The Stoic Virtues
The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. (Cape, 42s.)
FRogr's courage comes through most poignantly, in these letters, in 1938 with the death of his wife Elinor. He once said, 'Courage is the human virtue that counts most—courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence.' The courage in his poems is their action as a poise in the centre of his uneasiness, his sense of a human life as a nucleus of light, energy and differen- tiation in a dark space and in a world society increasingly bent on national and international undifferentiation.
His life and work are' profoundly defensive. Lionel Trilling was right in publicly observing the terror in the poems of the Kennedy adminis- tration's Laureate, realising that the roots of Frost's old-fashioned radicalism lay in his tender- ness towards men and women inhabiting a terri- fying universe: 'whenever have people been so isolated, so lightning-blasted, so tied down and calcined by life, so reduced, each in his own way, to some last irreducible core of being.' They all 'affirm by their humour, by their irony,, by their separateness and isolateness' a bare truth of the self which is terrifying but honest.
Frost's own life was such a process of trial and calcination. Louis Untermeyer, himself a poet and critic by no means placidly contented with things, is right to end his running com- mentary on his friend's letters with a reminder of his 'high stoicism which could mask unhappi- ness in playfulness, which could even delight in darkness.' Frost's poetry is probably the final American pastoral poetry, the last serious agrarian poetry, infused with the uneasiness of Spencerian naturalism. But after his wife's death, and his son's insane suicide, the terrible accumu- lation point of a family history of physical and mental illness and exhaustion,, Frost had to test the security of his stoic naturalism. In his poetry his philosophic insecurity came out as a wry acceptance of things, relying more and more on the mask of Frost the public reader, the voice of nostalgic America still in love with the national agrarian myth, still resentful of the prin- ciples of the Welfare State, still suspicious of the City and the Machine in the Garden, and still aggressively believing in Self-Reliance.
Perhaps raising chickens contributed to his stoicism. Although there is only one brief refer- ence to chickens here, he did, in fact, write for poultry journals at one time, Frost never cared for political idealism or any utopian perfection: his comment on the photograph of a prize hen was—'Real Perfection as distinguished from Ideal Perfection.' Chicken farming in his documen- taries—he was then in his early thirties—. resembles both the stoicism of writing poetry in American obscurity, and the gritty, foxy world of his poems. The last fowling-piece appeared in 1905; the first book of poems dates from 1913. Perhaps, too, teaching school in his mid-thirties contributed to his stoicism. In some earlier letters to his old pupil John Bartlett, Frost admits his 'vindictiveness' and 'vengefulness,' his acute feel- ing for Enemies. The Untermeyer letters admit to 'malice' and the long battle with Enemies and half-Enemies like Amy Lowell, E. A. Robinson and Edgar Lee Masters. But these subside like less and loss active craters of spleen, although it is striking how the pastoral naturalist mask is lowered in the letters and the literary man takes over with his endless round of gossip, hopes and fears, objections to criticism, prejudices, and aid for minor poets now forgotten. He misremein- bered, surely, when he claimed at the age of eighty-seven, 'I guess I really hate the literary life and hate to be gossiped about for my part in it.'
- In 1916 he says: 'the poet in me died nearly ten years ago'—he was forty-two, with most of his poetry to come. But, 'I tell you, Louis, it's all over at thirty.' Parallel repeated themes are his Republican capitalist pig-headedness, his mockery of any form of planned national welfare, his suspicion of poetic innovatory forms (he was one of the poets Pound did not mould), his dream of being a farmer (never quite made), his lifelong desire for 'innocence' of heart, his Byronic urge to maintain a tone of conversational levity which would prevent him from becoming 'intellectual.' At the end of his life he is proud of the Senate citation and the Kennedy Inaugural reading. But deep inside the man who knew, at the age of eighty-three, that he had become, with Untermeyer's help, 'a national American poet,' surged the tension which make him say, too, 'most accidents are just to ask us who we think we are.'
The rhythm and the assertion there are the exact articulation of Frost's rooted naturalist superstition, the core of his poetic energy and the ground of his philosophy. He needed an ironic sense of fate and forces over which a man had no control to steady him through his familY sufferings. In 1947 he writes, 'Cast your eye back over my family luck and perhaps you will wonder if I haven't had pretty near enough.' Im- mediately he uses this as the basis of an extended case against socialist practices—no such policy could possibly 'touch the reality of our personal life.' He is all of a piece. Since 'nobility is the object of life,' capitalism must be maintained, so runs his rubric. Much as he may disagree, the reader cannot fail to be moved by Frost's prose of humility after his wife's death. Seldom has old age been so dignified and honest: 'I am so quickened by what has happened that I can't touch my mind with a memory of any kind. I can't touch my skin anywhere with my finger but it hurts like a sad inspiration.' Later that year he writes: 'There's a vigorous devil in me that raises me above or drops me below the level of pity. Nevertheless I sometimes weep internallY with sorrow. . . . I was thrust out into the desolateness of wondering about my past whether it had not been too cruel to those I had dragged with me and almost to cry out to heaven fora word of reassurance that was not given me In time.'
Two years later, when his son shoots himself, the old father says: 'I took the wrong way with him. . . . Some thing in me is still asking for the chance to try one more. There's where the greatest pain is located. I am cut off too abruptly in my plans and efforts for his peace of mind. . . . I failed to trick Carol or argue him into be- lieving he was the least successful.' Alone at the end, it came to self-reliance, the old creed of self salvation and simplicity, the creeds of two of his favourite books, Robinson Crusoe and Walden. Louis Untermeyer has offered us the almost Ibsenian plot of a proud successful man, with his politics and his suffering, his trivialities and his dignity. It seems a pity to have to conclude on a carping note, but really such an important book ought to be given an index.
ERIC MOTTRAM
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