Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  The year 1912, then, marked a self-appointed climacteric in Frost’s life. Determined to make a clean break with his discouraging past, he had fixed on the idea of transferring his whole family to England for an indefinite span. There, on the soil that had produced so many of the fine poets he admired, he felt that his talents would bloom and be appreciated. England held out the hope of the success that had so far eluded him in his native land. Gathering all his available resources together, including the annual stipend left to him by Grandfather Frost, the poet had just managed to cover the cost of the trip and a reasonable term abroad.

  Elinor and the children were excited by the prospect. Even Elinor’s frequent nervous depression—a recurring melancholy matched only by her husband’s, who shared with his sister Jeanie a congenital disposition to black moods—lifted in the face of the foreign rebirth. Happily packing their many trunks, Elinor and the Frost children had speculated gaily on the new life that awaited them. Frost thought they sounded like a flock of the happy oven- birds he oft admired on his botanizing walks, and was pleased.

  The family was set to sail from Boston on August the twenty-third.

  A month prior to that date, Frost entered hell.

  It was late evening. Frost had been out alone on a ramble, wandering the hills around Derry, his head stuffed with fragments of poems, visions of public accolades, visits to Westminster Abbey. Unlike many such occasions, he had forborne to take any of his children with him, neither his son Carol nor any of the girls. He had started late from home, and moreover he wanted his solitude.

  Now, eager to regain his hearthside, nearing the road to his farm, Frost was disconcerted by unnatural activity at several of the neighboring homesteads. Flickering oil lamps behind curtained windows revealed that the diligent farmers and their wives were up and about much too late, as if agitated like a troubled hornets’ nest.

  Intuitively fearing that the source of the neighborhood turmoil lay for some reason at his own residence, Frost quickened his pace. Could one of the children have fallen ill or been injured? Ever since the death of their first boy, Elliott, Frost had lived in fear of just such a tragedy.

  The scent of smoke alerted him to the actual nature of the catastrophe. He began to run.

  The entire Frost homestead, outbuildings included, raged as a solar inferno, unnaturally dispelling the night. In the rabid lineaments of the conflagration, Frost discerned a leering demonic face that conformed to the visage of his darkest terrors. A demon arising from his wallow to laugh, brushing the dirt from his eyes as he rose. And well Frost knew what the demon meant.

  The useless equipment of the Derry Volunteer Fire Corps was ranked at a safe distance from the inferno, firefighters seeking to calm their nervous horses, despite their own human horror.

  A familiar-looking mustachioed man with soot-streaked face, his name driven from Frost’s brain by the mortal circumstances, warily approached Frost.

  “I’m sorry, Bob, but not a soul escaped. I’m sure it was quick for them though. The smoke itself—”

  Those implacable words were the last sounds Frost was cognizant of for the next several days. His mind deserted his body and he collapsed to the warm, grass-tufted soil, the mockery of its rich summer fragrance of birth and growth competing with the charnel smell of the pyre.

  When he next gained some small possession of his senses, he found himself in a half-familiar bedroom. Gradually he recognized the place as belonging to his friend Sidney Cox, a teacher at Plymouth High School. A nervous Cox himself sat in a chair beside the recumbent Frost. Upon seeing the older man’s eyes flicker open, Cox essayed a small smile and said, “Robert, welcome back to the world. You’ve been comatose for nearly a week, and we feared for your recovery.”

  Frost’s voice husked sepulchral. “You’re addressing a dead man, Sidney, with words that mean nothing.”

  Cox paled. “Don’t say that, Robert. You’ve experienced a huge tragedy, certainly, but one not unparalleled in human existence. Life goes on, after all. Surely all the worldly wisdom you’ve shared with me in our long talks will come now to your aid.”

  Silent a moment, Frost eventually replied, “I find all my high-minded concepts and speech-making utterly vacuous now, Sidney. A crushing but irrefutable realization has overtaken me. All my playing with tragedy prior to last week’s fatal night was just the action of a child seeking to frighten itself with shadows, simply to make the hearthside look brighter. I was a blissfully ignorant pedant until I saw everything that mattered to me go up in cruel flames. Not only were Elinor and the children of my flesh in that holocaust, but also all the children of my fancy. All my poems are ashes now, all the verses I meant for my first book. A Boy’s Will. Sidney, do you recall my projected tide? Well, both the boy who dreamed in verse and the man who sought to perfect those dreams are dead.”

  Cox gamely tried to dissuade Frost from this morbid conceit. “Then who am I talking to now, may I ask?”

  “A ghost, Sidney. A ghost.”

  Frost spent another week in Cox’s tender care. Some of that time was devoted to settling his affairs in Derry. He attended the closed-casket ceremony for his family, five coffins like so many loaves of hard bread out of the oven, and saw them interred. He found a buyer for the ruined farmstead, a neighboring farmer who generously paid more than the going rate for the property, out of sympathy for Frost’s loss. Frost banked the money without either discernable gratitude or embarrassment. What worth did this useless paper hold for a man in his position?

  When as a young man Frost had thought that his offer of marriage to Elinor had been spurned, he had done something romantically foolish, if not a little mad. Bumming his way south toward the Great Dismal Swamp, with half an eye toward self-destruction in that remote preserve beloved by poets from Longfellow onward, Frost turned his back on family, friends, and his art. Now that Elinor and his children and his hard-won stock of poems had been removed from him by Fate, he fixed on a similar course of action.

  Bidding a terse farewell to Cox and a few others, Frost set out upon the longest ramble of his life.

  Up and down the eastern seaboard he roamed, afoot and by rail, or hitching rides from strangers in buckboards or the occasional newfangled horseless carriages. From Miami to Baltimore, Norfolk to Portland, he made his ceaseless, pointless migrations, seeking to expunge his grief with mad activity, to lose his individual suffering self among the nameless masses of men. For money, he wrote drafts upon his account in Derry, although sometimes he had a hard time convincing suspicious bank managers that the disheveled vagrant before them was the legitimate holder of these funds. His longest trip came when he hobo’d his way to San Francisco, the city of his birth and his first eleven years. There, surprisingly, amid the bittersweet memories of his childhood, he somehow derived a small nascent solace that allowed him to contemplate his future with some dim interest, albeit still no joy.

  Picking up a pen one idle moment as he sat in a cheap rented room in the Tenderloin, Frost wondered what his hand intended to produce.

  Much to his surprise, his long-tortured brain poured forth not a poem, but a tale. A horror tale, to be precise, one much like those of Poe, whom Frost had long admired. The story was titled “The Demiurge’s Laugh,” and sought to convey the hideous demon-spoken revelations Frost had derived from the immolation of his family, transplanted to the shoulders of another unfortunate.

  The year was now 1914. Frost kept the manuscript of the story with him as he resumed his peregrinations, for it continued to haunt him, even though confined now to paper. One day in Chicago, he gained access to a typewriter at a library and drafted a clean copy of the text. He stuffed the typescript into an envelope and mailed it, without any means for editorial reply, to The Black Cat magazine, hoping to rid himself of a burden.

  Half a year later, in Cleveland, he found his story in print on the newsstands.

  He contacted the editor of The Black Cat. Payment swiftly followed, and a generous request that
he submit more such stories.

  By now Frost—his thick shock of hair gone white at forty, his health half-ruined, his furrowed face a map of too much drink and too many nights spent under heavy weather—was heartily sick of the road, and resolved to settle down. At first he thought of making Baltimore his new home, in honor of Poe. But then his old love affair with New England reawakened. That region had always represented to him the best of the country, of America’s spirit. Northern New England, however, held too many painful associations, so he cast his eye toward the south.

  And found Providence.

  Frost arrived in the bustling industrial seaport at the head of Narragansett Bay in early 1916, just as his hoarded money was running out. After finding cheap lodgings, he began to write. At first, his occult stories were merely a means to survival. But soon they began to occupy the role of an essential pressure-release valve for his turbulent brain.

  Argosy and All-Story. Thrill Book and Scrap Book. Cavalier and Blue Book and Mystery Magazine. All soon had run horrific stories under the Robert Frost byline. “Ghost House,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “The Road Not Taken,” “The Oft- Repeated Dream,” “The Witch of Coos,” “A Passing Glimpse.” In two years’ time, Frost had amassed a considerable reputation among those readers and editors who appreciated the grimly fantastical.

  A reputation that was all ashes in his mouth. Necessary as these stories were to his mental health, they excited in him only the palest shade of the ecstasy and pride his poems had once brought him.

  Frost’s growing literary prominence among a certain set made it inevitable that he would attract the notice of one of his fellow Providence citizens possessed of similar interests.

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft was some sixteen years Frost’s junior, still a bright yet introverted mama’s boy at the age of twenty-eight. He was visibly shaken by the fact that his mother had recently been confined to Butler Mental Hospital, in that spring of 1919. He humbly approached Frost after arranging an interview for an amateur press publication. Frost found the younger man’s admiration flattering and his writerly ambitions amusing. Now that he had an audience, the ex-poet’s long-stifled old urges to hold forth in long lectures were reawakened now for the first time in seven years. Frost resolved to take Lovecraft under his wing.

  By the time Sarah Lovecraft died, in 1921, her son was a changed man. He had set up housekeeping on his own, rejecting the smothering nest offered by his spinster aunts. Inspired by Frost’s own professionalism, Lovecraft had broken into print himself with several beginner’s stories that found homes in the same publications that Frost’s appeared in.

  Although never happy or content, Frost took some small pleasure in the changes he had abetted in Lovecraft’s life. The older man relished using the younger as a sounding board for his coldblooded cogitations on the meaninglessness of the universe. The younger, calling his mentor “Grampa Jack” as a play on “Jack Frost,” seemed pleased mainly to listen, interjecting his own thoughts only occasionally.

  But the changes in Lovecraft’s personality had unintended consequences.

  Frost was first introduced to a pretty young hat maker and amateur-press aficionado named Sonia Greene when she arrived in Providence to visit Lovecraft. From the outset it was apparent that Lovecraft was as smitten with Sonia as she was with him.

  The announcement of their impending marriage and move to New York City struck Frost harder than he ever imagined it could. By now, the Eddys had joined the Lovecraft-Frost circle. But as a married couple with three children, they could hardly offer Frost the complete acolyte’s devotion that Lovecraft had provided.

  Lovecraft’s departure for New York in late 1923 threw Frost into a black funk. He ceased writing for several weeks, and sought relief from his melancholy in cheap dago wine from Federal Hill, and on the weary urban footpaths.

  But the latest news by letter from his ex-neighbor—in conjunction with Frost’s fiftieth birthday—had been a gust of wind that truly broke the spine of a birch already well bent.

  Lovecraft had been offered the editorship of the newly launched Weird Tales magazine, and had gleefully accepted.

  The gorgeous missus and I are off to Chicago, Grampa Jack! Who’d’a ever thunk this granite-ribbed Yankee would ever hie his carcass all the way out to the land of wheat and wide waters. Call me Clem and stir my coffee with a hog’s knuckle! But you can rest assured that yer boy geen-ye-us editor will not forget all the sharp lessons he’s larned at the feet of the Master. And now the pages of WT are wide open for some sockdolager Frostian shiver-makers!

  Frost crumpled the letter and flung it across his room. Down deep, he knew he should be pleased with Lovecraft’s rise in the world, and the younger man’s continued friendship. But the contrast with his own sorry condition overwhelmed any empathy.

  By his birthday of March 1924, Frost had reached the trough of his despair.

  The smallish house in East Providence that barely contained the bubbling Eddy family was a modest dwelling indeed. Two stories tall in the main, with a single-story addition, twin-chimney’d, set on a small lot on Second Street enclosed by a black-painted picket fence, the domicile rested comfortably in frowsy disrepair. The lack of funds in the Eddy exchequer, attributable to the Bohemian ways of Muriel and Clifford, necessitated many daily hard shifts. But the life of the mind they enjoyed, the conviviality of their socializing, and their dedication to matters of art offset any physical deprivations. That their children manifested a blithe indifference to their poverty added an aura of Edenic innocence to the household.

  That late morning of March 28, 1924, a Saturday, the sun shone brightly on the Eddy doorstep. The long winter’s grip, unrelenting until just yesterday, had finally broken, it seemed, and tokens of spring were apparent, from the greening buds of the lilac by the door to the greening scents in the gentle breeze, as if the belated season were striving to make up for lost time.

  Down Second Street trudged Robert Frost, hatless, his snowy hair a haycock. His perpetual air of scarred hopelessness seemed somewhat moderated by sheer enervation. Passing through the gate, he climbed the single step of the Eddy house and knocked.

  The door was soon thrown back by one of the Eddy children, a boisterous young girl named Flora.

  “Ma! Pa! It’s Uncle Bob!”

  Frost reached down and absent-mindedly tousled the girl’s dark hair, then moved past her into the house. A battered horsehide sofa, many books on shelves and scattered elsewhere, a framed Currier and Ives scene of a sleigh stopping by a woods on a snowy evening. An isolated gas jet illuminated a corner of the parlor where sunlight did not penetrate. There, a desk hosted Clifford Eddy’s typewriter and sheaves of work in progress. Clifford was not seated at his desk, however.

  Muriel appeared from the entrance to the kitchen. A stout, round-faced, dark-haired woman wearing glasses, Muriel beamed at the sight of her friend. The Eddys were not yet thirty, and possessed all the youthful exuberance that Frost and Elinor had once enjoyed.

  Wiping her hands on her apron, Muriel advanced across the room and hugged Frost. “We were just sitting down to some lunch, Bob. Won’t you join us?”

  “I suppose.”

  In the kitchen Frost encountered the rest of the Eddys: crag-faced Clifford and his Penrod-like sons, Alder and Maple, otherwise known as A1 and Mel. A spread of cold chicken, potato salad, homemade bread, and baked beans drew the hungry stares of the boys back after a brief polite acknowledgment of “Uncle Bob’s” arrival. Once Flora had drawn up her chair and said a brief grace, the family dived into their repast.

  Despite his ennui, Frost found himself possessed of an inordinate hunger. He fell on his food like a wolf, and the Eddys forbore from questioning his unannounced arrival, letting him enjoy his meal. Instead, the couple and children chatted of local matters, school chums and neighborhood gossip. Clifford and Muriel both sensed that any literary talk would be unwelcome. Frost maintained a dour silence.

 
When the last slice of bread had swabbed the final smear of mayonnaise, the children asked to be excused to play outside. Once they were gone, Frost broke down.

  “Cliff, Muriel—I’m at my wit’s end. I can’t deny the bitter truth any longer. I’ve wasted my whole life. All my fifty years have been just so much dust on the wind. When I was young and heedless of life’s innately tragic cast, I frittered my time away. I never pushed hard enough to get my poems into print. If I had really tried, I could have made my name by the time I was twenty-five. But I just didn’t have the gumption. Then, when—when I lost my family, I simply fell apart. I didn’t have the backbone or strength to start over with my poetry, so I threw away everything I had left, and became the pitiful specimen you see before you. I—I don’t know where to go from here, and I’m compounding my sins by dumping my problems in your laps.”