The sun was shifting in the sky: now, the afternoon had begun to wane. Overhead, a soughing in the treetops.
Half-consciously I’d been smelling something both sweet and mildly astringent—a smell of fresh-cut grass. There came to me a blurred memory of childhood, like frost on a windowpane through which you can see only the outline of a figure, or a shadow. The poet is the emissary to childhood, and all things lost. I thought He is not a wicked man, that he can lead us there. If only he would not misuse his power.
The ticking of the windup clock merged with cries of crickets in the tall grasses at the edge of the clearing. Uncertain what I should do, I glanced through my notebook pages, as Mr. Frost sighed, and stirred. He opened a single eye, and regarded me quizzically: “In your printed piece, I suppose you will mention the alarm clock, dear Evangeline? It’s because I hate watches, you see. Wearing a watch, as fools do, is like wearing a badge of your own mortality.”
These mordant words, I recorded in my notebook.
“The poem is always about ‘mortality,’ you see. The poem is the poet’s mainstay against death.”
In the trees overhead, that soughing sound that is both pleasurable and discomfiting, like a memory to which emotion accrues. Except we have forgotten the emotion.
Belatedly Mr. Frost offered me a glass of lemonade, which I poured for myself, as I replenished the poet’s glass as well; for Mr. Frost was one of those men who seem incapable of lifting a hand to serve themselves, still less others. This, I didn’t at all mind doing, of course, for I’d been trained to serve, especially my influential elders.
I took a small sip of the lukewarm, oversweet lemonade. My mouth was very dry.
I resumed the interview with a friendly, familiar sort of question: “Mr. Frost, will you tell the readers of Poetry Parnassus what you hope to convey in your poetry?”
Mr. Frost laughed derisively. “If I ‘hoped to convey’ something, Miss Fife, I would send a telegram.”
Very good! I laughed, and wrote this down.
In my schoolgirl fashion I went through a list of questions aimed to draw from the poet quotable quotes which would be valuable to the readers of Poetry Parnassus, virtually all of them poets themselves. Pleasurably, Mr. Frost leaned back, his hands locked behind his neck, stretched and yawned and answered my questions in his New England drawl which was both self-mocking and sincere. Countless times the great poet had been interviewed; countless times he’d answered these very questions, which he’d memorized, as he had memorized his carefully thought-out replies. Unlike other poets who would have become restless, irritable, and bored being asked familiar questions, Mr. Frost seemed to bask in the familiarity, indeed like a Buddha who never tires of being worshipped. How different this slack-faced old man was from the dreamy-eyed poet in his early twenties, on my bedroom wall! Long ago he’d composed his aphoristic replies, worn smooth now as much-handled stones. Free verse—“Playing tennis without a net.” Poetry—“A momentary stay against confusion.” Lyric poetry—“Ice melting on a hot stove.” Love—“An irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” On invitations to poetry “festivals”: “If I’m not the show, I don’t go.” Opinion of rival Amy Lowell—“A fake.” Opinion of rival T. S. Eliot—“A fake.” Opinion of rival Ezra Pound: “A fake.” Opinion of rival Archibald MacLeish: “A fake.” Opinion of rival Wallace Stevens: “Bric-a-brac fake!” Opinion of rival Carl Sandburg: “Hayseed fake! Always strumming his geetar. Everything about Sandburg is studied—except his poetry.”
From time to time the vatic voice took on a sound of Olympian melancholy, as a god might meditate upon the folly of humankind from above. “Everything I’ve learned about life can be summed up in three words: ‘It goes on.’”
(Yet even these somber reflections, the poet presented to the interviewer as one might hold out, in the palm of his hand, the most exquisite little gems.)
“And what is poetry, Mr. Frost?”
“Poetry is—what is lost in translation.”
Mr. Frost paused, then continued, thoughtfully: “A poem is a stream of words that begins in delight and ends in wisdom. But, as it is poetry and not prose, it is a kind of music—a matter of sound in the ear. I hear everything I write.”
This I took up with a canny little query: “Do you mean you hear—literally, Mr. Frost? Words in your head?”
Mr. Frost frowned. Though he liked very much to be listened-to, he did not like being queried. “I—speak aloud—to myself. The poem is a matter of measured syllables, iambics, for instance, that produce a work of—poetry.” Abruptly he ceased. What sense did this make? The young woman interviewer gazing at him so avidly with her widened heal-all-blue eyes had become just subtly disconcerting.
“A poem is ‘sound over sense’?”
“No. A poem is not ‘sound over sense’—not my poetry! The babbling of that pretentious prig Tom Eliot might qualify, or infantile lowercase e.e. cummings—but not the poetry of Robert Frost.”
And again cannily I asked, “Do you ever ‘hear voices,’ Mr. Frost? As you are composing your poems?”
Mr. Frost frowned. The large jaws clenched. A look of something like fright came into the faded-icy-blue eyes. “No. I did not—ever—‘hear voices.’ The poet is not, as Socrates seemed to believe, in the grip of a ‘demon’—the poet is in control of the ‘demon.’”
“But there is a ‘demon’?”
“No! There is not a ‘demon’—this is a way of speaking metaphorically. Poetry is the speech of metaphor.” Mr. Frost was frowning at me, dangerously; yet I persisted, with my innocently naïve questions:
“But, Mr. Frost—what is metaphor? And why is metaphor the speech of poetry?”
The poet snorted with the sort of derision that would have roused gales of laughter in an admiring audience. “Dear Miss Fife! You might as well ask a mockingbird why he sings as he does, appropriating the songs of other birds, as ask a poet why he speaks as he does. If you have to ask, my dear girl, it may be that you are incapable of understanding.”
This scathing rejoinder would have eviscerated another, more subtle interviewer, but did not deter me, for I felt the truth of the poet’s observation, and did not resent it.
“But you have never ‘heard voices’ and you’ve never claimed to have ‘second sight’?”—I pressed these issues, for I knew that Mr. Frost would not volunteer any truth about himself that might detract from his image of the homespun New England bard.
“Miss Fife, I’ve told you—no.”
“And you’ve never had—‘second sight’?”
Scornfully Mr. Frost asked, “What is ‘second sight’?”
“The ability to see into the future, Mr. Frost. To feel premonitions—to prophesize.”
Mr. Frost snorted in derision. In his eyes, a small flicker of alarm. “Old wives’ tales, my dear. Maybe in your Scots family, but not in mine.”
Adding then, in a smaller voice, “Why would anyone want to ‘see into the future’! That would be a—a—curse . . .”
In the elderly poet’s face an expression of such pain, such loss, such grief, such terror of what cannot be spoken, I looked aside for a moment in embarrassment. Thinking But he is just an old, lonely man. It is mercy he deserves, not justice.
And for that moment thinking perhaps I would take pity on him, beginning by destroying the humiliating snapshots in my Kodak Hawkeye. Then, Mr. Frost resumed his bemused, chiding, superior masculine voice: “Miss Fife! Tell your avid readers that poetry is very mystery. Quite above the heads of all. No matter what the poet tries to tell you.”
But readily I countered: “Yet, the poet builds upon predecessors. Who have been your major influences, Mr. Frost?”
Mr. Frost looked at me startled, as if a child had reared up to confront him. “My—‘influences’? Very few . . . Life has been my influence.”
“But not Thomas Hardy?”
“No.”
“Not Keats, not Shelley, not Wordsworth, not William Collins—”
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br /> “No! Not to the degree that life has been my influence.”
The thundery look in Mr. Frost’s face warned me not to pursue this line of questioning, for of all sensitive issues it is “influences” that most rankle and roil even the greatest geniuses, like the suggestion that others have helped them crucially in their careers. Yet I couldn’t resist asking why Frost had so low an opinion of Ezra Pound, who’d been extremely generous to him when he’d been a struggling unpublished poet when they’d first met in England.
Mr. Frost shut his eyes, shook his head vigorously. No comment!
“Was Ezra Pound mistaken, or some sort of ‘fake,’ when he said that A Boy’s Will contained ‘the best poetry written in America in a long time’?”
Mr. Frost’s eyes remained shut. But his large, lined face sagged in an expression of regret.
“Well—even a, a ‘fake’—can be correct, now and then.” Cautiously Mr. Frost opened one of the faded-blue eyes, his gaze fixed upon me in mock-appeal. “As a clock that can’t keep time is yet correct twice each twenty-four hours.”
Still, I wasn’t to be placated. My next question was a sharp little blade, to be inserted into the fatty flesh of the poet, between the ribs: “But, Mr. Frost, weren’t you once a friend of Ezra Pound’s?”
“Miss Fife, why are you tormenting me with Pound? The man is a traitor to poetry, as he was a traitor to his country. A Fascist fool, an ingrate. No one can estimate when he became insane—he’s insane now. Enough of Pound!”
“And what is your opinion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?”
This was a sly question. For Mr. Frost’s Yankee conservatism was well known. Even more than Ezra Pound, “FDR” enraged the poet who stammered in indignation: “That—cripple! That Socialist fraud! ‘FDR’s’ brain was as deformed as his body! Tried to hide the fact that he wasn’t a whole man—the idiot voters were taken in. And his wife—homely as the backside of a gorilla! Socialism is plain theft—taking from those of us who work, and work damned hard, and giving what we’ve earned to idlers and shirkers. My wife Elinor, a sensitive, educated woman, nonetheless raved about ‘FDR’ that if she could, she would’ve killed him!—which suggests the man’s monstrousness, that he would provoke a genteel woman like Elinor Frost to such rage. You may call me selfish, Miss Fife—yes, I am a ‘selfish artist’ for I believe that art must be self-generated, and has nothing to do with the collective. ‘Doing good’ is a lot of hokum! I would not give a red cent to see the world ‘improved’—for, if it were”—here Mr. Frost’s voice quavered coyly, for he’d made this remark numerous times to numerous interviewers—“what in hell would we poets write about?”
My shocked response was expected, too. And my widened blue eyes.
“Why, Mr. Frost! You can’t mean that . . .”
“Can’t I! I certainly do, dear Evangeline. Have you not read my poem ‘Provide, Provide’—in a nutshell, there is Frost’s economic theory. Provide for yourself even if it means selling yourself—‘boughten’ friendship is better than none.” The chuckle came, deep and deadly. “Just don’t expect me to provide for you.”
“But—you are acquainted with poverty, Mr. Frost, aren’t you? Quite extreme poverty?”
“No.”
“N-No? Not when you were a child, and later when you were married and trying to support a young family on your grandfather’s farm in Derry . . .”
“No! The Frosts were frugal, but we were not—ever—poor.”
“When your father died in San Francisco, your mother was not left—destitute?”
“Miss Fife, ‘destitute’ is an extreme word. I think that you are insulting my family. This line of questioning has come to an end.”
Mr. Frost’s face was flushed with indignation, of the hue of an overripe tomato. He’d been striking the swing seat beside him with the flyswatter as if he’d have liked to be striking me.
“You don’t think that we have a moral duty to take care of others? Did Wordsworth feel that way?”
“Wordsworth! What did Wordsworth know! The old windbag didn’t have to contend with our infernal IRS tax, Miss Fife! He did not have to contend with the slimy New Deal!”
Between us there was an agitation of the air. The very lemonade in my glass quivered, as if the earth had shaken.
Seeing that the poet was about to banish me, having lost patience with even my wanly blond good-girl looks, I plunged boldly head-on:
“Is it true, Mr. Frost, that as a young man not yet married you were so depressed you tried to commit suicide in the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina?”
Mr. Frost’s cheeks belled in indignation. “‘Dismal Swamp’! Who has been telling you such—slander? It is not true . . .”
“Didn’t you suspect that Elinor had been unfaithful to you, and so you wanted to punish her, and yourself, in a Romantic gesture?”
“Ridiculous! It’s for effete poets like Hart Crane to commit suicide—or utter fakes or failures like Chatterton and Vachel Lindsay—not whole-minded poets. A man with a wife and a family to bind him to the earth doesn’t go gallivanting off and kill himself.”
“But your poems are filled with images of darkness and destruction, Mr. Frost. The woods that are ‘lovely, dark and deep’—except the speaker has ‘promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.’ The poem is obviously about a yearning to die, but a resistance to that yearning, and a regret over the resistance.”
“Balderdash, Miss Fife! Though you are a pretty lass, you are also a hysterical female. Reading into poems nasty little messages that aren’t there, like looking into a mirror and seeing a snake-headed female who is there, and who has your secret face.”
Vehemently the poet spoke, and not very coherently. The red flushed face swelled and throbbed as with an incipient stroke. Yet, I persisted: “Why don’t you ever read your ‘dark’ poems to audiences, Mr. Frost? Why only your perpetual favorites, which audiences have memorized in school? Are you afraid that they will be offended by the darker, more difficult poems, and wouldn’t applaud you as usual? Wouldn’t give you standing ovations, that so thrill your heart? Wouldn’t buy your books in such great numbers?”
Flush-faced Mr. Frost told me that I had no idea what I was saying. And that I’d better turn off the damned tape recorder, or he would smash it. “Enough! This ridiculous interview is concluded. I suggest that you leave now—exactly the way you’d crept in.”
Yet boldly I asked Mr. Frost about his patriotic poem of 1942, “The Gift Outright,” with its remarkable line “The land was ours before we were the land’s”—“Could you explain to the readers of Poetry Parnassus what this astonishing statement means?”
Mr. Frost had taken up the dingy red plastic flyswatter, tapping it restlessly against the swing railing. His voice was heavy with sarcasm: “Assuming the readers of Poetry Parnassus can comprehend English, I see no reason to ‘explain’ a single word.”
“Mr. Frost, this is indeed a provocative statement!”
“Damn you, ‘Fife,’ what are you getting at? Frost is not ‘provocative’—Frost is ‘consoling.’ Audiences have loved ‘The Gift Outright’ whether they understand it, or not. The poem tells us that our ancestors, who settled the New World, were ‘of the land’ in a way that later generations can’t be, because we are American citizens; and that the ‘land’—our country, America—is a ‘gift outright.’ It is ours.”
Seeing the expression on my face, which was one of utter transparency, the poet said, irritably, “Is it each individual word that perplexes you, Miss Fife, or their collective meaning?”
“Mr. Frost, the collective meaning of your poem seems to endorse ‘Manifest Destiny’—the right of American citizens to claim all of North America, virtually. It totally excludes native Americans—the numerous tribes of Indians—who lived in North America long before the European settlers arrived. British, Spanish invaders—‘Caucasians.’”
Mr. Frost cast me a smile of glaring incredulity. “Miss Fife! For God’s sake—are you s
eriously suggesting that Indians are native Americans?”
“Yes! They are human beings, aren’t they?”
“Human, but primitive. Beings, but closer to the animal rung of the ladder than to our own.” Mr. Frost tapped the flyswatter on his knee, with a dangerous squint of his eye. “You may put this in your interview, Miss Fife, that Robert Frost believes in civilization—which is to say the Caucasian civilization.”
“But, Mr. Frost, the indigenous people you call ‘Indians’ were the original native Americans. Caucasians from the British Isles and from Europe came to this continent as settlers, explorers, and tradesmen—with no respect for the native Americans living here, they appropriated the land, exploited and attempted genocide against the natives, and are doing so even now, in less obvious ways, in many parts of the country. And your poem ‘The Gift Outright,’ which might have addressed this issue with a poet’s sharp eye, instead—”
Smirking Mr. Frost interrupted, with a sharp slap of the flyswatter, “Miss Fife! ‘Genocide’ is a pretty hifalutin’ term for what our brave settlers did—conquered the wilderness, established a decent civilization . . .”
“But there was not a ‘wilderness’ here—there were Indian civilizations, living on the land. Of course, the original inhabitants were not city dwellers—they lived in nature. But—surely they had their own civilizations, different from our own?”
How surprised Mr. Frost was by the passion with which I spoke!
You might have thought, as Mr. Frost was possibly thinking, that there was something not quite right about this interviewer from Poetry Parnassus with her tape recorder and notebook and straw satchel who was persisting, despite the poet’s obvious agitation: “Mr. Frost—is it possible that your audiences have been deceived, and that you aren’t a ‘homespun New England bard’ but something very different? An emissary from ‘dark places’—an American poet who sees and defends the very worst in us, without apology—in fact, with a kind of pride?”
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