On Writers and Politics

...Logic seems to be on Frost's side...

...But he would have published the truth he found, whatever it was...

...Reading the new stories with their almost unbearable and yet irresistible incendiary truth, one must conclude that her creative energy has been increasing and enriching itself, as love can, in its spending...

...These reversals have been possible, perhaps inevitable, because writers are people, and people change...

...Convinced socialists become fascist dictators...

...he tended to demur-that an earlier poem, "The Runaway," had been inspired by their relationship...

...When he read Frost's poem he must have pondered rather wistfully its admonition that the millennium "is not at a progress-end...

...After all, he had a notable interest in the experiment of human life on the planet earth...

...What use, comparatively, is one person blocking a bulldozer...

...ton in the New Deal seemed populated with noisy radicals, his temperament was reflective, his speech measured, his actions consistently prudent...

...This question constantly swirls about her unbowed and slyly cheerful head...

...But he and MacLeish were soon to switch positions...

...No burst of nuclear phenomenon That put an end to what was going on Could make much difference to the dead and gone...

...In "The Directive" he suggests to a wayfarer looking for an old homestead that on finding it, "pull in your ladder road behind you / And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me...

...In fact, it would have been hard to pin Frost down on any position...

...He undoubtedly looked back sometimes with regret at the road he had not taken...

...Invoking Shelley, he proclaimed that Wordsworth by accepting honors from the Tory government "alone breaks from the van and the freemen...

...The purpose of his Washington research project was to draw the truth from facts and figures...

...I once asked Frost if it was true that the poem was about Carter Goodrich...

...Privately he could express sympathy, as he did in a letter about Carter Goodrich, with the "equalitarians who pray or act for the Kingdom of God on earth...

...We can't really know what he would have thought if he had given attention to Paley, had fully comprehended the enormity of what she is trying to spare us...

...During the Popular Front days the threat of Hitler inspired MacLeish to anti-fascist ardor that made him welcome even among the Communists...

...Tate as a neo-Confeder-ate took a vigorous conservative stand...

...What it does-must do for anyone coming to it anew-is to open up once more the old troubling question of where a writer's duty lies...

...Browning, in a burst of musical violence, accused revered old Wordsworth of deserting the revolutionary cause...

...In "The Planners" he is callously forthright: If anything should put an end to This I'm thinking the unborn would never miss What they had never had of vital bliss...

...He was able to stand outside the battle among writers that was now becoming almost literally bloody...

...Grace Paley's interest in truth, surely full-time, expresses itself not only in political action but (Woman's work is never done) also as mother, daughter, wife, teacher...

...Seeing what they see, they do what they have to do...

...But imagine asking him to be consistent...

...I doubt that Frost ever read Grace Paley-he may not even have heard of her, according to Kathleen Morrison-but she is the very paradigm of the passionate radical his poem addressed...

...Writers are exemplars, too...

...In public he could make a careless statement after a trip to the Soviet Union, putting one of his own mischievously derisive remarks about liberalism into the mouth of Nikita Khrushchev and undercutting the sensitive foreign policy of a President who had been-till then-his friend...

...his folksy idiom ridicules the notion...

...His argument, like the one it contradicted, made excellent poetry...

...In "It is Almost the Year 2000" he speculates that we may have been living in the second millennium and that an imminent cataclysm may be "the final golden glow to end it" Nonetheless, all the attention he asks us to give is a pause in our gardening And annotating books, To watch this end deluxe...

...Still, when a great public danger was brought to Frost's attention he could laugh it off, as in "A-Wishing Well," his Christmas greeting for 1959, which ends: I am assured at any rate Man's practically inexterminate...

...It is merely play...

...But right beside you booklike on a shelf...

...Frost's innocent looking pastoral poems, such as the bodeful "Design," often carry a hidden charge of terror or despair...

...Frost in one of his epigrams ("From Iron: Tools and Weapons") declares: Nature within her inmost self divides To trouble men with having to take sides...

...As a student ("I have known them passionate and fine") he may even have had the desire, which Frost blames, "to live ungolden with the poor" before his family responsibilities intervened...

...Surprisingly, Allen Tate was the one to answer, "It is just...

...whether "if a poet does not mix in politics," as John Peale Bishop complained, during the '30s, "he is refusing in some cowardly fashion to face life...

...In the very act of challenging his disciple's values, the poet slips in a cryptic line that can be read as a second thought almost negating his outward message...

...The last line suggests a play on the word "revolution...

...It might, as I would see, apply more directly to others-many the poet had never met-than to the person he had in mind...

...Then, of course, there is Frost's own vanity, his jealousy of those who might supplant him...

...In using Shelley's name to support his accusation, Browning seemed to forget how easily he had retreated from his early allegiance to Shelley's atheism...

...After presenting as a wiser choice for the millennium "booklike on a shelf," he adds, "Or even better godlike in yourself...

...Poets, like other people, can get carried away by an idea, however dubiously based, and in their hands it can have far-reaching effects...

...For some people there is no choice...

...Having to," he says...

...Youth takes naturally to rebellion, yet there were some young writers in our '30s who resisted being shanghaied into the Leftist ranks...

...When Frost reproached potential followers who took a different road from his, he assumed they could choose...

...Yet the fraction of her days given to writing has been enough to inspire serious analyses of her art such as appeared recently in Partisan Review, and all the reader devotion that has resulted in a clamor for more...

...There's always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at...

...Archibald MacLeish in his 1932 "Invocation to the Social Muse" appears to be on Frost's side, asking "How to conceive in the name of a column of marchers...

...I knew that Goodrich had been an Amherst student of Frost's at the time of World War I. And I had heard-not from Carter...

...But is there a loss...

...The only ones who would complain, he says, are the reformers, whom he sneakily derogates by crippling his final rhyme: These anyway might think it was important That human history should not be shortened...

...As it turned out, he may have served the liberal cause moreef fectively as a member of the establishment than he could have done if he had been the all-out rebel envisioned in "The Lost Follower...

...After later talks with him, I realized he had been telling me a poem could never be "about" just one person...

...He liked to be perverse, contrary...

...That was unfair...

...Another said she would not be the first writer to have "proved that progressive politics, which advances so many estimable causes, is a downright heavy burden on the art of fiction...

...In this period of debased venial publishing, of demand for gossip about the greed and self-indulgence of authors, of contempt for do-gooders to whom disinterested action is a necessity, what a relief to think of Grace Paley...

...These generally run to greater length than her earlier ones, making their impact and their aftermath more inescapable...

...This is strikingly true of "The Lost Follower...

...Frost, who was so prolific, might not agree that there could be a concentration of quality in small quantity...

...Moreover, it may require the writer's vision to see what they see...

...The ending foreshadows "The Lost Follower" in its doubt about the disciple's ability to meet the challenges of the great world wisely on his own: "Whoever it is that leaves him out so late.../ Ought to be told to come and take him in...

...It has sometimes landed her in jail, always taken up much of her time and energy...

...Wordsworth had gradually changed his creed to a Tory Christianity long before, and was in no sense selling out when he became Poet Laureate...

...Frost, up to his own kind of demonic mischief, reverses not only the title of Browning's poem but its politics...

...Frost, to whom "progress" was a fighting word, could hardly have disagreed...

...Some day I must go into that...

...Curiously, though, one can feel its force without surrendering to its eloquence...

...Frost's rare specific statements are buried in many pages of poetry having very different emphasis...

...The job of writing requires exactly one person, no more...

...Since the publication of Changes, a Paley story has appeared in the New Yorker about once a year...

...His resignation is feigned...

...Although WashingHope Hale Davis is a frequent contributor to The New Leader and author of The Dark Way to the Plaza...

...Occasionally, the parts of a single poem contradict each other...

...Well...and others," he answered, loath to give a straight Yes or No...

...Some of his poems seem to have been written to take issue both with popular ideas and with his own expressed elsewhere...

...Knowing some of the tragedies of his private life, one cannot read "Spring Pools," for instance, without sensing his guilt for using his (oak-like) powers "to blot out and drink up and sweep away/These flowery waters and these watery flowers"-his family and their hopes and dreams...

...And even if they are on the "right" side, and stay there, the question of the best use of their talents is still difficult...

...Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms...

...Frost loved ambiguity, equivocation, paradox...

...The poem's title refers back to Robert Browning's "The Lost Leader...

...This perplexed me...

...A MEMOIR On Writers and Politics BY HOPE HALE DAVIS On a recent visit to Kathleen Morrison, who was in fairly complete charge of Robert Frost's career during the last half of his life, I learned that a poem of his, "The Lost Follower," had been written to a friend of mine, Carter Goodrich...

...Counting on his reader's memory of Browning's famous first line, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," and also of a subsequent one, "They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver," Frost plays, as he often liked to, with the word "gold" in all its meanings...

...By the time I knew Carter Goodrich he would not have given a dogmatic answer to the question...

...And it may have been these one-persons in the past, with their prodding and resisting, their building and their abolition, who gave us a world, unfinished as it is, worth saving...

...How can anyone become godlike other than by following the call of conscience...

...He had pronounced strongly against causes when devotion to them resulted in a "loss to song...

...After reading her brief poignant tales of urban disaster, with their darting dentist-like probes lasting just to the edge of endurance, relieved suddenly by fearful comedy, one reviewer of Changes made a sorrowful calculation: Paley's literary output had been 28 stories in two volumes in two decades...

...The poem is a splendid tour de force, the four ringing rhymes that end the lines of each of its nine stanzas giving an effect of mounting power...

...If she is at work, that is...

...One of Frost's most charmingly implicative metaphors, it describes a colt bewildered-spooked, you might say-by his first snowfall...

...When Goodrich became director of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, the postwar spirit made it possible for him to promote civil rights and show quite new official concern for the developing countries of the Third World...

...But is it...

...They count in what they do as well as in what they write...

...It may be only these one-persons with the imagination to feel in advance the burning, the choking, the nausea, who can save us from the final explosion...

...Even "The Lost Follower" may have offered Goodrich a further hint than Frost himself quite intended...

...In private and in public affectionate carpers wonder, as a piece in People magazine put it, whether Pa-ley "writes too little and protests too much...

...Recalling the Columbia professor I had known during New Deal days in Washington, I could not see him as the fervent, implacable radical the poet was addressing...

...He makes clear that it would not be for "gold of darkness from amine" that his disciple would defect, but for a dream of a Golden Age, which Frost gently derides as a delusion...

...Those who chide Paley for not staying home from demonstrations to write novels are expecting her not to be Grace Paley...

...Paley's protesting is political-at present against the threat of nuclear devastation...

...From the French Revolution on, an endless chain of young writers have thundered against older ones for going over to the establishment or even, like Eliot, Yeats and Pound, becoming actively Rightist...

...It could be argued that our need of her is rather desperate, and of the Carter Goodriches as well, and even of those who have, in Iris Murdoch words, "a part-time interest in truth...

...Perhaps the reason for his insouciance about outer disaster is the famous one he gave for being undaunted by emptiness in space: "I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places...

...to be consistent he should have wanted to see it prolonged...

...He himself becomes the leader, and it is from his conservative guidance that his follower has broken away in order to try to change the world...

...I assumed Frost was merely getting his usual pleasure from leaving room for mystery...

...Carter Goodrich, firmly set as he was on his professional path toward liberal reform, was admittedly a poet manque...

...This one person at a desk can produce a lasting work "booklike on a shelf...

...If, as it happened, much of what his staff was able to uncover turned out to be truth that the conservative economists had for some reason failed to reveal, with possibilities that might free workers from their most dulling and damaging drudgery, he was gratified...

...In " How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation" he has a royal sage who is advising an upstart sultan muse, "If we could only stop Progress somewhere," and go on to admit it is impossible: "A nation has to take its natural course/ Of Progress round and round in circles...

...We expect writers always to be on the side of the angels, but they are subject both to outside temptations and dark inner needs...

...Although Browning in "The Lost Leader" was careless with his facts, the poem helped the ardent of generation after generation to hold to their ideals against the temptations of wealth and privilege...

...Heseems willing to bend Nature's ways in the defense of Paley's need to fight for her convictions, and to accept some loss to literature...

...When Paley's 1974 story collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, came out belatedly in paperback, it reminded reviewers again of a possibility her long silences tend to make them forget-that she may be our best writer currently at work...