A Poet Revealed

ROBERT FROST: THE YEARS OF TRIUMPH, 1915-1938 by Lawrence Thompson. 743 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $15.

It is easy to confuse beauty with goodness, but there is no law that says sound character is a requirement of great poetry. Nature has often endowed her poets in disturbing and mystifying ways. Take Robert Frost, for example --known to a vast public as the lovable old curmudgeon with the little horse and the harness bells. As this mercilessly detailed biography shows, Frost was jealous and vindictive, a malicious gossip and a petty schemer. The man who told the world he had promises to keep broke them frequently for gain or spite. The Years of Triumph is not a first crack in Frost's lovingly fashioned public image. Before the poet's death, Randall Jarrell, writing with brilliance and flawless taste about Frost's best work, also took time to lament his "complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy" and poke fun at his platform personality--"the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity." The first volume of Thompson's biography dealt with the powerful rages and resentments displayed by Frost early in life. Such faults seemed less shocking in a turbulent childhood, and more justified during the 20 years in which Frost struggled to support himself as a farmer and teacher as publishers kept rejecting what proved to be much of his best work.

It is part of cultural lore that he had to go to England for recognition. On his return in 1915, fame and prosperity came quickly. But neither sweetened his nature nor assuaged his fears. He campaigned skillfully and obsequiously among editors and critics whom he had loathed for years and would never forgive for early slights. He perfected his speaking style and was soon in nationwide demand as a lecturer. His first Pulitzer prize in 1924 finished the consolidation of his success.

Professional Jealousy. Somewhere along the way, Frost's fury at rejections fanned out into a general, capricious malice and crass opportunism. Much of the book is devoted to an appalling accumulation of trivial plotting and backbiting. It was a shrewd Yankee who first told Frost that good fences make good neighbors, because contracts in particular meant little to him. A publisher once got the poet's approval before signing up an early biographer. Frost gave it, but finding another writer even more idolatrous, he awarded him the exclusive rights--leaving the publisher with two authors for one book. He was probably most heartless to an admiring young poet, Raymond Holden. In 1919, he offered Holden half his Franconia, N.H., property, with the proviso that Holden must buy the rest if Frost should ever move. Unknown to Holden, Frost was already planning to live in Vermont. "I had not only contributed to his desire to leave, but had also given him the means of doing it," Holden sadly concluded.

Frost was plagued by professional jealousy. He resented every other poet from Eliot to Sandburg and suffered torments at Edwin Arlington Robinson's success. Even timid Marianne Moore seemed a threat. She "had been turning you against me," he wrote their common publisher.

In a way it was fortunate that Frost was so sedulous on his own behalf because he supported a large and disaster-prone family. They all tended toward respiratory ailments; grippe and influenza appear as often in these pages as Frost's verse. At one point, both his daughter Marjorie who later had a mental breakdown and his daughter-in-law had severe cases of tuberculosis. They were a family Eugene O'Neill would have loved: angry, resentful, linked together like an emotional chain gang by mutual dependence.

The most enigmatic figure is Frost's wife Elinor. "She has been the unspoken half of everything I ever wrote," he once said. Unspoken indeed. Mrs. Frost's accustomed weapon against her husband was long, uncanny silences. In 1917, at 43, the father of four threatened to go off to World War I, and even took rifle practice on the Amherst village green in an attempt to provoke his wife. Mrs. Frost said nothing. She was fiercely devoted to the children, especially their despair-ridden son Carol, who was to commit suicide. Her hostility to Frost is captured in Home Burial: "She, in her place, refused him any help/ With the least stiffening of her neck and silence."

Elinor Frost's final silence was the most appalling. As she lay dying, the poet desperately sought her blessing or some reassurance about his treatment of her. Though she had been at his side for 43 years, she refused to admit him into her room.

There is ironic justice in the fact that a man so solicitous of his public image should have fastened on Princeton Professor Lawrance Thompson as his official biographer. Appointed in 1939, Thompson is as alternately obsequious and critical of his subject as Frost was toward editors and critics. He goes to embarrassing lengths to defend the poet against petty charges, but dwells gruesomely on Frost's faults, awarding equal space to serious transgressions and silly peccadilloes. The practice tends to obscure the importance of Frost's work. "Provide, Provide," one of the best short poems, is printed --but with the sole comment that it was occasioned by the poet's disapproval of a charwomen's strike at Harvard.

A pity, because even more than most men, Frost needs a biographer of deep understanding. It is easy to condemn him, at times impossible not to. But at his best--and he wrote ten or 15 of the best poems of the century--he wrote from a sure and deep humanity. That is why there is no rhetoric in Frost, no passionate effusions or rampages. His knowledge of evil was subtle and real. So was his natural grasp of people and their sorrows. Calling this record of human fragility and failure Years of Triumph is either a heavyhanded attempt at irony or reflects the kind of complacency that Frost at his worst could achieve. Thompson is reasonably fair to Frost the man, but more compassion would have yielded a larger, more reflective picture of the poet.

-- Martha Duffy

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