Old School

by Tobias Wolff

  I read the poem several times, and began to imagine that maybe it was satiric, and thus better than I’d first thought. But George set me straight when I went to his room that afternoon to congratulate him.

  What did you think of the poem, he asked me.

  I like it, way to go! George, you’re going to meet Robert Frost!

  Did you think I was . . . how did Mr. Frost put it—having fun at his expense?

  Well, I guess you could read it that way.

  You could?

  It’s possible.

  Oh, jeez. He slumped like a puppet, taking no care to hide his distress. He still had his tie on, a knitted tie with a flat bottom. It looked crocheted; it looked like a doily. Our biology master wore ties like that but George was the only boy you’d catch dead in one. He was both the oldest and the youngest of us, the most fuddy-duddy and innocent, and I could see that his innocence extended to this question of sardonic intent. His poem, alas, was perfectly serious.

  But you don’t have to read it as parody, I said. You can also read it as tribute. You know, the farm, the folksy tone, the snow. It’s like you’re paying your respects to him—tipping your hat, so to speak.

  Exactly! George sat across from me on his roommate’s bed. That’s exactly how I meant it, as an homage. He looked at me with such gratitude that I couldn’t help throwing another log on the fire.

  And of course the title, I said.

  You like the title?

  All those layers of meaning. “First Frost” as in, literally, the first frost of the year. Then there’s the symbolic sense of here comes winter, i.e., death, but also rest, right? The snow is soft, after all, after all the hard work he’s spent his whole life doing—soft and white like the girl’s hands. After all, he’s gonna get what he wants—unless I’m just reading this stuff into it.

  No! No, it’s all there.

  Then, I said, the crowning touch. “First Frost” as in first, Frost—as in Frost is tops, Frost is the best, Frost is number one.

  Exactly! Exactly. But it’s not just an homage.

  Of course not. You’d never find that business with the girl in one of his poems. Foaming cream. The pail between her legs. That doesn’t sound like Frost. Doesn’t really sound like you, either, to tell the truth.

  It is something of a new direction for me. He looked down, controlling a smile. I have to admit, the female character got away from me somewhat. Has that ever happened to you—someone you’re writing about suddenly becomes real?

  Now and then.

  She became very real to me. This will sound strange, but I knew her. And I’m not talking about just metaphysically. It was physical too. In fact, when I was working on her part of the poem I found myself in a state of, you know . . . arousal. Has that ever happened to you?

  Nope. I got up to leave. Look, you should probably keep that to yourself, George. You know how immature some of these guys can be.

  Once a week the sixth-form Honors English Seminar was invited to eat dinner at the headmaster’s table. He’d once been an English master himself and enjoyed our company, enough to be liable to the charge of favoritism; you’d never find him playing host to Honors Chemistry. He required literary conversation. If a couple of us talked up a book he hadn’t read, he wrote down the title and read it himself, then put us through our paces. Dinner at his table often ran late, the headmaster forcing some booster to explain an enthusiasm he found baffling, while the rest of us, elbows planted in a waste of cups and napkins and half-eaten rolls, chimed in with our own judgments and dissents. The headmaster took the gloves off and let us do the same—a liberty we preserved by putting the gloves back on when we stood up to leave. I loved the passion, the self-forgetfulness of those nights, though more than once my swelling heart clenched at the sight of the dining-hall staff, all other tables stripped and set for breakfast, wearily waiting for us to shut up so they could finish their work and go home.

  It was our headmaster who had persuaded Frost to visit. He always called his old teacher Mr. Frost, and a few of us tried that ourselves a time or two, until we saw the headmaster wince. Then we all understood that Frost or Robert Frost was fine for us, but that despite its apparently greater formality, Mr. Frost was reserved for those who could claim acquaintance.

  All of us understood, that is, but George Kellogg. Once George sank his teeth into Mr. Frost he wasn’t about to let go, and seized any chance to say it. He was completely blind to the headmaster’s discomfort, his helpless hunch and shudder at every repetition of the blunder. None of us had the heart to straighten him out, and of course the headmaster couldn’t do it without sounding ridiculous: I get to say Mr. Frost, but you don’t! It was a nuance of etiquette as inexplicable as a joke, and George wasn’t snob enough to get it. But now, by a quirk of fate, he was going to meet Robert Frost on his own, and afterward what had been presumptuous would become impeccable—without George ever knowing it!

  Purcell fell in with me outside the dining hall and declared his astonishment that George’s poem had been selected. His respect for Frost’s intelligence, he said, had suffered irreversible damage.

  George’s poem isn’t that bad, I said, if you read it a certain way.

  As a take-off, you mean.

  Right, as a take-off.

  But it isn’t a take-off.

  It could be. That’s how Frost read it.

  But it isn’t. And you know that.

  It doesn’t matter what I know.

  Bullshit.

  It doesn’t. Let’s say you find it in a bottle. You’re walking on the beach and you find George’s poem in a bottle. You don’t know anything about the person who wrote it, you just have the poem. You’d probably read it as a take-off.

  Frost. I don’t know why I even bothered submitting anything, given how he writes. I mean, he’s still using rhyme.

  Yeah, so?

  Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I’m being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It’s true—rhyme’s a completely bankrupt device. It’s just wishful thinking. Nostalgia.

  I’m not laughing at you, I said, and I wasn’t. What I was laughing at was the thought of George Kellogg getting aroused over his own poem. But Purcell was offended and turned away. Good thing, too. To prove I wasn’t laughing at him I would’ve told him about George. He’d have told everyone else, and George would have gotten endless grief, and I would have despised myself.

  If, as Talleyrand said, loyalty is a matter of dates, virtue itself is often a matter of seconds.

  Robert Frost arrived during dinner. When he appeared in the dining hall, slowly crossing from the side door with the headmaster, gingerly mounting the two steps to the high table, the ordinary din died almost to silence. We kept eating and tried not to stare, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

  Frost let himself down into the chair at the headmaster’s right, facing out over the room. He bent his big white head as he arranged his napkin, taking his time. He seemed deeply absorbed in the problem of the napkin. He looked up, nodded at something the headmaster said, and gravely surveyed the hall. The door to the kitchen swung open: a clatter of pans, someone shouting; the door swung to and the silence resumed. Then Dean Makepeace rose at the head of his table and turned toward Frost and began to clap, each report of his hands sharp as a shot, but measured, decorous, and the rest of us jumped to our feet in a great scrape of chairs and made the hall thunderous with applause and the rhythmic drumming of our feet on the oaken floor. Frost gave a little bow with his head but we kept up the racket and finally his reserve broke. He smiled boyishly and rose partway in his chair and waved his napkin at us like a flag of surrender.

  I was conscious of him throughout the meal and held myself as though he were conscious of me. Some of the other boys at my table also suffered fits of dignity. The atmosphere in the hall had become theatrical. This had everything to do with Frost himself. The element of performance in his b
earing—even the business with the napkin, awkward as it seemed, had a calculated quality—charged the room and put us on edge, not at all unpleasantly, as if a glamorous woman had entered the hall.

  Frost read to us in the chapel that night. This was unique in my time at the school; the other visitors all spoke in the auditorium. Maybe it was a sign of the headmaster’s special regard, or maybe Frost himself had asked to read there. Certainly it was the most beautiful building in the school, famous, we were often told, for its stained glass windows, plundered from France by some sharp alum. Even at night, weakly lit, the red panes glowed like rubies. The pews creaked as we settled in. We sat somberly in place, staring straight ahead or gawking up into the heights where the arched ceiling vanished in darkness. The iron chandeliers shed just enough light to cast long, medieval shadows and burnish the bronze memorial plaques, the rich woodwork, the plain gold cross on the altar.

  Frost sat with the headmaster in front of the altar, hands on the carved armrests of his chair, his head bowed as if in meditation or prayer, but I was sitting near the front and I caught the gleam of his eye under the heavy white brows. He was watching us watch him. When the headmaster finally stood to make his introduction, Frost gave a start and looked around as if he’d been worlds away, and that finding himself here was a puzzle indeed.

  The headmaster climbed the steps to the pulpit. He was a lanky, long-faced man with a big wen over his right eyebrow. It was a blistery-looking thing and when you first met him you could see nothing else, but he soon distracted you by holding your eyes with his keen, attentive gaze, and by the arresting beauty of his voice. He had a profound bass full of gravel, which he used to good effect and to his own satisfaction. When we made fun of him behind his back we forgot the bump and mimicked his rumbling drawl. Purcell, you’re not altogether a dull boy, perhaps you can explain what is meant by peyote solidities, or sexless hydrogen . . . I am trying to understand these words and I am failing, Purcell, I am failing.

  I expected the headmaster to use this moment for a swipe at the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti crime family, which had a few soldiers among us, though not as many as he feared. He had read their work and affected to see no difference between “Howl” and “A Coney Island of the Mind.” He did, of course. Ferlinghetti didn’t really matter to him, but Ginsberg he hated. Though he disparaged him in aesthetic terms as sloppy and incoherent, what he really detested was his vision of America as a butcher of souls. The headmaster was a democrat and a meliorist. He’d been steadily adding to the number of scholarship boys, and we heard persistent rumors that he was badgering the trustees to lift the ban on black students. Perhaps he sensed in Ginsberg the herald of those descending furies that meliorism made only more rabid, that nothing could satisfy but the death of the imperfect republic whose promises he cherished, and tried to keep. He hid his detestation of Ginsberg in ridicule, quoting him with such simpering, deadly scorn—Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels!—that it took me many years to figure out that “Howl” was a great poem.

  Whatever his reasons, he feared Ginsberg’s influence on us to a degree that was almost respectful. Frost would serve as the perfect bludgeon. I caught Bill White’s eye—we both knew what was coming.

  But no. Instead the headmaster told a story of how, as a farm boy completely ignorant of poetry, he had idly picked up a teacher’s copy of North of Boston and read a poem entitled “After Apple-Picking.” He approached it, he said, in a surly humor. He’d done more than a bit of apple-picking himself and was sure this poem would make it fancy and romantic and get it all wrong. Yet what struck him first was how physically true the poem was, even down to that ache you get in the arch of your foot after standing on a ladder all day—and not only the ache but the lingering pressure of the rung. Then, once he’d assented to the details, he was drawn to the poem’s more mysterious musings. What was that pane of ice about? Which part of the poem was dream, and which part memory? When he borrowed the book he’d had no idea where this act would lead him. Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

  That was all. He came back down the steps. No recitation of Frost’s honors and awards, no witty, polished reminiscences from the Amherst years. I had never before heard the headmaster speak of himself as someone with a particular past, and never did again; with us it was all books and ideas and what he liked to call, quoting Jane Austen, the compliment of rational opposition. He was married but hard to imagine in his wife’s arms, because he seemed consecrated to a relationship with the world that yielded nothing to the flesh, whose unremitting satisfaction I conceived to be the point of marriage. He was a mystery to us and, like great generals and actresses, he guarded that mystery like the power it was.

  He helped Frost up the winding steps and then, instead of returning to his chair, joined us in the pews. This left Frost alone at the front of the church, in the high pulpit. He arranged his books and some loose papers in a certain order, then rearranged them, the papers rustling loudly under the microphone. At this he stopped to inspect the mike as if the device were new to him. He tapped it suspiciously. This produced a resounding knock, and he shied back a little. He picked up a book, rifled through the pages, set it down again, and peered out at us.

  Can you hear me? You can hear me, you boys in the back? Well then. Good. That’s good. I suppose I should read you a poem. But I was just thinking about something Shelley said . . . you know Shelley, fellow who wrote “Ozymandias”—it’s in your books. Friend of Byron, friend of Keats. Wife wrote Frankenstein. Anyhow, Shelley liked to say that we poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. They used to speak like that in those days—by the pound. Unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Wonder if it’s true. Wonder what it means. Does it mean we’re dangerous, like your headmaster says? What does your man Kellogg think? Is Mr. Kellogg here tonight?

  Frost waited, gazing out at us until George stood up, a couple of seats to my right. He looked furtive and damp. He looked like a sinner in a Last Judgment painting, about to get his due.

  And Frost, Frost looked like Himself up there in the pulpit. He was standing below one of the chandeliers, whose wintry light silvered his hair and made shadows on his weathered face. He didn’t look old; he looked eternal.

  He took George in. So, he said. Mr. Kellogg. That was quite a piece of legislation you wrote. Bet you had some fun with it too, holding the old man’s feet to the fire. Good for you, good for you. Old men should have their feet held to the fire—keeps ’em awake.

  All right, boys, they’ve brought me down here to sing for my supper, so I’d better do some singing. Here’s one for you. No snow in here, Mr. Kellogg, but maybe we can find you some later on. I wrote this one when I was lonely for home, many years ago, in England. I expect you boys know about homesickness. It’s called “Mending Wall.”

  He lowered his eyes to read and George wilted back into the pew.

  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

  That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

  And spills the upper boulders in the sun . . .

  He picked his way slowly through the first line, as if the thought were just occurring to him, and then his dry voice filled like a sail and became good-humored and natural and young. When his farmer said Spring is the mischief in me I smiled, because I’d already felt the mischief at work in him as he came alive in the warm day, carrying stones to the wall, watching his neighbor do the same, struck by the pointlessness of their labor and unable to resist teasing his neighbor about it. I had read the poem and thought I understood it: All walls should come down. But in Frost’s voice the scene became newly vivid, and I caught something I’d missed; that for all the narrator’s ironic superiority, the neighbor had his truth too. The image of him moving in the shadows like an old-stone savage armed—he himself was a good reason to have a wall, the living proof of his own argument that good fences make good neighbors. Maybe something doesn’t like a w
all, but take it down at your peril.

  Frost was good at masking his eyes under those hanging brows, but now and then I saw him shift his gaze from the page to us without losing a word. He wasn’t reading; he was reciting. He knew these poems by heart yet continued to make a show of reading them, even to the extent of pretending to lose his place or have trouble with the light.

  His awkwardness took nothing from his poems. It removed them from the page and put them back in the voice, a speculative, sometimes cunning, sometimes faltering voice. In print, under his great name, they had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being.

  Frost read on, poem after poem, until the underclassmen began to cough and set their pews groaning. Then he raised his head and took us in. You boys are champion sitters, he said. You’ve got Sitzfleisch, as our great new friends the Germans would say. That’s enough for one night, eh? Maybe just one more—what do you think—for your man Kellogg. Yes? All right then. I have just the poem here. I believe Mr. Kellogg knows it.

  Still looking at us, Frost recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Then he gathered his books and pages while we applauded. The headmaster went up the steps, conferred with Frost, came down again and raised his hand for silence. Mr. Frost, he said, had agreed to take a few questions, if we had any.

  I had some. How did he know he was a good writer for all those years when nobody else knew? What did it feel like to write something really great? Why did he choose George’s poem?

  Sir, if I may . . .

  I looked around. It was Mr. Ramsey. He was standing in his pew. Even in this dimness his chubby cheeks showed their youthful English bloom. Mrs. Ramsey was plucking at something on her sleeve. He had married her four years earlier right out of some southern women’s college where he’d taught after leaving Oxford. She was just a freshman at the time, and Mr. Ramsey lost his job and brought her north to Putney and then to us. Mrs. Ramsey worked in the library and never lacked for boys willing to help. She wore her honey-colored hair in long girlish braids, and smelled good, and her voice was low and pleasantly southern. She had a teasing manner, and looked at us as if she knew what we were thinking.