Elinor has never been of any earthly use to me. She hasn’t cared whether I went to school or worked or earned anything. She has resisted every inch of the way my efforts to get money. She is not too sure that she cares about my reputation. She wouldn’t lift a hand to have me lift a hand to increase my reputation or even to save it. . . . She always knew I was a good poet, but that was between her and me, and there I think she would have liked it if it had remained at least until we were dead. . . .
Frost, even in great poverty and defiance, was as far as anyone could be from the poète maudit or the bohemian. In his personality and in his conception of the dramatic possibilities of the literary life, he appears to have united two strains. On the one hand he shows a clear connection with the old New England sages in their role of public instructors. Emerson was a hero of Frost’s and Emerson’s great career as a lecturer was of course not lost upon his young admirer. The two men were indeed different, but Frost with his poems and his sagacious anecdotes meant, as much as Emerson in his lectures, to save the nation. The writer counted, he was an important public figure and his ideas were urgent. Secondly, Frost seems to have been stirred by the vast audiences, both literary and public, of men like Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay. The sales of Spoon River were extremely annoying to him. The fantastic popularity of the manic performances of Vachel Lindsay made their point. (So greatly stressful has the life of a writer ever been in America that Lindsay, when his hold upon things began to weaken, drank Lysol, saying as he sank into death, “They tried to get me, I got them first.”) E. A. Robinson and Frost gradually took the attention away from Lindsay and Masters. (Masters, in his quite unusually interesting biography of Lindsay, published in 1935, says that the Jews were to blame for the vogue of the New Englanders. To the Jews, “pioneers are objects of aversion. . . .” By “pioneer” he did not signify anything technical or revolutionary, but rather that he and Lindsay were Middle Westerners.) In any case, forensic powers were part of the writer’s baggage as Frost saw it.
The relation of Frost to other poets was frankly one of rivalry—indeed one of frank rivalry. He had a certain good-natured, off-hand way of expressing this that saved him from any hint of fanaticism, but it must be said that he was quite anxious about E. A. Robinson’s reputation. He made fun of Wallace Stevens’s “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” He was ungracious about Walter de la Mare (“I have been in no mood to meet Walter de la Mare. He is one of the open questions with me, like what to do with Mexico”), and even had the odd notion that de la Mare was an imitator of Edward Thomas, who in turn was Frost’s most important disciple. In late life when Frost, visiting out in Ohio, was taken to see the old reclusive poet, Ralph Hodgson, he reported, “I couldn’t see that it gave Ralph Hodgson much pleasure to see me. . . .” Frost was a man of great culture, of naturally good taste, and had the deepest seriousness about poetry—it was vanity and not simplicity of mind that led him to fear his great contemporaries. His praise went to Untermeyer, Raymond Holden, and Dr. Merrill Moore. That the Nobel Prize should have gone to T. S. Eliot and Camus he considered, as Untermeyer tells us, “a personal affront.”
Frost’s private life was marked by the regular appearance of disaster. Except for his devotion to his wife and—what to call it?—the clamorous serenity of his old age, he was spared little. His sister went insane during the First World War. His letter about her condition is not sacrificial. “As I get older I find it easier to lie awake nights over other people’s troubles. But that’s as far as I go to date. In good time I will join them in death to show our common humanity.” His most talented daughter, Marjorie, died late in her twenties and his wife never fully recovered from her grief. She herself died suddenly, leaving Frost utterly bereft and disorganized. Untermeyer describes this period: “It was hard for Robert to maintain his balance after Elinor’s death. He sold the Amherst house where he and Elinor had lived; he resigned from the college; he talked recklessly, and for the first time in his life the man whose favorite tipple was ginger ale accepted any drink that was offered.”
After a sad life spent in a futile attempt to become a writer, Frost’s son, Carol, committed suicide. Another daughter broke down and had to be put in an institution. There is no doubt that Frost grieved deeply over these tragedies—horrors the audiences coming to see him and to read him knew nothing of. Still he endured and he gradually settled down to his spectacular old age and to those multifarious activities that made his final image.
His reputation as a poet was, one might say, put into order by the brilliant essays of Randall Jarrell. Those essays—so far as I can be sure without an index—are not mentioned in the letters to Untermeyer. They had a stunning effect upon Frost’s reputation with the most serious young writers and readers. At the end, Frost was in with everyone, with Sherman Adams and W. H. Auden alike. This is a circumstance of great rarity in our literature. Of course, it was the nature of Frost’s poetic talent, as well as the prodigality of it, that allowed this ubiquitous prospering of his work. As Yvor Winters puts it: “A popular poet is always a spectacle of some interest, for poetry in general is not popular; and when the popular poet is also within limits a distinguished poet, the spectacle is even more curious. . . . When we encounter such a spectacle, we may be reasonably sure of finding certain social and historical reasons for the popularity.” Winters goes on to say that Frost writes of rural subjects and “the American reader of our time has an affection for rural subjects . . .” and so on. In spite of the misinterpretations of some of Frost’s readers, he was at least to everyone readable. How difficult it is to imagine even so well-liked a poet as T. S. Eliot at the Eisenhower board. Perhaps Eisenhower did not even read Frost, but if he had he could certainly have understood at least some of his work; one cannot be sure of a patience for “Prufrock” or “Journey of the Magi.”
One of the most arresting aspects of Frost’s character was his genuine interest in power. And for him power did not lie, as it does with most artists, in the comradeship or the approval of the avant-garde. Also, he cared nothing for “smart” people, for chicness, for the usual intellectual celebrity world. What he liked was the institutionalized thing. He was perfectly serious in his relationship to power. When he was Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress he expected to be “consulted,” and not about what went on the poetry shelf, but after important matters of state. So great was his idea of public possibility that he went beyond factionalism, serving Republican and Democrat in turn, in a spirit of poet-laureatism and also in some strangely conceived Public Spokesman mask. His political ideas were usually capricious. A certain coldness entered into his notions. If he had a consistent political theme it was self-reliance. The New Deal with its atmosphere of optimistic enthusiasm was antipathetic to him. But Frost was not in any way a fanatic. He never went very far; somehow inside him there was always the desire to please. Take Untermeyer for instance: layered over his person, like a house with its coat after coat of paint, is nearly every folly and every enthusiasm of liberal belief of the last forty years. Frost teased him; he never became angry with him or broke with him. The independent old Vermonter side of Frost has been exaggerated. He was indeed independent, but he wanted to count, to have importance: this gave him a steady flow of prudence. Frost did not even want disciples. That would be a two-way street and except for those in his family he didn’t want to share himself. (Edward Thomas died in the First World War.)
The strain of some unnamed trouble that we feel in Frost is inexplicable. He was brilliant, adored, available, and even his resentments were not the sort that stripped a man of his charm. They did form his ideas to some degree. Somehow he had suffered and come through: there are no Welfare State lessons to be learned from that. There is, instead, only the example of individual initiative. Even his relation to those people who, like Ezra Pound, had the highest regard for his powers was touched by ambivalence. Amy Lowell wrote an early and very impressive essay about him, but he was, if pleased, not entirely
satisfied. (Didn’t like what she said about his wife and was not happy to share the stage with Robinson.) The only mention I can find—in Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s book—that Frost actually made of Randall Jarrell is not about Jarrell’s writing and is a bit querulous: “Randall Jarrell thinks poets aren’t helped enough. But I say poetry has always lived on a good deal of neglect.” We shall have to wait for other Frost letters to get his full opinion of Untermeyer.
But Frost was not a conservative, either. He was only a writer. He did not care for money, but for position, whatever position he could gain from his work as a poet. Sometimes we feel he bought his claim to the Old American virtues at a considerable price. He was fulfilled, charming, and he lived to a great old age and yet to go back over his life, in these letters, back, back, to the early years of the century, fills us with a sadness too. At the end, sick, tired, too old for the journey, he paid a visit to Khrushchev—interestingly described by his companion, F. D. Reeve, in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly. What he had come for, we find out, was not for the ceremonial edification of both countries. Frost had, in truth, gone to Russia to tell Khrushchev how to settle the question of Berlin.
1963
RING LARDNER
WHEN RING Lardner died in 1933, Scott Fitzgerald wrote an interesting and somewhat despairing tribute to him. “The point of these paragraphs is that, whatever Ring’s achievement was, it fell short of the achievement he was capable of, and this because of a cynical attitude toward his work.” Fitzgerald thought Lardner had developed the habit of silence about important things and that he fell back in his writing on the formulas he always had ready at hand. It is easy to imagine how this might have appeared true thirty years ago when the memory of the great short story writer working away at his daily comic strip text was still painfully near to those who cared about him. Lardner was a perplexing man, often careless about his own talents. How to account for the element of self-destroying indifference in the joshing preface to How to Write Short Stories, a volume that contained “My Roomy,” “Champion,” “Some Like Them Cold,” and “The Golden Honeymoon.” Edmund Wilson’s review of this volume in The Dial spoke warmly about the stories and mentioned the disturbing unsuitability of the preface, which he found so far below Lardner’s usual level that “one suspects him of a guilty conscience at attempting to disguise his talent for social observation and satire.” If Lardner knew of this criticism, he was unmoved by it and introduced The Love Nest in a similar manner. (That volume contained, among others, “Haircut” and “Zone of Quiet.”) The palpable incongruity of the jocular prefaces as an introduction to the superlatively bitter stories serves as a mirror to the strangeness of Lardner’s personality and work.
Reading Lardner again now is almost a new experience. Somewhat unexpectedly one finds that he has a dismal cogency to a booming America: his subjects are dishonesty, social climbing, boastfulness, and waste. For that reason, Maxwell Geismar’s new collection is valuable as a way of bringing Lardner once more to public notice. This new volume, because of larger print, is easier to read than the Viking Portable Ring Lardner, but it is not otherwise an improvement. Indeed the Viking Portable has the advantage of the complete text of “You Know Me, Al” and “The Big Town.” Geismar’s preface does not supply more than the usual demand; nevertheless his selection will not fail anyone who wants the unsettling experience of discovering Ring Lardner or of rediscovering him.
Out of a daily struggle to make a living by literary work of various kinds, Lardner produced many short stories and some longer works of great originality. These stories were also immensely popular and nothing touches us more than this rare happening. In a country like ours where there will necessarily be so much journalism, so much support of the popular, the successful, we are complacently grateful when we find the genuine among the acceptable. And with Lardner there is something more: he made literature out of baseball, the bridge game, and the wisecrack. Of course he was terribly funny, but even in his funniest stories there is a special desolation, a sense of national spaces filled by stupidity and vanity.
Now, in the 1960s, the distance from the twenties reduces some of the journalistic aspects of Lardner’s writing. We are struck most of all by his difference from popular writing today. His is a miserable world made tolerable only by a maniacal flow of wisecracks. “That’s Marie Antoinette’s bed,” the four-flusher says as he shows a couple around his Riverside Drive apartment. The wisecracker asks, “What time does she usually get in it?” When the wife says, “Guess who called me today?” the husband answers, “Josephus Daniels or Henry Ford. Or maybe it was the guy with the scar on his lip that you thought was smiling at you the other day.” Out of the plain, unabashed gag, and the cruel dialogue of domestic life, Lardner created his odd stories, with their curious speed, rush of situation, explosion of insult, and embarrassment.
Lardner’s characters have every mean fault, but they lack the patience to do much with their meanness. The busher is boastful and stingy, and yet quite unable, for all his surface shrewdness, to discover his real place in the scheme of things. He is always being dropped by the women he had boasted about and all his stinginess cannot help to manage his affairs. Lardner’s stories are filled with greedy, grasping people who nevertheless go bankrupt. You cannot say they are cheated, since they are themselves such awful cheats. The Gullibles have the fantastic idea of going to Palm Beach to get into “society.” Mrs. Gullible does at last meet Mrs. Potter Palmer in the corridor of the hotel and Mrs. Palmer asks her to put more towels in her suite. The squandering of an inheritance by the characters in “The Big Town” shows a riotous lack of elementary common sense. The husbands usually have some idea of the cost of things and of the absurdity of their wives’ ambitions. But they cannot act upon their knowledge. It comes out only in the constant static of their wisecracks. Wildly joking, they go along with their wives into debt and humiliation. It is hard to feel much sympathy and yet occasionally one does so: the sympathy comes, when it does, from the fact that the jokes played upon these dreadful people are after all thoroughly real and mean. Even the language they speak with such immense, dismaying humor is a kind of joke on real language, funnier and more cutting than we can bear.
Vanity, greed, and cruel humor are the themes of Lardner’s stories. The lack of self-knowledge is made up for by a dizzy readiness with cheap alibis. No group or class seems better than another; there is a democracy of cheapness and shallowness. Lies are at the core of nearly every character he produces for us. The only fear is being caught out, exposed to the truth. Love cannot exist because the moment it runs into trouble the people lie about their former feelings. Because of the habit of lying, it is a world without common sense. The tortured characters are not always victims. They may be ruined and made fun of, but they have the last word. They bite the leg that kicks them.
“Haircut” is one of the cruelest pieces of American fiction. Even Lardner seems to have felt some need for relief from the relentless evil of the smalltown joker and so he has him killed in the end. This cruel story is just about the only one that has the contrast of decent people preyed upon by a maniac. “Champion” is brutal and “The Golden Honeymoon” is a masterpiece of grim realism. Alfred Kazin speaks of the “harsh, glazed coldness” of Lardner’s work. He wrapped his dreadful events in a comic language, as you would put an insecticide in a bright can.
Lardner’s personality is very difficult to take hold of. In spite of poor health that came, so far as I can discover, from his devastating drinking, he had the continuing productivity of the professional journalist. He went to work every morning. Why he drank, why his views were so bitter are a mystery. He came from a charming, talented family and married a woman he loved. He was kind, reserved, hard-working; his fictional world is loud, cruel, filled with desperate marriages, hideous old age, suburban wretchedness, fraud, drunkenness. Even the sports world is degraded and athletes are likely to be sadists, crooks, or dumbbells. The vision is thoroughly desp
erate. All the literature of the thirties and forties does not contain such pure subversion, snatched on the run from the common man and his old jokes.
1963
GRUB STREET
Washington
HE IS IMAGINARY, not meant to be a true person. As a young man he showed an interest in public affairs, showed it early, but, of course, he was too bookish, too arrogant, too much disliked to think of real politics, of the state legislature, the Senate. And yet his earliest moral frustration came from his sense of history and biography, his living through today and yet imagining how it would all appear in a book tomorrow. He had only to read the newspapers to be seized by the agony of lost opportunities, the refusal of presidents and leaders to greet the true moment, utter the simple eloquence, jump into the open pit of possibility for memorable behavior, note the instance with a ready witticism. He had always wanted to help them. For he knew that few Americans slice their own bread: much that an American leader does and thinks is done for him. The president is a vessel into which suitable waters are daily poured. But at the same time he is a difficult man and it is only a sort of hollow arm he will allow to be filled up by expert waters. For the rest, he keeps himself dismayingly dry. All of our recent history shows the inability or refusal of our leaders to be other than themselves, as they were born. They will not undergo for us that dramatic metamorphosis the imagination and the spirit long for. Accents from babyhood stutter down through history, forever recorded on a thousand tapes. A president needs only to be, not to become. And our imaginary helper, the writer who would somehow live and write history simultaneously, suffers pitifully. Having successfully attained an elective office seems to freeze the personality in its winning shape. Only an idiot would tamper with success. An elected official does not fear the knowledge of professors or heed the vexations of aesthetes.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 17