Our Savage Art

by William Logan

  Dont preach it now

  He says dont preach it now.

  Hes listening to us—every word we say […]

  Im feeling better since I had my spell.

  Thats probably his son. He’s state police

  He said we were as good as under arrest.

  Frost was listening to the voices around him and shaping them into verse. (Here and in the quotations that follow, for reasons that will become plain, I’ve made corrections to the editor’s transcripts after consulting copies of the notebooks.) It’s unfortunate that we cannot date such lines precisely; though they probably come from the period of North of Boston or later, they show how easily he molded homely speech into meter.

  Once he had freed himself from the stale perfume of the nineteenth century, Frost created a vernacular flexible within the limit of his expectation—the limit of what he wanted the poem to provide. He was capable of vivid description—a woodsy altar’s “black-cheeked stone and stick of rain-washed charcoal,” a man’s hand “like a white crumpled spider on his knee”—but he never let himself be lavish with metaphor. He parceled out his figures like a Yankee his nickels. Frost was not attracted, like Pound, to the romantic argot of the troubadours (hence “Bertran de Bornagain”) or, like Eliot, taken with tormented metaphors of the soul. The New England poet is unsettling more than he admits to being unsettled: compare “Desert Places,” a slightly terrifying poem, with “Hysteria,” where Eliot seems, as elsewhere, frantic and overemotional—the differences of temper are instructive.

  Some of the best passages in Frost’s notebooks are a register of overheard conversation—we can make inferences from what he set down, because poets record what they fear to forget. (Frost was always on the lookout for cheating clerks and calculating egg-salesmen.) If his eavesdropping reminds us how sharp-eared the poems were, in the notebooks you have to wade through a lot of woolgathering and pot-bellied-stove philosophizing to get to it. Frost thought a lot about man and society; he read Darwin, Marx, and Freud while claiming to be an anti-intellectual; he wrote many lectures and essays that might have been herded together under a heading like “Civilization—What Is It?” or “Man! Has He a Future?” He spent decades at this and managed almost never to say a memorable thing. It’s a pity these notebooks are largely the repository for Frost’s musings on government, social justice, the idea of America, the problems of rich and poor, the experiment of Russia—his analysis and commentary are tedious to the extent that they are virtuous. You wish he could have seen what prose did to him; it turned him into the dullest of town councillors—garrulous, petty, a little mean-minded, but keenly interested in the improvement of the town curbstones. This side of Frost didn’t make him a thinker; it made him a bore. If the poems came from such necessary tedium, we are the worse for being exposed to it; if such passages prove irrelevant to the imagination that so often exceeded them, we are no wiser for having read them.

  Frost knew a lot about making poems but as little as most people about political philosophy. He mulled over the same questions a long while, coming to no conclusions, or far too many conclusions—in part because he didn’t have the right intellect; in part, more sadly and humanly (the self-delusion in Frost makes him likable), because he fancied himself something of a backwoods philosopher. Being able to settle the antique questions of mind and matter is difficult even for a brain of a philosophical turn, which most poets lack—of the moderns, only Eliot could write convincingly about such things, and he had been trained in graduate school at Harvard. (Frost’s virtues lie outside his thought—there’s nothing here about government or society that couldn’t have been written better by an educated garage mechanic.) Frost may have felt Eliot his rival philosophically as much as poetically—Eliot’s sophistication and originality in writing about the designs of verse make him, on long acquaintance, all the more compelling as a poet.

  Frost’s insights are psychological, not philosophical—his philosophy is of the Yankee “good-as-most, better-than-some” variety. You feel that, ten minutes after meeting him (the Frost of the poems), you’d be chewing his tobacco and he’d be chewing yours. He was canny about people as no poet of his day except Eliot, who looked at others the way an entomologist looks at bugs, a little hungrily. Eliot scrutinized people with bland curiosity and the gifts of subtle analysis, though he never forgot that they were bugs, as in a way were Prufrock and Sweeney and Phlebas and the rest. (You might say that from the start Eliot suffered a condition common to people ripe for conversion—the men and women around him seemed hollow, flawed creatures, sinners all. But then at the start he was drawn to sinners.) Eliot was interesting as an anatomist only in the dissection of the soul—this makes Four Quartets one of the most mournful instruments of precarious faith. Frost, who had in him a touch of the Jeffersonian Deist, took sad delight in men because of their foibles—he recognized their defects and registered their small triumphs. He presented the human side of men as only a skeptic can, but a skeptic can be very hard to live with.

  “Does Wisdom Matter?” was a fond topic for Frost’s lectures, the editor reminds us, though it’s hard to think of a subject more antithetical to the poet’s gifts. His genius came, not in offering what might be called homespun horse-sense, but in rendering the quarrels with self that complicate, and even destroy, the characters in his poems. Frost is the great poet of human failing, limitation, stoicism, bleak outlook, frustration, and blind pride. Though he was not as bleak as Hardy, that acid-bitten pessimist, you read Frost on men and shake your head sadly and say, “It’s so. It’s so.” He wanted to think well of men, but he flinched a little from them (consider the professor in “A Hundred Collars,” who was perhaps a crude and knowing self-portrait)—he knew their limitations and through them, at least in his verse, something of his own. Then you read Frost on women and wonder what other poet since Shakespeare knew women so well. (Frost is the master-mistress of American verse.) There’s a lot of hokum in Frost; but it’s dry, wrenched-from-theheart hokum—sometimes it’s mere playacting, as in the sentimental poems (these represent the Frost Frost wished he were, or for a moment thought he was). His best poems come when the poem distracted him from the way he thought.

  One of the early notebooks has a long list of titles, probably for articles in a farm journal to which the poet contributed, though you wish he’d written poems on them instead: “The Thankless Crime,” “Ace & the Pigs,” “The Philosophy of Potato Bugs,” “The Moral Struggles of My Home Neighbors,” “Nothing Lost in Sod,” “Lives for a Poet in Business,” “Crows & Potatoes,” “The Worst Chicken,” “The Question of a Feather.” (Frost did write an essay with the last title for Farm-Poultry, as the editor neglects to mention; so it’s likely that other titles were used as well.) You can detect, in the etiology of such titles, the pressure toward lesson, example, and homily that drives the poems and that produces the occasional maxim that keeps the reader in hope through deserts of philosophizing. Frost possessed an aphoristic intelligence—he was a splendid composer of epigrams and apophthegms and the like, perhaps too good for his own good, because once he settled on an idea he found it hard to get rid of (he was rarely, however, in the league of Heraclitus and Pascal, to whom the editor compares him). Frost would rub the old coin over and over until it shone, like the neighbor in “Mending Wall,” who, against all evidence, keeps muttering, “Good fences make good neighbors.” If a maker of sayings and saws believes his own wisdom, he becomes hidebound, because aphorism prevents more thinking than it provokes—fortunately most aphorists suffer from wit more than wisdom.

  Frost’s humanity was half invented by language; but the other half lay in the length he hauled a thought as it formed itself—he liked to go a furlong or two farther than expected. (Curly brackets enclose words Frost wrote in superscript.)

  If its a good thing to be dead it must be half as good to be half dead

  In unicellular life what is the difference between eating each other and marrying

  When
ever I doubt if my letters {to a friend} are numerous or long enough I am sustained by the thought that it was not at a friend of anybody that Luther threw ink by the bottlefull.

  I wouldnt trust a preacher any further than I could throw a church by the steeple.

  Paints cost more than ink.

  His night thoughts on writing, on the other hand, aren’t disappointing so much as accidental and unconvincing—they seem mused upon, left-handed, not untrue but not quite true, either, as if the plumb hadn’t dropped straight.

  A poem is a triumph of association

  A poem is a run of lucky recalls

  You can always get a little more litterature if you are willing to go a little closer into what has been considered left unsaid as unspeakable just as you can always get a little more melon by going a little closer to the rind or a little more dinner by scraping the plate with a table knife.

  Such thoughts seem not to derive from long meditation or profound insight—they’re chance occurrences or “lucky recalls.” The poet was brilliant almost despite himself (Frost’s knowledge of self was always his insight into others); his cracker-barrel cheeseparing got in the way of that black-browed, unremitting Frost from whom the major poems came; and yet the major poems needed a little of the cheeseparing in order not to descend too far into despair. Frost’s lesser self helped his great to be greater. In these notebooks, perhaps only when he wrote “How many pains make an agony?” or “Mercy is illogical kindness” did he reveal, or seem to reveal, something that lay troubled beneath the surface of the verse.

  Occasionally, very occasionally, you see in the prose that instinct for the half-articulated that animates the poems:

  The saddest is not to see the poor longing for what they cant have: but to see a poor child happy in the possession of some thing too trifling for anybody else to want.

  Story of the blind old gardener. I guess them ______ aint a going to bloom. We’d a heard from them fore before this if they was.

  The blindness catches at the anecdote—you might say such blindness is more metaphysical than physical (hearing would be the blind man’s most trusted sense, even as metaphor). I’d trade five hundred pages of these notebooks for two more pages where the poet noticed people in so quirky and broadhearted a fashion.

  Frost’s aphorisms almost never work unless dramatically rendered, which makes “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” gnostic and shrewd, its mysteries not expunged but exposed in syntax, while “The saddest thing in life / Is that the best thing in it should be courage” is static, a dead fish of wisdom, and not that interesting as wisdom. The younger Frost knew how to give such sayings a darker face, how to invest them with the same frailty that led to his monologues and dialogues, those playlets he called poems—the older Frost was too busy saying important things. The memorable quotations here are so obscurely buried, it might reasonably be asked whether a selection a quarter of the length would not have served the reader better.

  Some of the aphorisms are malicious when they mean to be wry, as when Frost suggests that both rich and poor are a bad business; but the poet had a meanness in him he knew (and makes calculated use of in his most desolate verse) and a meanness he did not know. Vain, selfish, jealous, Frost was a nasty piece of work to his family; and all the Yankee warmth in his poems could turn jellied and cruel toward those around him. (In the days she lay dying after a heart attack, his wife pointedly never asked to see him.) Yet think of the other moderns—Eliot the cold fish whom Virginia Woolf accused of wearing green face-powder; Pound iffy about Jews (Eliot, too); Stevens a monster to his underlings; Williams the small-town philanderer; and Moore an emotionally stunted terror who used racial slang like “coon” and called her American Indian students gnats and sluggards, according to her biographer. You might think great poetry was a side effect of personality disorder.

  Frost was not much possessed by a sense of humor—he could be mordant, yes, with a Yankee distrust that sometimes reads like humor. He could manage a gruesome pun, but that’s as far as humor usually took him (this makes a reader wonder about the forms of attention Frost preferred). It adds a layer to that mysterious onion Frost to find the notebooks pierced by doggerel and light verse, though his light verse comes in any color you want, as long as it’s black. There are some sixty lines in boisterous couplets, unfortunately too scrawled over and revised to quote, spoken by a Columbus four hundred years at sea, and a draft of couplets in the voice of a dead Roman, which begins:

  A thousand years ago in Rome

  And I was in a catacomb

  Stretched out upon a stony shelf

  I had entirely to myself.

  I lay apparently becalmed

  From having died and been embalmed

  With toes upturned, arms composed,

  And you would never have supposed

  What I lay there a-thinking of—

  Of everything but mostly love.

  (To make this and the next three quotations more readable, I’ve removed canceled words and supplied punctuation where necessary. In the penultimate line here, I’ve also removed an extraneous “they,” which must have been an error of anticipation Frost neglected to delete.) These lines remind us how strangely tender Frost could be. He saw just how weak men were, and knew how weak he was himself; all that imperfection, all that taut resistance to apology and amelioration—the unction, in other words, of walking around and being a man—makes his crustiness likable. What he knew about men who wanted to be certain about things produced one of his most ambivalent poems, “The Strong Are Saying Nothing,” which admires the stoic’s philosophy but understands the limitation of hope it imposes. There are also, from the notebook, these unpublished lines:

  Aries, Taurus,

  Gemini, Cancer,

  Arise in chorus,

  What’s the answer?

  Tell, oh, tell us,

  If it be a

  Blend of Hellas

  And Judaea.

  Who and what’ll

  Solve the poser,

  Aristotle

  Or Spinoza?

  Frost cast a wary eye upon religion, the eye of an atheist who refuses to blink, all the while professing to be an orthodox believer (some think him as much an Arminian heretic as Milton). How hard he wrestled with the invisible—this was an old Yankee inheritance, to be sure, but we simplify the past by forgetting its subtleties; and in Frost there is at least as much religious conscience and torment as in Donne, or Eliot, or Geoffrey Hill. The notebooks allowed him to be a little more unbuttoned on the subject than in print, especially as he grew famous and became ROBERT FROST in capitals big as tenpins. He was willing to ask the metaphysical questions, the questions to which there are never answers (he was in any case a poet more suited to questions than answers); but the poems didn’t always find that a diet of philosophy agreed with them.

  Frost was not a systematic thinker—thank goodness, I’m tempted to say—though there are a few places in the notebooks where he tries to categorize experience in the manner of Auden or Kierkegaard. Frost had a curiosity about science (he seems to have taken his ideas from popular articles), which is not surprising, when science offers so much to a poet for whom homily mediates between scientific hypothesis and the certitudes of faith. There are numerous notebook pages that puzzle over some scientific notion or try to mold it into poetry, as he did in “Desert Places.” Such poems remind us, not just how rarely poetry borrows from science now, but how reluctantly it is drawn to homily. Frost was interested in what the individual revealed to the general, not how each peculiar soul suffered his torments. The public record exceeded the private case—you can see Frost’s crippled private life, but darkly.

  Sometimes the darkness was too dark. It’s tempting to think that Frost could write poems so gloomy even he couldn’t publish them, their sourness shot through with a sardonic glee at how awful the human condition can be:

  There were two brothers come home from their trial.

  Th
ey took of[f] their coats with a terrible smile,

  And one of them calmly said to the other,

  “The court says we didn’t kill father and mother.

  The court’s word in such things is final for men.

  Our neighbors can never accuse us again.

  The worst they can say to us under the laws

  Is Som[e]one was guilty: if we weren’t, who was?

  With the judgement of God, we may still have to cope,

  But not for a good many years, let us hope.”

  There are many such amusements in the notebooks, places where Frost unbuttoned his vest, or took the road less traveled, or rattled on endlessly—and then abandoned such things to the dead matter of the spiral pad or the buckram-covered pages. You sense that in the notebooks Frost felt he was milking himself, as Milton’s daughters milked Milton. (Notebooks are where a Protestant confesses—or were until poetry became the confessional.) Little of this, however, gets us much closer to Frost the poet, so it is fortunate that these books house substantial drafts of two long poems he never published, “A Bed in the Barn,” which was meant for Steeple Bush (1947), and “Old Gold for Christmas,” which struggles through a few incomplete drafts and discards fragments elsewhere.

  “Old Gold for Christmas” begins on a freezing night, when a stranger helps an elderly man who has fallen to the icy pavement. The good Samaritan, who serves as narrator, has little to do but listen to the old man’s tale:

  “You stand and let me lean on you a minute

  Till I can think. Don’t ask me who I am.

  I’m all mixed up from having been retired.”