POETRY AND POWER: The Later Robert Frost

...nor did he stick at savaging, both publicly and privately, Henry Commager as a "Red" when, in 1947, in a once-celebrated article, the historian assaulted the equation, already hardening into ideology, of "loyalty" and supine conformity...

...This is the only world Rudolph has ever known, at least professionally, and so he's more insular in his view of it and fonder of its peculiarities...

...And in the film's penultimate scene Geraldine Chaplin announces to Carradine from off camera, "I'm naked now," whereupon the shot cuts away to a frontal view revealing that she is indeed...

...From the General to Kennedy was an easy leap for this deep-dyed hater o f Roosevelt, the New Deal, the "welfare state" and other insidious alien conspiracies to subvert American character and manifest destiny...

...Speaking on "American Civilization" at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he observed that he would not speak on it . . . he was American Civilization...

...He had come to lecture at a university where I was teaching, had heard somehow that I had had conversations with Frost--about anarchism, of all things, and other matters--in the late '40s...

...at an international writers' conference in Brazil because . . . there would be other writers there...

...jectness were among the bewildering array of faces he wore--weapons, it might be said, in the arsenal of a man who always "had his way...

...Do you see these scars...

...The mortal enemy of the welfare state accepted for years a substantial monthly payment from the collector Bernheimer in exchange for various literary items, an arrangement on which Frost defaulted though he went on cashing the cheeks...

...Archibald MacLeish, came to read his work and then at the height of his reputation, blocked out some of the limelight which until then had shed its radiance on Frost alone...

...As for MacLeish, or Carl Sandburg, or anyone else who dared share billing, well, Frost made no secret of his condition for going anywhere, doing anything, that he be "the whole show...

...Grief--and he suffered a terrible bereavement, a kind of madhess--was not his only emotion or even, on tile evidence, his principal one: he was tormented that in her waning hours she d i d - n o t call himto her bedside, nor offer to "forgive" him for the anguish he had brought her...

...probably would have been The Sound ot Music all over again...

...The passion--the l u s t - - for acclaim, feeding on itself, was boundless...

...a man who had once recognized excellence when he saw it couldn't be wholly mad nor wholly a traitor, could he...

...What can be said for Frost the man is said...

...where tributes are possible, tributes are rendered...

...You have to play on some central action, or some view of the action, that recurs again and again with variations and glues all those fragments of scenes together...

...Like Beard, who became an isolationist (or "continentalist") between 1934 and his death in 1948, Kolko regrets the extent of U.S...

...or that he could be, and at times was, devious, dishonest, a liar and blackguard and fraud...

...His powers as a poet were declining-had declined (indeed his avarice seems to have swelled as his powers sank...

...or that he could, and often did, behave with the mindless cruelty of a spoiled child to friend and enemy alike...

...Kolko is a policy-oriented historian particularly concerned about matters of economic motivation and political responsibility for those historical actions which have shaped the world we live in...

...They take hold of us and ,won't let go...

...In any case I notice such things and had noticed none on him...

...Read aright," as Frost would say, they are not the folksy, homely verses of his popular reputation--they're neither one nor the other: Read aright, he is at best a dark and (as Lionel Trilling said to Frost's consternation) "terrifying" poet, a tragic poet...

...but what was to be made of the life as distinct from the art...

...Out of that sense of things the great poems came, and they yield cold comfort...

...It doesn't matter that Frost was enamored of war, perversely in love with war as the great test of a man's and a nation's character (though he himself never fought in one) or that he was (in my view) a benighted reactionary in his bones...

...At the conference's end, De Voto, referring to Frost's conduct toward MacLeish and toward the Morrisons, said: "You're a good poet, Robert, but you're a bad man...

...1~ower overseas during the twentieth century, and would like to see our interventionism vastly scaled down...

...And nothing so civil as radical disagreement with opposing perspectives: at a symposium at Kenyon College he refused to follow Harold Laski to the podium though he was willing enough to follow the elder Robert Taft - - a f t e r swallowing ~his disinclination in the first place to participate in any symposium...

...As if that weren't enough, he went on baiting and insulting MacLeish unlil his devoted old friend Bernard De Voto felt compelled to cry him down...

...but contrition, humility, abI IIII SAUL MALOFF i$ the author of Happy Families and most recently, Heartland (Scribner' s...

...I must have looked away and mumbled something inaudible...

...True, he wrote his okd friend Louis Untermeyer, also present at Bread Loaf and also greatly distressed: "I've .been crazy for the last six months...

...and, true, he wrote De Voto that he was "a had bad man...

...In a related way, though MacLeish was the prime mover in obtaining Ezra Pound's release from St...

...Don't have the spunk to stand up like men and say what they are...

...Suddenly, without the least preparation, he asked "Do you see these scars...

...These are the glory y e a r s , with Frost, his reputation secure, on his way to becoming his legend--the good gray poet, our national bard, uncrowned laureate and revered sage in his favorite disguise as hard-scrabbled Yankee farmer and hayseed philosopher...

...flourishes are added to brushstrokes ~r plausible, and sometimes even when they are not...

...Commonweal: 217 or that ,his surviving son ~vent mad and killed himself, that a daughter went mad, and that another daughter (outrageously) "blamed" him for those catastrophes...

...Thompson, of course, knew this, and Winnick knows it...

...Accordingly, throughout MacLeish's reading Frost created a nuisance, rustling papers, making insuiting remarks about the quality of his rival's verse which were audible to the audience as well as to the reader, and finally--in the event that not quite all eyes were upon him--striking a match and setting fire to a batch of papers and then beating out the fire and waving away the smoke...

...BOOKS THE BEARD-ING o r GABRIEL KOLKO MICHAEL KAMMEN Main E r a ' r e n t s in Modern Ameqfleaa History GABRIEL KOLKOHarper & Row, $15 More than just the title of this book evokes memories of Main Currents in American Thought, an influential classic which Vernon Louis Parrington began in 1913 and published to wide acclaim in 1927...

...and, without waiting for the answer his demand was not intended to elicit, added: "They're what come of knowing Robert Lee Frost too well...

...Again, it is worth noting that his original judgment in the case of Pound (who was the first important champion of his poetry at a time when he was wholly neglected at home) that he was both crazy and a traitor was somewhat softened by his discovery more than thirty years after the fact of a favorable review which Pound had written in 1914 of his first significant book, published in England...

...A scourge of the dead as well as the quick, he called Shelley a "darn liar" when, while Visiting Oxford, he was reminded of the poet's expulsion from the university for writing an atheistic article which he vigorously denied having written...

...Beyond a doubt he wrote more than a few such "little" poems and they're impossible t o g e t - r i d of...

...save for a rare miracle, the spasm of a dying poet, nothing that he wrote in those years will endure, and much of it is no more than the dimmest echo, or merely bad: a kind of talkativeness where a great talker, faintly recalling the old manner, runs on not hearing the absence of the slow, somber, deep, powerful music .,and not noticing the awkward embarrassment of his audience...

...In an important, and I think decisive, sense none of it matters in the least...

...He almost declined a State Department invitation to represent the U.S...

...or that he was a vain, selfish, greedy, garrulous old man, an egotist of megalomaniac proportions...

...Is it...

...These three scenes plot the course of an arc that passes through many other scenes as well turning the film around,.literaUy changing the attitude we seein it 180 degrees...

...About Frost's officially-sponsored trips abroad there is a strong sense that he thought of himself as a visiting head-of-state bound on a mission of the gravest and most delicate portent...

...But grandiose pretensions are always absurd and sordid...

...the great tests of character are enacted on a smaller, more modest scale...

...Between grapefruit and shrimp cocktail I glumly told my tales as Thompson nodded his head---sadly, I thought...

...I haven't known what I was doing . . . . Do you think I am still living in this world...

...and cut dead William Faulkner, the other 1 April 1977:216 American representative, because . . . he was there, and seen to be there...

...Unfortunately, however, Altman's antic, vignette style is suited only .to Altman's own, icier view of such a world...

...of getting too close . . . . ") What are we to make of all this...

...468...

...the flood of evidence rules otherwise...

...17.95) the time of his wife's death he was casting a long backward glance, not at fond memories, but ever the darker side of his life...

...When Keith Carradine's maid (Sissy Spacek) strips to the waist to do the vacuuming, the whole scene is played from behind...

...Like Parrington, Gabriel Kolko is Harvard-educated, a disaffected Populist, and argumentatively selective in his choice of materials, themes, and critical analysis...

...ually turn around...

...Some time in 1959-60, not long .after the above incident, I met "Fhompson...

...But later, when a photographer he's also involved with (Lauren Hutton) strips as well to work in her darkroom, though she does so with her back to us she turns abruptly to face the camera once her top is off...

...Rudolph seems a bright and likely ladnbright and likely enough, anyway, to be uncomfortable merely duplicating Nashville...

...All the same it must be borne in mind that the period recorded here was a melancholy time in Frost's career in art, a sad fallingoff...

...There is every reason to suppose he meant just that...

...Rudolph does it by having his characters turn their backs on us and, by implication, on each other...

...Their friendship never having been in any sense amorous, the startled and shocked woman of course refused him and went on to say that, were ethe free and Commonweal: 215 both of them twenty years younger, the idea would still be no less out of the question...

...foreign policy...

...The first two volumes of Lawrance Thompson's immense biography contained much supporting evidence for the charge...

...He let it be known there was no point in his going to the Soviet Union if he couldn't see Khrushchev...

...Finally, only one thing matters...

...It does not matter, by this view, that he was a a God-damned son-of-a-bitch...

...That's all I ask...

...Yet when his patron was forced by dire need to sell his collection at auction instead of bequeathing it to a library as he would have wished, Frost let it be known he'd been betrayed, failing the while to mention the payments and lying outright by claiming he'd made a gift of a particular item for which he had in fact been rather handsomely paid...

...the canonical poems are as memorable as any written in this century...

...Poor old Ezra...

...Don't spare me...

...Like Beard (~r in 1946 published "Grounds for a Reconsideration of Historiography"), Kolko is a revisionist whose thrust for fifteen years now has been to reconsider the conventional wisdom of modern American historiography...

...no more than did Chukovsky and Paustovsky...

...Tell me the truth...

...Unlike Altman, Rudolph didn't work his way into feature filmmaking through years of industrial films and TV work, and consequently Rudolph doesn't have Altman's jaundiced view of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general...

...So much for the nastiest, most ruinous of all itches, what his biographers call a "craving for recognition" and "a need for approbation that was almost insatiable...

...Ahkmatova, though he was taken to see her, meant nothing to him...

...Even more to .the point, however, Kolko is in many respects the modern incarnation of Parrington's better -known contemporary, Charles A. Beard...

...Until the previous day we had never met and, taken somewhat aback, I was not about to begin scrutinizing him for scars...

...Bereft, "abandoned," terrified, "in a reckless mood and a dangerous one left thus lying around loose in the world," he felt panic and behaved wildly, erratically, demanding that his well-married friend Katherine Morrison leave her husband (and his friend) Theodore Morrison forthwith ~nd marry him...

...A semi-personal note...

...As the film progresses, however, the characters grad...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Recalling her long punitive silences he took her final silence as a final reproach and punishment...

...He's like our Communists...

...Extreme as it is, this is no mere isolated instance of aberrant behavior on the part of a distraught man...

...The attitude Rudolph is trying .to turn away from is the cynical and ridiculing one that typifies Altman's own films...

...The sub-title of Welcome to L.A...

...And finally, like Beard, Kolko has enjoyed considerable academic influence through six widely read books, particularly The Triumph o~ Conservatism: A Reinterpretation o/ American History, 1900-1916 and The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954...

...Altman did this in Nashville by turning the coincidences in his characters' lives into a chain-reaction wreck, an endless collision of both automobiles and personalities...

...Elizabeth Hospital, Frost overcame his initial reluctance when the winds of opinion shifted and thereupon, happening to forget MacLeish's initiating and propelling role, claimed decisive credit for what could be made to seem a heroic intervention and act of mercy...

...Like Beard, too, Kolko is appalled by the manipulative political power which accrues to persons and groups having great wealth...

...John Kennedy worried that Frost might upstage him at his Inauguration...

...too decadent and "liberal to fight...

...So, seen aslant in the shadows we cast, are we all...

...But his is the usual assistant director's dilemma...

...The universe for Frost (he once said ,he was "prepared for any sadness in the structure of the universe',) was a dark, desolate, shelterless place marked by dialectic tension, composed of opposing forces, contraries--good and evil, lightand darkness, fire and ice...

...When officials asked him to go on a cultural "mission" to England he had first to be assured that the "demand" for him came from the highest levels in both countries~from Dulles and Eisenhower and the heads of Oxford and Cambridge--and with assurances of honorary degrees...

...But power was another matter: before power one bows "very low...

...The same deep flaw of the spirit that brought Frost to urge, pleadingly, of a White House assistant that he "needed all the honors he could get" reduced him to the cruelty of ridiculing De Voto on the score of his psychiatric history ( h e had followed the critic to Indiana University and met there a group of faculty members who made the mistake of speaking very highly of De Voto) and to say "curtly, in a sullen voice" to a lady who thought well of his longtime friend and authorized biographer since 1939, Lawrance Thompson, "He's a charming man, but charm is not enough...

...he had found a style more suitable to his true, fel!ow feelings for his characters, Welcome to L.A...

...To our exhaustion (but not his, as he was tireless in their pursuit), the record of the "later years" is sodden with the honors, both unsought and sought unashamedly, that he reaped: prizes, awards, medals, honorary degrees, more than twenty-five of them, including the two he coveted most, from Oxford and Cambridge, along with special lectureships at Amherst, Harvard, Dartmouth, the consultancy in Poetry .at the Library of Congress, and of course invitations to speak and read everywhere...

...the third, final, posthumous volume (co-authored and completed by Thompson's assistant R. H. Winnick following the former's death in 1973 and covering the years from 1938, which marked the death of Frost's wife, to 1963, the year of his own death) continues to amass further depressing evidence.* What Frost had in mind when he called himself by his proper name he didn't say and we can't know, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that at *ROBERT FROST: The Later Yeors, 19381963 by Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick (Holt, Rineher~ & Winston...

...which did not prevent him from continuing to bedevil h e r - - and capitalize on the Morrisons' affection, solicitude, and grave concern by making her the next best thing: his lifelong "devoted secretary," nurse, companion, confidante, in a word his "wife...

...This new volume is Kolko's most 1 April 1977:218...

...Without straining, the portrait might have been much harsher than it is-the authors, for example, aren't nearly critical enough of Frost's political pronouncements and other futilities majestically uttered in supreme confidence that the ancient seer speaketh eternal truths when really the tiresome old chap was babbling...

...The scene both of the self-accusation and the Morrison "matter" was the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, of which Morrison was Director~ Frost a member of the faculty...

...if the poet didn't quite succeed in capturing the whole show, it was a near miss and it wasn't for want of trying...

...is City ol the One Night Stands, and the lyrics of one of Baskin's songs for the film go in part, "Sure it hurts (still it feels pretty good) to be livin' in the city of the one night stands...

...He thanked Sherman Adams, who was soon to make vicuna a household word, for granting him access to the "ruler of the greatest nation in the world" (he had a peculiar affection for the word "ruler" and an eccentric understanding of "democracy" and groveled before Kennedy, who broke his heart by withdrawing into a cold presidential silence when Frost, returning from his talk with Khrushchev in Russia, reported, grossly inaccurately--and worse than that recklessly, dangerously--that the Russian had pronounced the U.S...

...Iconoclasm isn't the point of the biography though it is in part the effect...

...The film begins with Viveca Lindfors having her injured back massaged, and in the first half of the film almost every character has a key scene played facing away from the camera...

...and as no scrap of information can be overlooked by a definitive biographer, he asked that I have a meal with him...

...His stark truths went into his poems, even if sometimes he builded better than he knew...

...it certainly wasn't Thompson's original impulse when as a young man he was delegated by Frost to devote a considerable part of the rest of his life to the poet's life and Life...

...Like Beard, Kolko is equally interested in both domestic party politics as well as U.S...

...Kennedy, it will be recalled, was curiously sensitive to such charges, and it is worth noting that the episode occurred shortly before the "missile crisis" when the President and his courtiers appeared willing that we all burn by way of refuting the calumnious affront to his manhood...

...R OBERT FROST called himself a "God-damned son-of-a-bitch . . . . a selfish person who had dragged people roughshod over life . . . always a person who had his way, a God-damned son of a bitch and don't let anyone tell you different...

...His cunning maneuvering toward this end doesn't bear telling, nor does 'his campaign to exact an invitation, via his carefully cultivated acquaintanceship with Sherman Adams, to dine with Eisenhower (who finally asked him to a "stag party" at the White House...

...he repeated...

...the worry was justified...

...By the end Rudolph wants his whole movie to "feel pretty good" in that confiding, parenthetical way...

...That audience is aware of man's fallen nature, and it surely knows that nice people do not often write great poems...

...He said of his life once, at his best, in a solemn meditative moment: "All I've wanted is to write a few little poems it'd be hard to get rid of...