently into "cacophonous" expression, but Longfellow, for whom Frost has a tender place in his regard, had strength. He told of slyly reading Longfellow's poems before a group at Bryn Mawr without his elite audience detecting whom he had been reading. Longfellow's poetry was applauded unwittingly.
After our talk we walked up the incline to his vantage-ground from a hilltop, where we looked toward Manchester. Woodchuck runways threaded the pasture grasses. On the west, looking down the valley, was the Taconics and, on the east the granitic range of the Green Mountains. At an opening on his 150-acre farm, we viewed a fine stand of white birches thick as arrows in a quiver, across the field.
When I returned from my walk, hot and sweaty, Frost was sitting in a chair in the front room. After a drink of Pepsi-Cola we went downtown to shop, first at Wood's Market, next at the Grand Union, then at Marshall's Hardware Store, and finally at Durfee and Waite's furniture store. We drove down to the Eastern State's Farmer's Exchange where he bought a couple of bags of grain, and to Concetto Paulino's greenhouse where he bought two boxes of petunias. He was interested in Paulino and in Mr. Parent, who had dropped in to buy some young plants. We stopped to look over the falls at the bridge when we were first downtown, and as he looked at the water thundering over and the whirlpool racing around below the falls, he wondered "how the banks could ever hold the rivers in leash."
As we passed the Congregational Church, he said, "I don't go to church but I look in the windows," (i.e., he knows what's going on inside the church—in religion). He praised Churchill; struck out at Stalin, whom he thought would probably wait patiently to get from the U.S. what others like Trotsky, for example, would get only by impatience. He was upset at Robert Dragon, who is supposed to plough his garden, because he goes fishing on the first sunshiny day rather than stick to his job. But he was amused at the Dragons who are having a big pre-wake celebration in anticipation of the death of the old man. The latter has been dying these many months.
I drove him up to the Homer Noble farm. At the turn-off, by the mail box, he got out to recover his rubbers and topcoat hidden in the wayside bushes. We fed and watered the chickens, fetched wood, hefted the bags of grain, and then went inside to talk. He had a stack of books and among these was T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
He first asked me to read and discuss it, but I deferred to him. He read here and there, especially from "East Coker," and what a job he did on it: He analyzed its structure, word usage, thought content, examining it closely. Certainly he made it seem like very inferior poetry—very decadent.
At 8:00 p.m. I drove down to the Homer Noble place, taking the Jesse Stuarts to meet Frost. The Stuarts were taking in the lay-out of the farmstead: the old barn, the house, and the narrow footpath leading up the lane to the Cabin, and the tall, lovely hollyhocks, the fireweeds, the button chrysanthemums in Frost's little flower garden by a wall that closes the entry to the lane to keep intruders' cars out. We stopped at the vegetable garden in front of the cabin, noting the electric wiring to keep the deer out, and we looked at the mountain view to the south and west.
Inside the cabin, Jesse Stuart plied Frost with questions. He asked about Frost's lecture trips. Frost said: "I call it barding around," and told of how nicely they treated him at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and at the University of North Carolina. About keeping engagements, he said: "I'm one of the most regular men who ever went down the pike." He appeared where and when he was supposed to. Said he'd get off the train in Grand Central to keep an engagement at the New School of Social Research and start to walk, zig-zagging with the changing street lights, until it got near the time for his appearance, then he would step into a taxi and complete the trip, arriving on the hour.
How much land did Frost have? About 200 acres. Stuart owned about six or seven hundred acres in W-Hollow, at Green-up, Kentucky. About property, Frost said "I'm dangerous to take anywhere. I want to buy what I see, and especially a lonely place."
What did Mr. Frost think of Milton? Here the ever-ready Frost made an expert parry. "I never bother with monuments as big as that," replied Frost dryly.
They talked of writing and Frost mentioned how he had seen Vachel Lindsay cutting out sections of his poems to satisfy an editor or because certain parts hadn't seemed to go well in a reading. Lindsay claimed he could tell how well certain sections work: "Nobody ever touches the poem for me."
"Do you use scrapbooks?" "No, I don't keep anything," said Frost.
They talked about health. "I'm tough," remarked Frost. Then he told of meeting a woman (now in her middle nineties) out in California who had known him when he was young. "I wasn't thought to be very strong," and this woman told him that the family hadn't thought he would live to grow up.
On going to England in 1912. Since England was cheaper to live in, he said: "What I went there for was to be poor—not to be literary. I was a wanderer in those days."
Of Edgar Lee Masters: "He was hostile to me; a dark, somber person."
Speaking of a writer's drive for fame (with Masters in mind), he said: "It's such a gamble of what's going to happen to a person in the end."
Of New York City. "l wear out very fast in it."
What of Yeats: Frost and Stuart agreed that the early Yeats' lyrics were better than the later poems. Frost thought that Yeats, like Masters, was a bitter man at the end. "Times he was in agony of silence," said Frost, and he referred to Yeats' saying, "All I'll remember is sweating blood and biting pencils"' in an effort to write.
Frost told how "The Lone Striker" had come out of personal experience. He'd been shut out of the mill, and he turned to teach in the district (ironically he said dee-streak) school. He told how in the early teaching experience for two year he had to teach thirty-five hours a week, how he arrived home and lay down for a couple of hours in a kind of stupor from fatigue. Since he was a beginning teacher they made him a slave.
Drove up to Homer Noble Farm to take Frost to dinner at the Waybury Inn. We talked for a half hour—Frost insisting—until after seven, then drove down to East Middlebury. He sat for a moment in the car peering ahead and then, as he got out, mentioned the Latin name of the flowering shrub in front of which we had parked a honeysuckle—which he'd been looking at. We had daiquiris, and he ordered a double order of shrimp. I ordered a lobster Newberg. Afterward, although it was 8:45, we drove up to Ripton village and then to Lincoln so he could look off from what he called his "balcony view." We doubled back and saw three deer in fine coats in the road. Probably they had been licking salt. As we drove along the wasteland before reaching the 'balcony view' he said it reminded him of Currier Bell and the Wuthering Heights country in Yorkshire. We agreed we liked the barren, wild moorland scenery. It made one feel a little "morbid." Since the day had been humid with little sunlight, it was a dullish evening but from the "balcony view," Mt. Abraham loomed up, as he said, rather "sullen." we could see its outline veiled in the misty dusk. Soon it was full dark.
Back at his cabin we were greeted by Sheba, the little schnauzer, who barked vigorously. It delighted Frost to find her there awaiting him. She had left the other dogs and somehow crawled into his cabin. It was now about 9:45, and we sat and talked until 12:30. Even then Frost was reluctant to let me go but I thought he shouldn't stay up longer, although he was growing more interested in what he was saying. He picked up a flashlight and accompanied me to the bottom of the lane.
During the evening he ranged widely. We talked about trees, birds, people, poetry, writers, his mid-winter illness, Washington, a new president for Middlebury (he suggested Dr. Frank Piskor of Syracuse), the Elinor Frost scholarship at the English School; a new paperback edition of his works.
Trees:
Our forests were not ruined by the big lumber industry so much as they were by fire and insects, especially insects. He said it took him a little time to discover the truth of this. He referred to the white pine as "one of the great American trees."
Nationalism:
He was positively exuberant when he said of our continental map: "You've got to have a good map and we've got a beauty." "What a beautiful cut to it," and he indicated the three thousand mile sweep from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The ugliest map was the present partition of East and West Germany. "There is one, not two languages," he said. "There is no American language; there is only English."
On Expatriats
He didn't think much of Henry James, nor Pound and Eliot leaving their own country. William James he thought greater than Henry.
On Thoreau and Emerson:
"You mustn't praise Thoreau to destroy Emerson," he said, thinking of the popularity of the former these days. But he liked Thoreau. "I have been thinking about Thoreau all my life."
On Melville:
Called him "muddle-headed," citing Redburn, Pierre and Billy Budd. Also referred to him as "an unhappy thinker" and "frustrated." "Everything searched for and not found," he said at one point, which indicates Frost believes the ultimates could be realized without Melville's agonizings and uncertainty. Life might be unbearable, he seemed to be saying, but you've got to know what to do about it. He didn't like the symbolism in Melville's books; he did like the picturesque. And he thought Melville's "Mosses" review of Hawthorne's tales a wonderful thing. Of Billy Budd, he said: "I can't bear it, it's too sad. I never finished it."
He retold the episode of Redburn and Launcellot's—Hey, and then, by way of parallel, he told the story of an Upstate New York hey who once, sailing to Russia, wanted to see the Czar, and, although it was said to he impossible, did see him and held out a closed hand to the Czar which worried the guards who thought the boy might have something dangerous in his hand but when he opened it there was an acorn, a future oak for the Czar. And the Czar showed him St. Petersburg. How different this was from Redburn's unpleasant experience in Liverpool, Frost said.
Reading:
Praised Palgrave's Golden Treasury. This has been one of his mainstays.
He said he had learned something from Vergil's "Eclogues," but didn't say what it was.
On the Study of Poetry:
"Happy is the man who enters poetry without having had to study it."
On the writing of Poetry:
He said that no critical commentary he had ever read had helped him in his writing. Sherwood Anderson used to say the same thing.
He told of the girl who had appeared after one of his lectures at Boston College sat down beside him and said, "Now I want to talk to you for a half hour about poetry." "Well, go ahead," he said. "What do you want to know?" "I want to know where the frustration comes in," she said. "If that's what you want to talk about I've nothing to say," and, at that moment, a priest came up and apologized for the girl's appearance. "She shouldn't be here," he said. "But," Frost said to me, "I've never been frustrated. Frustration isn't part of it. I picked up things in my reading." And he quoted a few: from the witches' scenes in "Macbeth"; from "Kublai Khan" ("Whert Alph, the sacred river, ran") which he came upon, he thinks, as an epigraph in one of Rider Haggard's books (probably King Solomon's Mines), and Keats' "magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
Of Other Poets:
He praised Robinson's "Mr. Flood's Party" with more enthusiasm than I have heard him show toward other poets for some time. He also said good things of Pound's early poems.
When I mentioned the honors John Kennedy's administration had showered on him, he said that when Longfellow visited the Senate accompanied by Sumner, it recessed and gathered around him. And one mustn't forget how Teddy Roosevelt helped Robinson.
"What's the difference between T.S. Eliot and myself?" he asked, rhetorically. "Eliot's churchly, I'm religious." And he laughed.
Poetry Friends:
Referred to Henry Hayford and then to Philip Booth, now at Syracuse, saved from Wellesley, but he had heard Booth was giving all his attention to student papers and he thought this was a waste of precious time.
Two Things in Life:
On Leaving Things:
He had left a couple of shrimp on his plate. When I called this to his attention, he said: "Get so you can bear to leave something. I'd rather waste it outside than inside."
On Conservatism and Radicalism:
"A conservative is one who believes in continuing his stock. A conservative breeds true; a radical breeds new."
On Idealist and Realist:
"I'm not an idealist, I'm a realist."
Money Matters:
Said Choate School paid him $1500 for a recent visit. Apparently Paul Mello of Pittsburgh put up the money.
Said he got 20% on each copy sold of In the Clearing. The sale will probably go over 100,000; hence Frost should receive about $80,000, which will be paid him in annual installments by Holt, Rinehart, Winston, his publishers.
Said "Al" Edwards, the Rinehart president, was worth three or four millions.
Degrees:
He let the University of Michigan know they ought to give him a more advanced degree than an M.A.— the first and only one he received. They ought to take it back if they weren't willing to give him another. So lately, in June 1962, the University obliged. While there he heard Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, address the students and make the idealistic proposal that if war becomes imminent the big warring nations like the Soviets and the USA should combat by token forces—by 'champions', as it were—a very romantic notion, Frost thought. It's poetic but idealistic. J.F. Kennedy is probably in back of it and suggested it to McNamara. "I thought it sounded familiar," Frost said; "then I remembered it had been done before—in the Bible—in the story of David and Goliath." This illustrates Frost's penetration. His insights come from taking time to think about things; they don't simply glance off his mind.
Education:
Had heard since President Harold Taylor left Sarah Lawrence the curriculum had changed. The word now was 'permissive.' Students were permitted, not given free hand in electives.
The Kennedys:
Said he thought there was a rivalry between the Kennedy wives in their social activities. At the inaugural (1961), Mrs. Robert Kennedy tried to get him to ride in their car but he had promised Stewart Udall he would go with him. Then Mrs. Robert Kennedy invited him out to Hickory Hill, McLean, Virginia, where the Kennedys lived in a lavish place. Mrs. Kennedy took him around the place, and he told her, "This is for the overprivileged." He was glad he hadn't gone to one of the latest parties that turned into a wild one with the Hollywood stars living it up. He referred to this party a couple of times.
Illness:
Described his recent illness, saying it started as most of his do with 'chagrin'—chagrin at something people had been saying to him about his recent success which they described as due to popularity. It hadn't occurred to them, he said, that I had been successful now for sometime. He was stricken at Agnes Scott College, taken down to Coconut Grove, and nearly died, as he said. The newspapers kept asking: "Is it terminal?" He told of a doctor standing by in consultation, saying, "Pneumonia is an old man's friend." "That's the last I saw of that doctor. The statement was a little indiscreet. But I wouldn't be living if they hadn't shot me full of penicillin. The only thing penicillin is really effective against is the pneumoeuceus."
Frost talked very objectively about death. This time he had thought he would surely die.
De Voto and Frost:
Once he mentioned Bernard de Voto's saying to him: "You're a great poet but a bad man." "What did he mean by this statement?" quizzically inquired Frost. He didn't understand it. It had something to do with Kathleen Morrison, he thought, but he didn't explain. I find Frost very self-revealing in this important relationship. Did De Voto think Frost had, in attaching himself to Kathleen Morrison, taken her away from either him or her husband? But why did De Voto think this? What designs had he in the matter? Under the circumstances Frost's reaction is nothing less than astounding. Was he trying to cover up for an illicit relationship, or was he simply ingenuous?
He also said Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. told him: "What I learned from De Voto was what you had taught him."
Good and Evil:
Said he had been reading Bohme—Jakob Bohme, a 16th century German shoemaker and mystic, who believed in the creative value of the conflict of opposites, which he saw producing a new unity. Frost was interested in the doctrine of contraries, or conflicts, and apparently accepts a dualistic concept of good and evil. "What is evil?" asked Frost. "It is inherent in things." He illustrated that the most evil thing would be by referring to the high priests and the coming of Jesus. They condemned him, not recognizing the advent of a new order. In the failure of the high priests to see the possibilities in Christ's coming he seemed to think there was an element of evil. While in Israel (early in 1961) he had seen a knot of old Jewish priests in the street and he had thought to himself that here were living examples of the kind of people who would not have been in on the change when Jesus Christ appeared on the streets of Jerusalem.
This is a new notion to me of the source of evil: in a failure of insight to be in on the new development, the change, the possibilities in things.
Some people had criticized Frost's statement in A Boy's Will ("Into My Own")—they will not find him changed from him they knew only more sure of his truth. What did he mean by this statement? It only means that he would be true to the things he saw as he experienced life. It didn't mean fixity, that he had made up his mind once for all and would therefore remain inflexible. He said he didn't quite agree with Emerson's consistency doctrine. He remained consistent to some directional feeling but it was hard to explain.