Our Savage Art

by William Logan

  He rued a bloody knuckle in the street light

  As a girl gloats on her engagement ring.

  I helped him shoulder one of his suspenders.

  “I’ve been down on some ice and lost my coat.

  The empty busses at this time of night

  Are so insane to get home to their car barns

  They’d as soon knock you down as pick you up.

  I must have thrown my coat away at one.

  The place I’ve got to get to is a farm

  That’s out here on a side road with two rows

  Of sugar maples leading up to it—

  The air, lit up by seven burning maples,

  In case you had a mind to take me there

  Or rout out someone else to do it for you.

  You’re on foot walking so you can’t yourself.

  It’s where I live and claim my residence

  To vote at when there’s any need to vote.

  The house is not much, but the barn is standing.

  There! midnight I suppose or one o’clock!”

  This is from the second draft we have; but no doubt there are drafts missing, as the opening lines in the initial draft have been neatly transcribed. Frost begins the story with all the confidence of the poems in North of Boston. The details have that roughed-up pathos that makes his characters seem party to the injury that is the world—the old man looking at his knuckle with pride, the way a “girl gloats on her engagement ring”; the furious, fruitless gesture of hurling his coat after the departing bus (a horse-drawn trolley bus, perhaps, or one of the electrified sort that still run on the streets of Boston); the foxy Yankee rectitude of “It’s where I live and claim my residence / To vote at when there’s any need to vote.” And then the farm with its “burning maples” (seven of them, and burning, details unsettled by the bush of Moses, the seven branches of the menorah), yet modified by the old man’s disarming modesty, a modesty almost proud: “The house is not much, but the barn is standing.”

  Frost was agile at hard-grained details—his characters live, not just at the mercy of the trivial, but through its quiet, insistent force. The poem is the observation of distress and rock-bound pride found in “The Death of the Hired Man” or, more pertinently, “Snow,” where a local preacher stops at a house and then, against the pleas of the couple there, pushes on into a blizzard—he does it because he has to, because it’s a sort of calling. Frost loved such characters—you sense he tried to find stories for them. The tale in “Old Gold for Christmas” starts so well, it’s a mystery why the poet couldn’t finish it. The delicacy of Frost’s judgment lies in the observation “I’m all mixed up from having been retired.” The confusion of meaning is part of the old man’s confusion; but you feel he has it right, that retirement had made him lose his bearings—and he has been retired, as he says. It may be just an acknowledgment that time has passed, but it sounds involuntary. There’s a mark of attentive charity in “I helped him shoulder one of his suspenders,” where the disheveled man’s awkwardness, his slight haplessness and hopelessness, make him the more vivid. He isn’t beyond anger at his plight, at his treatment by the buses. Partly this is a poem about the future. The old man has been turned out of his job, or turned himself out; and the world rushes onward, in the progress of those buses that will not stop and the street lights (now electric, because they go out “on one sudden breath”) to which the old man objects. Frost handles the symbols so quietly, you hardly notice—the lights are going out for the man; and the poet has the right simile, “like candles on a birthday cake.” Frost knew a lot about being old, even when he was young.

  Once you start noticing, it’s hard to stop. I love the old man’s selfish practicality: “The thing for us is to stay propped together”—it’s good for him, but he tries to make it seem good for the stranger, too. And the narrator, though he wants to get away from this grasping elder, can’t quite resist him (the narrator is the wedding guest and the old man the Ancient Mariner). The stranger wants to bring the man to a house nearby, the only one with a light still on. The old man knows who lives there:

  “No one I’d care to introduce you to.

  He’s a church preacher and a baseball pitcher—

  Combined. He pitches for us Saturdays

  And preaches to us Sundays. He can pitch.

  Only they claim he’s too wild for his strength.

  Catchers cant hold him, or he’d make the league.[”]

  These lines were deleted from the first draft. You feel that the two occupations are reciprocal and collusive, pleasure one day, preaching the next, strikeouts then sermons. “He can pitch,” the old man says mildly of the preacher—he’s silent about the preaching. The very thing that spoils the pitching probably makes the preacher overzealous at the pulpit (he’s the kind of preacher who might turn the Devil into Casey at the Bat). No wonder the old man doesn’t want to be dragged to the house. When we do meet the preacher-pitcher, or pitcher-preacher, it turns out that the old man was once his catcher, “in the bare handed days before the mitt.” That pushes their acquaintance back to the 1870s or thereabouts (the first major-league player to wear a glove was in 1875, and he was embarrassed to do so).

  Frost’s method, so far as method reveals itself here, is to drive the action of the poem forward until the lines grow fragmentary, then start again, not necessarily at the beginning, trying to consolidate passages as he goes along or striking off into a later passage that might be included. (Frost formed his lines into pentameter as he wrote—you sense this even in the shattered phrases where narrative breaks down.) He seems to have felt that “Old Gold for Christmas” was too digressive; but the character of Frost lies in digression, and he should have given way to his impulses.

  Something goes wrong with the story, and the drafts begin to thrash about trying to find a solution. Part of the problem is the old man. He’s a little “touched,” and there turns out to be no farm. He worked for forty years firing the furnace at a local factory, given a wage so paltry, the entire sum could be paid once a year in gold—probably with a single coin, a double eagle. He never asked for a raise; indeed, he became proud of his status, as though aristocratic, of being paid just once a year at Christmas. Frost can’t seem to settle on a way to tell the old man’s story, how much to render through other characters (in “The Death of the Hired Man,” the other characters do all the talking). Once it’s revealed that he’s partly mad, something must happen—but nothing much can happen, other than the inevitable tragedy. Perhaps the revelation of madness, handled with Frost’s usual judgment of the off-center center, would have proved enough to set the tragedy in motion. Instead, he plunges into further drafts, changing the story slightly but getting further away from what made the earliest draft affecting. Frost tries various shifts: in the first draft, the preacher tells the old man’s story, while the man sits doltishly by; in the second, the old man himself tells it, and the preacher-pitcher and his wife become simply “some people in the nearest house” and then are written out entirely. A son, silent in the first version, does duty in the second—but he’s a less interesting character than the Billy Sunday–style preacher.

  There’s an ending, the right ending—some weeks later the old man fools another passerby into taking him out to the farm he claims to own (“The place I’m trying to get to all my life”—it is a kind of Paradise, but it’s also death) and freezes to death. There’s the ending, but Frost can’t quite get there from where he is. The third draft is even more fragmentary than the second. Frost returned to the poem briefly in a later notebook, but then seems to have given it up.

  The reader who watches closely as the poem emerges from the ruck of composition (emerges, only to sink back unfinished) will know much more about Frost the craftsman, about how feelingly he manipulates the lines and how what he sought was the force of plainness, not the vigor (or waste, a favorite theme) of decoration. Poetically speaking, he was a clapboard Presbyterian, not a gilded Catholic. The notebooks
, though they are not at all devoted to poems, at least in the surviving pages, nevertheless give a sense of how the poems were assembled. Perhaps, in a way, all the dead matter of these notebooks proves merely what the poet needed to discard or discharge before he could write poetry. It would be a mistake to view them as waste without purpose (Eliot, Frost’s bête noire at times, once referred to a poet’s “necessary laziness”). The poet’s task is to find a purpose for what others call waste, and to the poet all chronicles are chronicles of wasted time.

  Robert Faggen deserves every credit for taking on a difficult, unenviable task, the sort for which thousands of small successes go unpraised but every slip is damning. The paleographer is the drudge of academic scholarship, though the most useful book for a reader is a good edition of a poet’s letters, drafts, or fragments—most volumes of theory will be out of date by the week after next, but the editions of Coleridge’s notebooks or Dickens’s letters may never be superseded. Faggen is one of the leading figures in “Frost studies,” as they are amusingly called (leading to meteorological phrases like “new directions in Frost studies” and “possible futures for Frost studies”), an editor with long practice reading Frost’s difficult, geometric hand. He should be a trustworthy guide to this crabbed, private, willful poet; but in just about every way possible the edition goes wrong.

  The reader’s confidence is shaken by the strained reading, on the first page of the introduction, of Frost’s comparison of his poems to a child’s “ordinaries,” meaning toys and small possessions. Faggen calls this an “extraordinary use of ‘ordinary’ as a noun”; but it’s not extraordinary at all, though the meaning has fallen out of use. He then compares the word to religious ordinaries—devotional manuals or long-headed ecclesiastics—which is hardly what Frost had in mind (you might as well say it “resonates” with other old uses, the ordinary as courier, or customary meal, or lecture, or part of a fleet laid up and not in commission). One can ignore the blather the editor feels obliged to spout (“Robert Frost’s poetry has long compelled readers with its clarity, dramatic tension, and vocal presence. Its pleasure arises from the promise of cognitive order”) but not the plague of typographical errors that infects the text, so many the reader begins to doubt that all the misspellings in the transcription are Frost’s. (At one point the editor refers to a “jllegible phrase,” though it isn’t “jllegible” at all.)

  From the start, there are problems of pagination. The notes and index refer to page numbers notebook by notebook, so “1.1r” means Notebook 1, page 1 recto. Unfortunately, there are two pages known as 1.1r; wherever Frost included some loose sheets or jumped to the back of a notebook and soldiered forward, similar confusions occur (in addition, the numbering of Notebook 26 starts over halfway through without explanation, and there is a bad case of misnumbering in the middle of Notebook 31). The group of loose and miscellaneous sheets called, somewhat unhappily, Notebook 47 has no fewer than fifteen pages that could be termed 47.1r—but the editor is too canny for that. When reference is required, he blithely refers to “47,” which means the poor reader must paw through thirty-seven pages of text to find the passage he seeks. (Worse, this “notebook,” for no good reason, collects sheets from two different libraries—best of luck to the researcher who doesn’t notice a footnote to that effect, buried in the middle of the text. Worse still, some pages allegedly at Dartmouth are either missing or at some other location.) The editorial practice is baffling in other ways. Frost sometimes skipped a page while scribbling down his thoughts (perhaps the following page was filled already or contained some pertinent digression). The editor rarely points out where the passage continues a couple of pages later, leaving the reader mostly to fend for himself.

  The index is helpful as far as it goes, and it goes only as far as being unhelpful—the reader will soon discover that it is very difficult to find anything. Frost mentions a man named Bently or Bentley, but the notes offer no assistance, and the index fails to include him; context suggests this is simply Richard Bentley, the cantankerous seventeenth-century classicist. Where is the entry for the poem “The Bed in the Barn,” or for one of Frost’s earliest poems, “The reason of my perfect ease,” or for the essay notes titled “Education Seventy Years Afterward”? If you want to look at all the pages containing drafts of “Old Gold for Christmas,” the index refers to some lines in Notebook 35 that seem from another poem altogether, while there are half a dozen or more pages in Notebook 1 that belong to the poem and go unrecognized. Where are the index entries for Lenin and Quisling, Josiah Royce and Mary Wollstonecraft, Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr, among a crowd of other unhappy absentees? Indeed, where are the entries for Athens and Sparta (there’s one for Greenwich Village); or Dartmouth, Vassar, and Chapel Hill; or Jove, Jesus Christ, and God? Or the Bible? In notebooks that speak so much of religion, these last are unforgivable omissions. There are incomplete entries for Chesterton, Einstein, Emerson, Freud, Job, Jonah, Keats, Lindbergh, Wordsworth, and far too many others. Worse, Walter Pater appears as William Pater; but by this time that’s hardly surprising.

  Say you recall reading an anecdote about Agassiz. The index and one of the notes steer you confidently to 6.24r (Notebook 6, page 24 recto), a page that does not exist. Or, should you be curious about Frost’s notion of Kipling, the index entry reads, in part, “Kipling, Rudyard, 4.33r; 66r, 25r; 6r; 15; 17.32r. (Entries in the same notebook are separated by commas, different notebooks by semicolons.) The first and last of these references are perfectly clear and happen to be correct. The notation “66r” is a mystery; “25r; 6r” should be “7.25r, 6r”; and “15” should be “15.11r.” Even if the middle pair were corrected, you might start thumbing through Notebook 7, find that page 6r is blank, and give up—but you should have kept thumbing, because there’s a second “6r” further on. It might have seemed precise to adopt this mode of reference; but the many ambiguities of pagination should have suggested the folly being indulged. (The editor seems not to have considered that convenient device, the page number of the volume itself.) Two other index entries for Kipling steer the reader into the thirty-seven-page swamp of Notebook 47, without compass or direction.

  Many of the notes are splendidly well informed. Faggen has nosed out inviting connections and provided much of the basic matter for understanding Frost’s stray references and allusions, without ever being the sort of editor who condescends to the reader. Nonetheless, after a while I wondered if he possessed the basic cultural knowledge necessary to interpret Frost. How could anyone of even modest learning transcribe one line in these notebooks as “Sog Magog Mempleremagog” and then, to compound ignorance with inattention, fail to make note of it? Gog and Magog famously appear in Ezekiel; though Frost’s capital s resembles his capital g, there is no excuse for this. (Memphremagog, the word Frost actually wrote next, is the name of a glacial lake between Vermont and Quebec.) What should the reader think when Frost writes “Co ex co ex co ex”? Or, in some light verse,

  To sit there on a waterlog

  And with your Breck a Re ok co ex

  Ventriloquize the tranquil bog?

  He should think Aristophanes! These lines imitate the famous chorus of frogs in The Frogs, “Brekekekex koax koax”; but they go unnoted.

  If ignorance of the Bible and Aristophanes is no bar to being an editor, perhaps some acquaintance with the historical and cultural milieu in which Frost flourished might be considered an advantage; yet the editor misses an obvious reference to FDR’s attempt at court packing and fails to note that a “tumbledown dick preacher” alludes to Tumbledown Dick, the nickname given Richard Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell’s son and hapless successor. Frost says he reads obituaries, according to the transcription, in the Times and the Tribute—that should, of course, be the Tribune, as a look at the notebook page confirms. And how does an editor with any knowledge of eighteenth-century printing manage to transcribe a sentence as “No one ever took a wife for wise except by mistake in reading old print Wife Wife”? This make
s no sense. Frost has in fact painfully printed out, to make the distinction clear, “wife wi∫e” to show that printer’s type for the old long s was easily mistaken for f, as any first-year grad student knows—the title page of Paradise Lost looks like Paradife Loft. No editor is perfect, but such errors suggest a level of incuriosity fatal to a good one. (The blindness to typography, for which the carelessness of the editor and the complacence of the publisher should be roundly scolded, means that initial apostrophes are habitually reversed.)

  Given the hard labor such an edition requires, a tolerance for mistakes might be the price of gratitude. There are few jobs more thankless than that of an editor tasked to decipher a dead man’s hand. Faggen has slaved thousands of hours over writing often snagged like old fishnet. Frost usually wrote with a fountain pen, his script stiff, juddery, hairpin angled; and he did his editor no favors (though who in the privacy of his notebooks would think to do such favors?) by occasionally dropping a letter while writing at speed or malforming letters, especially at the end of a word. His terminal r can be mistaken for s, his d confused with cl, his a with ci, and his p identified with no letter known in this world (it looks like the design for a billhook). He failed to cross t’s or dot i’s and left punctuation for the most part to the imagination. These are just the things, however, that bring torments of joy to the paleographer’s heart. There are lines where the editor has made sense of what to most readers would look like chicken scratches.

  Editorial procedure, however it is understood, must aim for clarity of description and accuracy of transcription, both of which this edition fails to achieve with a certain consummate brilliance. Obliged though readers must be for this unknown Frost, the transcription is a scandal. To read this volume is to believe that Frost was a dyslexic and deranged speller, that his brisk notes frequently made no sense, that he often traded the expected word for some fanciful or perverse alternative. Even a casual comparison of the text with the five photofacsimiles included in the introduction shows a discomforting degree of inaccuracy. I would not normally stake my eyes against those of an editor who had spent years in company with these notebooks; yet, having requested a dozen or two photocopies from the Dartmouth library, where most of the books are housed, I shook my head in wonder at the editor’s wild suppositions, casual sloppiness, and simple inability to set down what was on the page before him. (I ordered another dozen, and another dozen, and kept going.) Words are added or subtracted, punctuation missing where it is present and present where it is missing, canceled words unrecorded, and sense rendered nonsensical. In this long volume, there are typographical errors that suggest a failure to proofread the final text against the notebooks and enough highly inventive misreadings to fill a phone book. Frost wrote in a rush and was not a perfect speller (“literature” comes out at least three different ways), but he was not the maniac speller the editor makes him. He suffered, as many writers do, the occasional stretch of wayward syntax; yet, in most of the cases where Frost’s words seem deranged, a glance shows that it was not Frost but his editor who was mad.