Take, for example, a passage Frost jotted down for “Education Seventy Years Afterward.” The editor offers this transcription of a few lines:
Thus there is another rule of life I never {always think of when} I see a player serving two or three bats once before he goes to the plate to fan pitcher with one bat. Always try to have arranged that you were doing something harder and more disciplinary [illegible] than what you the picktie exhibition you have before you are about to make of yourself.
This has a jostling, out-at-elbows, stenographic air, the syntax going wherever the thought drifts. The batter metaphorically serves up his bats before, by some topsy-turvy turn of phrase, he fans the pitcher; and there is a country redolence to the “picktie exhibition,” whatever that might be—no doubt some blue-ribbon event at a county fair. Unfortunately, this is nothing like what Frost wrote, which I would read as follows (the underlining notes the differences):
Then there is another rule of life I never {always think of when} I see a m player swing two or three bats at once before he goes to the plate to fan the pitches with one bat. Always try to ha have arranged that you were doing something harder and more disciplinary that than what you the public exibition you have before you are about to make of yourself.
In the course of two sentences, the editor has committed three comical misreadings, overlooked two words and a misspelling (“exibition”), and left strikeouts untranscribed or wrongly transcribed—ten errors, four of them serious. The editor fails even to mention the ruin of a poem drafted at the top of the page. A large part of the page has been torn out, mutilating the draft; but about forty words remain legible at the beginning of the lines and perhaps another dozen on the reverse. Given how rare Frost’s drafts are, you wonder why in the notes the editor did not even allude to such lines. The transcription is not much better later in the passage: what the editor abandons as “someone who said in [illegible]” is actually “someone who said in Latin.”
Or take these relatively simple and cleanly written paragraphs from Notebook 22. Here is Faggen’s version:
That was are reason Middlebrow! that was a new one to me and I am afraid it was mean to be for my embarrassment. It was as much as to say invidiously you old [illegible] what of at the level of intellect so to call it where you at which you vote and peddle rhyme sheets. It was invidious perhaps. Anyway I was chastened it was all to the good. I was chastened {brought up dull in my slang} and put in my place. But I it was better than good: it furnished me a new refrain for a poem some day.
High brow
Low brow
Middle brow
And no brow
With acknowledgments to Polybius and Pound {the poem} it would the story of the girl Hannof the Carlingian captured on the coast of West Africa outside the Gates. It would begin:
She had no brow but a mind of her own
She wanted the sailor to let her alone
She didn’t like sailors she didn’t like men
They had to shut her up in a pen.
She was quite untractable quite contrary [b.i.]
Hannof the Carlingian? That mysterious “[b.i.]” gives a sense of what has gone wrong—it’s the editor’s note to himself that the line was written in black ink. He has somehow forgotten its purpose and, instead of using a footnote to record the change in ink, as elsewhere, mindlessly included it as part of Frost’s passage. The lines above might more accurately have been transcribed thus:
That was a new on Middlebrow! That was a new one to me and I am afraid it was meant to be for my embarrassment. It was as much as to say invidiously {you,} you old skeezicks what at {of} the level of intellect so to call it where you at which you vote and peddle ryhme sheets. It was invidious perhaps. Anyway I was chasened it was all to the good if I was chasened {brought up to date in my slang} and put in my place. But it was better than good: it furnished me a new refrain for a poem someday.
High brow
Low brow
Middle brow
And no brow.
With acknowledgements to Polybius and Pound it {the poem} would be the story of the girl Hanno the Carthaginian captured on the coast of west Africa outside the Gates. It would begin
She had no brow but a mind of her own
She wanted the sailors to let her alone
She didnt like sailors she didnt like men
They had to shut her up in a pen.
She was quite intractable quite contrary
That the editor provides an erudite note on Hanno the Carthaginian makes his initial error mystifying (Hannof the Carlingian, indeed). I have again noted the differences by underlining—here the editor has fobbed off on Frost misspellings he did not commit and overlooked the misspellings he did (ryhme and chasened here—in previous paragraphs the editor accuses Frost of writing ofr, tow, and palin where the poet plainly wrote for, two, and plain). Faggen has been unable to read a couple of difficult phrases that did not take long to puzzle out; has missed strikeouts, capitals, and terminal s’ s; has failed to record where phrases are written in superscript; and has made Frost’s start at a logical phrase like “a new one” into “are reason.” (The editor also has a bad habit of throwing the phrases revised in superscript before rather than after the draft phrases they replace.) I counted some two dozen errors in the three paragraphs leading up to this passage, so the problems are not local. The editor seems to have worked in haste (though not yet repented at leisure). Two sentences later, we find:
They they hung it up in the temple of Ashtaroth as hide [linigue] for harriners. Tunique ought to be rhymed somehow with Runic—Runique.
Linigue? Harriners? Tunique? Runique? This should read:
They They hung it up in the temple of Astaroth as a hide unique for hairiness. Unique ought to be rhymed somehow with Punic-Punique.
And on it goes, page after page of appalling errors and flat misreadings, twenty or thirty per page at times, some trivial, most trying, too many disastrous. Frost is a much clearer and more sensible writer than Faggen’s transcripts suggest. Two pages after the passage above, we discover this:
It runs poor spirited to wonder if sometimes when half gods go if cant quarter godst that arrive and so on down to no gods at all.
That should read:
It seems poor spirited to wonder if sometimes when half gods go it isn’t quarter gods that arrive and so on down to no gods at all.
Or, early in the notebooks:
History that coming / I [illegible]
Every word of this is wrong. Frost in fact wrote:
His son thats coming’s / Is State Police
Passages have been so mangled, they bear only dim relation to Frost’s thought. In one of my favorite lines—it’s almost mean to quote it—the editor offers, “I know someone who has been given money to consider bear one year,” which sounds suitably woodsy. Alas, Frost wrote “to consider fear one year” (fear had been mentioned in the sentence just preceding). It’s as if the editor had forced some grad student to type up the rough notes, given them a cursory glance, and then dispatched them to print—how else explain places where a query meant to remind him of a suspect reading became a question mark never made by Frost’s pen?
The editor does no better with a tangled draft of poetry. Here is his version of a passage in Frost’s rollicking doggerel on Columbus:
My name is Christopher Columbus
I cant be moved by all this {?threat} and rumpus
Put up your knives and go below
We’re members of the O. {HO Hi Ho} O. Hi.O
A stock exchange affiliate
I know {see} who you are!
Lets hear some more! Vociferate!
For such a husky lot {herd} of boys ghostly noise
You make a very husky {very [illegible]} noise
It does you fools us good to strike {you strike and strike and strike and strike}
I end by sailing where I like.
The word in bold type has wandered in from the editor’s ima
gination. I would transcribe these lines as follows:
My name is Christopher Columbus
I cant be moved by all this {threats and} rumpus
Put up your knives and go below
We’re members of the [two letters illegible:?O I.] O. {HO Hi O Ho O. Hi. O}
A stock exchange affiliate
Lets hear some more {I know {see} you are}! vociferate !
For such a husky lot {herd} of boys
[in margin: you know] You make a very husky {very feeble } noise {ghostly noise}
[in margin: You see You see {know}] It does you fools no good to strike {you strike and strike and strike and strike}
I end by sailing where I like.
It’s hard to know which are worse, the misreadings, the omissions, or the outright inventions. Here, even more hilariously, is the last couplet on the page, followed by some marginal couplets, first in the editor’s transcript:
Colundres! Christophes! No less!
What no one left alive but you
He boards again
Columbus boards in I [illegible]
Till someone comes up over [side]
The meekly [?vaunt] single file
Columbus brooch alone awhile
This, however, is what Frost wrote:
Columbus! Christopher! No less!
What no one left alive but you
Columbus broods {He broods again} in Spanish pride
Till someone comes up over side
They meekly vanish single file
Columbus broods alone awhile
“Columbus brooch alone awhile” ought to have given the editor pause. On the following page, he has “They’ve named it for Americas,” which is pretty obviously “Americus.”
In places above, the editor has given an inaccurate idea of when Frost is revising by superscript and when he’s starting a new line (he can’t even describe his own practice accurately in his pages on editorial procedures). To show how complicated it is to render poetic revision, here’s a complex line in the editor’s version:
But that you {brute} at [illegible] in the {our} way. {[illegible]} {desert {seacoast} bars our way}
The editor notes that the last bracketed phrase falls below the line, and the word “seacoast” below that; but he has disfigured the draft in all sorts of ways. Frost originally wrote “But that great [?lump] is in our way,” then substituted “brute” for “great” and tried, successively, “reef” and “coast” for “[?lump]” and then “desert bars our way” and finally “seacoast.” A more accurate transcript, using the editor’s sigla, might be rendered thus:
But that great {brute} [?lump] {reef coast} is in the {our} way {desert {seacoast} bars our way}
The problems continue—on one page, the editor substitutes “Who are you marring with now?” for “Who are you marrying me to now?”; on others, “And if I did today” for “And if I died today,” “Lets not be persona!” for “Lets not be personal,” “And put in y in some fold of her dress” for “And put it by in some fold of her dress,” and, amazingly, “In colleness or in the quest of fruit” for “In idleness or in the quest of fruit.” He’s at times willing to put down any old rubbish, however nonsensical, rather than stare long enough to see the homely meaning. It’s a pity that the editor has apparently misidentified the location of certain pages in Notebook 47, because I’d bet the farm that what the transcript has as “The use of lipstitch and howdy … in public should be forbidden” is the much less inventive “lipstick and powder.”
These transcriptions are full of errors so basic, it’s difficult to see how they escaped the attention of the editor or his editors. Many are trivial; but it makes a difference whether Frost wrote, as the editor has it, that he “may be so attracted to Russian” instead of “Russia,” or that players “got know down” instead of “got knocked down,” or that there was frozen ground men might “dig your rave in if your dead” instead of “dig your grave in if you died.” Or, to continue this sad catalogue, Frost wrote, not “all he is parinian” but “all he is poor man”; not “wild hearths and deserts” but “wild heaths and deserts”; not “go to wrack and mine” but “go to wrack and ruin”; not “two rows of rock samples” but “two rows of rock maples”; not “He might have arrested the thinking folk” but “He might have parroted the thinking folk.” I would be surprised if the errors in the whole volume numbered fewer than ten thousand. Not a page of transcription can be considered trustworthy; and Harvard University Press, if it has any regard for its reputation, should withdraw this edition and subject the transcripts to microscopic examination—and the final text to the hawkeyed copyediting and proofreading it somehow failed to enjoy.
These notebooks are not for the casual reader. But is Frost’s poetry for the casual reader any longer? Is there even a casual reader to attract? Here you have the most technically restrictive of the modernists, who reformed the pentameter line until it became expressively vernacular. (You might think reformers were a dime a dozen, but the list is short: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Browning, and few others.) Sometimes the Whig narrative of modernism emphasizes only the breaches and ruptures of form, which consoles us in our fallen free-verse ways. This tends to strand Frost as a fuddy-duddy, a man who couldn’t play tennis without a net. Eliot and Pound, however, thought of vers libre as a temporary breach in the manners of poetry. They kept the free and the metrical in constant creative tension, Pound writing lines with the memory of meter, Eliot flexibly using tradition where it bore upon his matter (or where it simply suited him). Wallace Stevens’s elegant pentameter is usually ignored in favor of his exotic language and absurdist instinct—free verse earned him forgiveness for his galumphing manner and symbolist mannerism. Marianne Moore used a scaffolding of syllabics and rhyme to construct her poems but years later in revision sometimes cheerfully (or distractedly) abandoned them. Only William Carlos Williams came to free verse as if it were home and stayed there contentedly, though the ease and consciousness of rhythm in the later meditative poems suggest that, however much he desired a linoleum-like prose, the subtlety of his ear wouldn’t quite let him. Where does this leave Frost? More in the middle of a group trying out certain tensions in the verse line, tensions between meter and prose unimagined in French vers libre, in the earlier essays at free verse by W. E. Henley and Stephen Crane, or in the long philosophizing line of Tupper and Whitman.
Frost would not be the first poet to require form to order his imagination. Is the scattered and unhappy organization of his lectures due to a routine of mind the notebooks reflect, a habitual dislocation or relocation of focus, or to the patchwork, crazy-quilt character of the notebooks from which he drew (in which case he lacked some essential integrating faculty in prose)? A notebook is an aide-memoire, an act of self-education, a way to stem the tide of trivia that passes through the writer’s mind, a jump start for poems, the grave of failed expression, and much else—in notebooks, the poet is often waiting for lightning to strike or the sewers to overflow. It doesn’t diminish Frost that his notebooks are less interesting than those of other writers, just as it doesn’t diminish Beethoven that his rough drafts are less fluent than Mozart’s—indeed, you might say that the clutter of sawdust and brown wrapping-paper that composes the notebooks ennobles Frost, because in the poems he rose so far above them.
Interview by Garrick Davis
When did you begin writing criticism? Did you see it as an inevitable task—an obligation—of your poetry?
I was drawn to criticism blindly and without regard for the justice or ethic of the role. There may be artists born to criticize (and those whose every poem is a review)—my own criticism is no more than a shout from the back of the room. A sort of “Yeah, yeah,” a double affirmative that reads like dissent.
As a critic I began with little except passion and an ornery nature. I spent my late teens and early twenties reviewing records for a grimy and now forgotten rock magazine, a suitably depressing place to learn
a little, a very little, about critical prose. Such Grub Street reviewing had its moments—my opinion once so offended a record executive the next records I received were lovingly and individually vandalized. I had an absorption in music that at times approached the pathological and was the more delicious for that.
On a whim, at the Writers’ Workshop at Iowa, I reviewed a novel for the student newspaper; with that callow introduction, I began reviewing fiction for the Chicago Tribune. My opinions were sharpened by putting them in ink—no doubt this is a common experience. At least, I’d like to think I’m not the only critic who discovers his mind (not the impulse of taste but the very words) in the act of writing. Those early reviews look hollow and ill at ease now. It wasn’t until I started reviewing poetry that my criticism showed an act of imaginative sympathy, a deeper dwelling as a reader. Perhaps I was more cruelly affected (or more irritated) by poetry, or perhaps as a poet I felt something more critical at stake.
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