The Frost Story

...That's the way Mr...

...For the fadeout—after the bard faltered over his windblown pagehe proposed some lines by Galway Kinnell: "And the managers of the event/ said Boys this is it/This sonofabitoh poet/is gonna croak./Putting the paper aside/You drew forth/from your great faithful heart/The poem...

...If such strong feeling preoccupies us at the expense of some of Thompson's achievements, it is proof that he has met the first test of biography: He has engaged us in a life...

...its unsettling nature is apparent in several of Thompson's notes to his edition of the Collected Letters...

...And our involvement with Frost is the more intimate because of the dramatic collaboration between the author—a younger friend and admirer who becomes, often against his will, a Recording Angel?and the poet, the Eminent Subject who has devoted his life to concealment yet has invited judgment upon himself by appointing an official biographer...

...He has expressed his distaste for the "Mount Rushmore" elevation of a laureate, suggesting in a 1966 Atlantic essay, "Frost: The Man and the Myth," that the 1961 ceremony would make a fitting climax for a film called The Frost Story...

...Even more devastating are the entries under Frost, where no euphemisms are used: Fear, Friendship, God, Hate...

...Thompson died in 1973, but his former graduate student, R. H. Winnick, has ably completed the third and final volume, Robert Frost: The Later Years 1938-1963 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 468 pp., $17.95...

...To a clergyman worried that the remark was "most welcome grist to the . . . Birchers' mill...

...Dickey was mocking not Frost the artist, but the "beloved poet [esteemed] for saying things we want to hear, for furnishing us with an image of ourselves that we enjoy believing in, even for living a long time in the public eye and pronouncing sagely on current affairs...

...Writing a famous poem "with one stroke of the pen" (a favorite fiction), Frost, she says, "was riding high on his Pegasus in that emerald dawn...

...My dismay, though, is somewhat puzzling: I never subscribed to the Frost myth and came independently to his poetry...

...Since Frost had been dead for three years, Dickey's toneharsh, angry, a little frightenedis rather puzzling, until we realize that he was reacting to the first volume of Lawrance Thompson's biography of Frost...

...The mask that I ignored or tolerated in consequence takes on a much more sinister aspect...

...Most of the accounts of his life that he authorized while Thompson was engaged in this project (which both agreed would not appear until after Frost's death) were inaccurate and adulatory...

...He speaks in Volume I of "the delicate problem" of Frost's "mythic utterances"the difficulties in obeying his warning, "Don't trust me on my own life...

...his son's wish to buy a rooster, against [E.A.] Robinson for being more popular than R.F...

...Then, on the Capitol steps, the venerable Robert Frost recited "The Gift Outright" after the glare of sun on snow kept him from reading the Dedication he had written for the occasion...

...Finally, at a poetry reading during the Cuban missile crisis, Frost admitted, "Nothing like that did I hear...

...This lock-step relationship lasted for 25 years (almost exactly the period covered in the final volume...

...Thompson grew to realize, however, that he would go on doing just that, and this knowledge breaks through his reticent, third-person presentation of himself in the biography as close friend, sometime neighbor and traveling companion...

...Despite the suggestion here of overkillby Thompson as well as by Frostthe text informaiton justifies the terms used...

...Frost, he writes, gave him complete freedom to arrive at his own conclusions: "He never asked to see any part of the biography...

...Noting that "merely," we see how little the celebration of the laureate had to do with poetry, even civic poetry...

...when in his last years Frost sought power in Washington, his anger had abated, but his mythmaking ranged far beyond publishing and academic circles...

...Thompson ascribes this "mythmaking" to Frost's acceptance of William James' statement: "We have a right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will...

...Returning in 1962 from a good-will trip to the USSR, he told the press, "Khrushchev said we were too liberal to fight...

...If only a word would stay put in Basic English," he mused...

...Indeed, some of the poet's admirers have claimed that it is an attack, and we cannot discount the possibility that the tensions and frustrations of the long association took their toll in some unintentional distortion...

...And Rage: Frost felt it against Amy Lowell, his wife, "his sister for being a radical...

...Excessive and unfair, one might think, particularly since this judgment was made on the basis of Frost's first 40 years, when he suffered enough deprivation, failure and humiliation to temper our response to his own cruelties and treacheries...

...But it is doubtful that Frost knew the extent of Thompson's independence, or understood the overwhelming thoroughness of modern biographical research...

...Yet he would have agreed with Russell Kirk's 1973 National Review speculations on "what great national blunders might have been averted had . . . Frost been appointed President Kennedy's privy counsellor rather than merely the performing poet at the . . . inauguration...

...Khrushchev sees it, as a nationalist...

...I share the shock registered by Dickey, not least because it deflects my attention from Frost's great poems and Thompson's scholarly and critical treatment of them...

...The strain is most evident in Thompson's decorum and reserve, and in some of his euphemistic interpretations...

...Under Vindictive 27 "gestures" are listed, toward persons ranging from Matthew Arnold to Morton Zabel...

...Now he applied it more or less favorably to Matthew Arnold, Henry Wallace, Aristotle, and Thomas himself...

...Dickey had only the early years (1874-1915) to go by when he wrote that "no one . . . will ever believe in the . . . myth that Frost was kindly, forebearing . . . good neighborly or anything but the small-minded, vindictive, ill-tempered, egotistic, cruel and unforgiving man he was...

...Although I thought Dickey's "The Strength of Fields," introduced by Bette Davis and followed by Warren Beatty, called for more concentration than the Gala audience was prepared to give, the Georgia poet no doubt preferred the more informal setting...

...He agreed to stand silently by as character witness when Stewart Udall called reporters to deny a campaign impropriety...

...Writers &Writing THE FROST STORY BY RUTH MATHEWSON when, on the eve of Jimmy Carter's oath-taking, James Dickey read his Inaugural Poem from the stage of the John F. Kennedy Center, there were few reminders of the more august office of civic poetry at JFK's swearing-in ceremony...

...Don't let me throw dust in your eyes," the poet said with a smile...

...It becomes still more understandable now that we can read the entire life...

...There is something primitive about the Frost story that may begin to account for our anxiety on reading Thompson's revelations...

...Perhaps I suspected his terrible drive for power without imagining its scale or the crudity of its contrast with the smiling public image...

...True, Frost was an old man when this occurred, but he had been an artful dodger all his life...

...and assured Kennedy before the Russia trip that he had fought at Harvard against removing John Reed's portrait from "our" Adams House...

...To Norman Thomas, who asked for clarification, he wrote (but never mailed) an evasive answer playing with the word "liberal," which in his lexicon usually meant "cowardly...

...Or so it seemed...

...Frost replied, "Liberals are wasting time in an emergency...

...At one point, he explains the need for great tact in telling Frost that his answers to questions on his religious beliefs were evasive...

...This is surely a misreading of James by both men if it is supposed to justify the 35 instances of "mythmaking" listed in the indexes of Volumes I and II: "that he was disinherited and reduced to poverty . . . wronged by his beloved . . . 'Pound sought me at every instance,'" etc., etc...

...Yet (with one large exception: an enduring impression of the man's courage) the cumulative effect of the succeeding books actually compounds the revulsion Dickey felt after reading the initial, most extenuating, volume...

...for example, upon learning that his publishers were bringing out essays by Zabel that did not mention him, Frost threatened to leave the house unless Zabel's contract was broken...

...Give or take a few references to "puckishness," one finds none of this nonsense in Thompson's Robert Frost...

...One such book, written by Jean Gould with the poet's cooperation, is almost a parody of the tone the "beloved poet" encouraged: "[Padraic Colum's] pixie sense of humor and spitfire temper evoked Rob Frost's responsive imp, and the the two had many a merry argument on the relative merits of Yeats and Synge...

...He never knew how resentful Kennedy was after learning this was Frost's sentiment, not Khrushchev's...

...he wasn't joking when he said he was "an opportunist on the loose...