| The Road Not Taken |
Few figures in American literature have suffered as strangely
divided an afterlife as Robert Frost.
Even before his death in 1963, he was canonized as a rural sage,
beloved by a public raised on poems of his like “Birches” and “The Road Not
Taken.” But that image soon became shadowed by a darker one, stemming from a
three-volume biography by his handpicked chronicler, Lawrance Thompson, who
emerged from decades of assiduous note-taking with a portrait of the poet as a
cruel, jealous megalomaniac — “a monster of egotism” who left behind “a wake of
destroyed human lives,” as the critic Helen Vendler memorably put it on
the cover of The New York Times Book Review in 1970.
Ever since, more sympathetic scholars have tried, with limited
success, to counter Mr. Thompson’s portrait, which was echoed most recently in
a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Harper’s Magazine last fall,
depicting Frost as repellent old man angrily rebutting a female interviewer’s
charges of arrogance, racism and psychological brutality to his children.
But now, a new scholarly work may put an end to the “monster
myth,” as Frost scholars call it, once and for all. Later this month, Harvard
University Press will begin publishing “The
Letters of Robert Frost,” a projected four-volume edition of
all the poet’s known correspondence that promises to offer the most rounded,
complete portrait to date.
“There’s been a kind of persistent sense of Frost as a hypocrite,
as someone who showed one face to the public and another privately,” said
Donald Sheehy, a professor at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, who edited
the letters with Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen.
“These letters will dispel all that,” Mr. Sheehy added. “Frost
has his moods, his enemies, the things that set him off. But mostly what you
see is a generosity of spirit.”
The Harvard edition, which will include more than 3,000 letters
from nearly 100 archives and private collections, is not the first presentation
of Frost’s correspondence. An edition of selected letters was rushed out by Mr.
Thompson (with index entries for “Badness,” “Cowardice,” “Fears,” “Insanity”
and “Self-Indulgence”) a year after the poet’s death, followed by several smaller
collections, all of which have long been out of print.
But the complete correspondence, scholars say, will show Frost
in full, revealing a complex man who juggled uncommon fame with an uncommonly
difficult private life (including four children who died before him, one a
suicide), a canny self-fashioner who may have cultivated the image of a
birch-swinging rustic but was as much the modernist innovator as T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound.
“You see there are so many Frosts,” said Jay Parini, a Frostbiographer who
was not involved with the project. “He moves among them, like everyone else, a
wounded individual trying to make his way in the world.”
“The idea of Frost as a jealous, mean-spirited, misogynist
career-builder,” he added, “is nothing short of nuts.”
The new collection will contain hundreds of little seen or
entirely unknown letters discovered languishing in poorly cataloged archives,
tucked away in books or forgotten in attics. One cache of letters turned up in
a desk donated to a thrift shop near Hanover, N.H., where they became the focus
of a stolen property investigation.
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The first volume begins in 1886, with a charming note from
12-year-old Frost to a childhood sweetheart, and follows him through marriage
to his wife, Elinor; a hard decade as a farmer in New Hampshire; three years in
England; and return home in 1915, when he became a late-blooming literary star
with the success of his second collection, “North of Boston.”
It contains little family correspondence (no letters to Elinor
are known to survive) and few letters that touch on difficult family matters.
But it does vividly show Frost’s deep ambition and confidence — “To be
perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time,” he
wrote in 1913 — along with a concern to protect his family from intrusions. (“I
really like the least her mistakes about Elinor,” he wrote in response to an
article by the poet Amy Lowell. “That’s an unpardonable attempt to do her as
the conventional helpmeet of genius.”)
The letters show his pleasure in hard-earned fame, but also his
resentment. “Twenty years ago I gave some of these people a chance,” he wrote
in 1915, referring to his newfound admirers. “I wish I were rich and
independent enough to tell them to go to hell.”
The full publication of the letters is the capstone of an
arrangement between the Frost estate and Harvard to prepare scholarly editions
of Frost’s primary material, in the hopes of inspiring research into a poet
whose broad popularity has not always been matched by scholarly attention. The
project has not gone entirely smoothly. The 2006 publication of Frost’s
notebooks, filled with drafts, fragments and sometimes cryptic aphorisms, was
hailed by some critics as the most important Frost release in years but soon
came under fierce attackfrom
two scholars charging Mr. Faggen, the volume’s editor, with thousands of
transcription errors that turned the poet into a “dyslexic and deranged
speller.”
(Harvard released a 2010 paperback making what Mr. Faggen, a
professor at Claremont McKenna College, characterized in a recent email as
“appropriate changes.”)
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That typographical skirmish, however, was nothing compared with
the uproar over Ms. Oates’s short story, which drew
outrage from Frost family members and the tightknit world of
Frost scholars, some of whom gather each year at an informal symposium
organized by Lesley Lee Francis, one of the poet’s granddaughters. “It was just
mean-spirited and pointless,” said Mr. Sheehy, who together with Mr. Richardson
prepared a 14-page document challenging the story’s factual underpinnings.
Ms. Oates, via email, said that the story was “really about the
sensation-mongering, ‘malicious’ personal and biographical accusations that are
made against a poet” when “poetry and the life should have nothing to do with
each other.” Her detractors, she suggested, “had misread the story in their
eagerness to attack.”
But even some fellow Frost outsiders said the Oates story might
give new life to some questionable notions first advanced by Mr. Thompson,
including the claim that Frost cruelly quashed the poetic ambitions of his son
Carol, who committed suicide in 1940.
“The letters to Carol are very poignant,” said the novelist
Brian Hall, who was denied permission by the estate to quote from Frost’s
copyrighted poetry in “Fall of Frost,” a
2008 fictionalization of the poet’s life. “You see him gently trying to push
him in different directions but doing his parental best to be supportive.”
Those letters, along with the rest of the surviving family
correspondence (including some that has not been published), will appear in
future volumes. Those installments, expected to appear at two-year intervals,
will touch on some of the most sensitive subjects in Frost biography, including
the commitment of his daughter Irma to a psychiatric hospital in 1947 and his
relationship with Kathleen Morrison, the married woman who became his
secretary, protector, primary emotional focus and, some have argued, his
mistress after Elinor’s death in 1938.
Taken together, “these letters will show very clearly that the
caricature of Frost’s behavior toward his family is utterly without
foundation,” said the co-editor Mr. Richardson, a professor at Doshisha
University in Japan.
If there’s a true revelation in the first volume, the editors
say, it’s the sheer intellectual firepower Frost brings even to a casual
missive, the range of references that can wind playfully from George Bernard
Shaw to Gothic architecture to Neolithic archaeology, all in a few hundred
words.
“He’s never thought of as an intellectual poet, but that’s
because he wears all his learning gracefully,” Mr. Sheehy said. “People may be
surprised by just how smart he was.”
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