Gabriel Pearson on Robert Frost
'I have always thought of poetry as pro- wess—something to achieve, something to win or lose.' It sounds like the archetypal American boast, the cliche of classic com- petitive individualism. This second volume of Lawrence Thompson's biography—a labour of love-hate if ever there was one—reveals the devious but unrelenting single-mindedness with which Frost trans- formed his copybook convictions into a poetry unblinkingly dangerous and alien behind its comfortable metrics and almost aggressively low-keyed, chatty syntax. Frost, whose name was so oddly true to his nature, emerges from behind the accumulated trivia of his day-to-day living as the cold, un- comforted, uncanny demon that he was.
And knew himself to be: 'I am of deep shadow ... I have neighed at night behind a house like vampires. But there are no vam- pires, there are no ghouls, there are no demons, there is nothing but me.' Or, more flippantly: 'One can't help thinking a little of number One.' The triumph of number One emerges as the singular pursuit of Frost's 'Years of Triumph.' In his own com- pulsively poured-out letters to such receptive cronies as Untermeyer—some so vitriolic that prudence left them unposted—Frost dramatised himself as ruthlessly manipu- lative,. insatiably greedy for reputation, murderously envious of fellow-poets, chron- ically vindictive and obsequiously flatter-1 nig. (Most of these phrases are his biog- rapher's.) Yet Thompson is surely wrong (and driven by what obscure rancour?) to present these traits as moral defects rather than as dramatic strategies. They are ob- viously entwined with the calculation of craft, the grim, cold and uncompromised love, which can even flower into a disin- terested tenderness, out of which Frost con- ceived his poetry. His defects have to be reckoned as among the costs of the poetry, not isolated for elated disapproval.
Certainly, in more normal ways, these Were years of success. Frost managed—just- to hold his family together, despite disasters (the death of his favourite daughter) and tragic tensions not unconnected with his singular pursuits. This volume ends with the death of Mrs Frost, whose shadowy despera- tion is the bitter undertaste of the triumph.
More impressively, he maintained contact with the original sources of his inspiration, extending, though .only occasionally deepen- ing, the scope of his poetry, through all the nomadic shifts and evasions that passed for a career. Interestingly even his nature poems during these years owe less to direct contact with the outdoors than they pretend. Whatever their origins in the memory of farm, wood and field, they are distilled alohemically, in the deeps of night. At the same time the teasing loquacity that weakens his later poetry became more habitual; one suspects the infection of the lecture hall.
His worldly .success was a more am- biguous commodity. He earned it basically by milking the campuses, poetry con- ferences, lecture circuits, finding those ud- ders more lucratively nutritious than any he squeezed in his farming interludes. The post of poet-in-residence, invented for him at the University of Michigan, inaugurated the cur- rent uneasy symbiosis of poet and campus. It is worth noticing that it was Mrs Frost who distrusted it as a distraction from poetry. Her husband, despite routine bouts of wanting out and recurrent illness when the pressure of obligation grew insupportable, gloried in his over-subscribed courses and overflowing lecture halls. He became a star turn with an act which mingled lay-preaching, wiseacre admonition and genially socratic teasing. It was obviously a very good show.
He became, as he said, with no note of apology, 'my own salesman.' He packaged his poetry in his appearances and never registered this as self-betrayal. On the con- trary, it tied directly back to his con- stitutional Yankee and puritan predisposi- tion to count success in market terms, though not simply financial ones. Part of the integrity of cussed individualism is free choice of one's market. Frost in a poem called 'Christmas Trees' reflects on 'The trial by market everything must come to.' It was a trial he embraced almost gleefully. 'The struggle to win,' he remarked elsewhere, 'is still the best tonic.'
The American university system is a privileged version of the homogenising agen-
cy of the market. Frost played it for all he and it were worth. The years of triumph con- sist for a large part in manipulating the manipulators and outwitting their machinery without gettffig homogenised, or even pasteurised, himself. Likewise he remained in touch with the current liberal and left-wing orthodoxies while cultivating his innate in- ner hostility. His intransigent and insidious radical conservatism follows from his ex- altation of the market. New Deal economics and sentimental Marxism, by substituting, to use his own terms, mercy for justice, threatened to rob him of his due. Trial by market was the only social yardstick ac- ceptable to his extreme individualism.
True, there was religion. But neither Frost's own poetry nor his biographer's assertions convince me that Frost ever con- sented to view himself as a creature distinct from a creator and hence accountable to any power but his own genius. Frost's God is essentially thrust into being through savage and lonely acts of self-creation.
Finally, contrary to what his biographer implies as against the facts he presents, the system needed Frost more than he needed it. Superficially he was wooed for his sincerity, his naturalness, his wisdom. But at a deeper level I suspect that his poetry was grasped in- tuitively as a mythic justification for the intense, isolating competitiveness which underlay the bland conformity and sociability of much American life. Frost sanctioned the inner isolation by referring it back to the aboriginal struggle with nature. This could in turn be seen as analogous to the struggle with inhuman forces in the soul, with madness as extreme, demonic egoism. Madness is contained, indeed harnessed to the disinterestedness of craft. One has to salute Frost's dauntlessness, the courage to become his madness (unlike his sister who succumbed to hers). He could absorb the self-punishment and at his best confront the damage it did to others in his studies, in his best narrative poems, of aghast, affronted womanhood.
Yet ultimately his solidarity was not with human nature, but with the darkness outside, the powers of earth, air and water that loom against the precarious holdings of men. He pretends a humorous sociability, as his poems pretend conventionality of form and sentiment. But, as he argued himself, it was always the silence behind the words, the powers unstated, that he attended to. Deeper still, an appalled puritan self-sufficiency discovered an image of its isolation in the unabated non-humanness of the land and the elements. The sociability of the academy was for exploitation, recreation and recourse; and in these two academic labours—the definitive biography and definitive collection of poems—the demon can still be contacted posthumously -at work, driving his willing labourers for his own strange ends.
Gabriel Pearson is Lecturer in English at the University of Essex, and editor (with John Cross) of Dickens and the Twentieth Century.
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