"Check Up on me Same"

ROBERT FROST: THE EARLY YEARS-1874-1915 by Lawrence Thompson. 641 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $12.50.

To the millions who watched the old man recite The Gift Outright at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, or learned to love Mending Wall or After Apple-Picking in their school days, Robert Frost was the serene, supremely benevolent country poet. A generation of interviewers had gorged themselves on his folksy humor and humble denims, on that familiar shock of untutored hair, those earthy accounts of his early scrabbling for a living from his New Hampshire poultry farm. Yet Frost also used to say: "I'm liable to tell you anything. Trust me in the poetry, but don't trust me on my life. You want to watch me. Check up on me some."

Lawrance Thompson, the New Hampshire-born Princeton professor and critic whom Frost chose in 1939 to be his official biographer, did a lot of watching and checking. Out of nearly three decades of conversation and affectionate companionship has come an eloquent biography--this is the first of two volumes--that will surprise Frost's idolators. Thompson shows that there was very little in Frost's style that was spontaneous; he had to whittle laboriously at his poetry to achieve his roughhewn colloquial effects. Even more interesting is the author's picture of Frost as a selfish, baffling, perverse and tormented soul, systematically creating a public image of a kindly, -home-spun and uncomplicated grandfather.

Self-Doubt & Hatred. Young Robbie Frost was a spoiled brat almost from the day he was born in San Francisco in 1874. His father was a hard-drinking, Harvard-educated journalist who beat Rob often. His mother indulged the boy, taught him to love poetry and nature; she was a devout Swedenborgian who believed that she had religious visions. It was her influence, says Thompson, that encouraged Robbie and his sister Jeanie to withdraw into a private world as children.

Jeanie died in an insane asylum in 1929. Robbie, infected with a tendency to explosive furies--which, as Thompson says, were much like his father's--and with what Frost himself called "my Indian vindictiveness," found survival in poetry. His poems became "tools or weapons for actually trying to resolve those conflicts within himself, or between himself and others, which he viewed as being so dangerous that they might otherwise engulf him."

Torn with self-doubts, self-hatred and continual impulses to suicide, Frost set himself adrift before he was 20. He fled Dartmouth before the end of his first semester, spent three years moving from job to job, finding only in poetry "the momentary stay of confusion." He tormented Elinor White, his shy high school sweetheart, with accusations of disloyalty because she wanted to finish college. Eventually she married him, but by that time, as he liked to say, he had "bent her to his will." He put in two years at Harvard, paid for by his grandfather, who then bought him a farm in Derry, N.H., and set him up in business as a poultry farmer. When Grandfather Frost died in 1901, he left Robert and his family the greater part of his estate, in the form of an annuity that began at $500 and later went up to $800 a year. It helped support them for the next 20 years.

The Sound of Sense. Incredibly, Frost complained for years afterward that his grandfather had sent him into farming "to die," and then cheated him out of a larger fortune. Thompson suggests that this notion was typical of Frost's self-indulgent "mythmaking," a compulsion to see himself as a hero battling against insuperable odds. This particular fancy gained a wide audience when Frost went to England in 1912 and published two collections of poems. It was Ezra Pound who, in his review of A Boy's Will, launched the poet and the myth by singling out In Neglect, a five-line verse that begins, "They leave us so to the way we took." That poem, wrote Pound, had been composed "when Frost's grandfather left him in poverty because he was a useless poet instead of a money getter."

Happily, Frost's poetry was finer than his pretenses. Discarding an earlier, florid, neo-Victorian style, he developed a naturalistic technique that he called "the sound of sense," linking the counterpoint of metrical lines with the natural spoken sentences of his friends on the farms of New Hampshire. Because he admired their stoic cheerfulness, he adopted this form of speech himself, dropping the careful diction that his educated parents taught him.

He took to wearing unpressed suits and a soft grey shirt and, writes Thompson, "brought his arrogance and grouchiness under at least temporary control. His remarks were usually cheerful, witty, mischievously playful." Thompson concludes this phase of Frost's life with the newly successful poet preparing at 40 to return to America. Frost's ambition now was to find a farm in New England where he could "live cheap and get Yankier and Yankier." He did, and so did his work.

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