The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 14
With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet.
Or turn and sit on and look out and down,
With little ferns at his elbow.
“As to that I can’t say. But there’s the spring.
Right on the summit, almost like a fountain.
That ought to be worth seeing.”
“Real” for the farmer may have more to do with what can be imagined than
experienced. On the other hand, he may also be a trickster, playing with the
narrator’s idle curiosity.
“It doesn’t seem so much to climb a mountain
You’ve worked around the foot of all your life.
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What would I do? Go in my overalls,
With a big stick, the same as when the cows
Haven’t come down to the bars at milking time?
Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear?
’Twouldn’t seem real to climb for climbing it.”
The narrator also remains deeply intrigued by the paradox that the brook is
somehow “cold in summer, warm in winter.” The farmer has posed this riddle
as a kind of joke: it is really the same all the time:
“I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it’s warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”
The narrator should know that but the farmer may be a bit more subtle, if not playful in talking around the subject of leisure versus labor, about their common humanity and sensibility, for which the brook has become a metaphor. His
fun, both playful and sinister, is “in how you say a thing,” a way of keeping
the sojourner-narrator out of his business. There may be another mythic level
to interplay, in addition to Wordsworth’s. The farmer here may be at once
more strange and clever than Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer. That mountain,
too, which defines the tiny community has been called Hor, which means
boundary and also evokes the biblical Mount Hor in Numbers. Frost’s first
published prose, “Petra and its Surroundings” (1891), begins by evoking the
burial tomb of Moses’s brother Aaron, whom God condemned to die on the
summit of Mount Hor. This condemnation, which extended to Moses as well,
stemmed from their lack of faith in God and their transformation from stone
of the waters of Mirabah. There seems to be some echo here, almost a taboo,
of not penetrating too far into the mysterious and the miraculous and about
the relations of brothers. Yet the strange concluding utterance of the farmer, overheard and broken off, leaves the narrator and readers wondering what
kind of strange isolated consciousness or otherness has developed around the
isolated region of the mountain:
“You’ve lived here all your life?”
“Ever since Hor
Was no bigger than a —” What, I did not hear.
He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
Gave them their marching orders and was moving.
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A racial fear haunts the pastoral world of North of Boston, and this should not be surprising since pastoral has long been a highly political form, though a subtle one. The tension between labor and leisure would always be seen through various lenses of human worth and hierarchy. Well aware of the Jeffersonian
ideals of a natural aristocracy rooted in an agrarian society, Frost also witnessed the disintegration of that agrarian ideal in areas of New England challenged
by poverty, industry, and changing social conditions. He also witnessed the
sometimes strange and fearful responses to this disintegration in the forms of various attempts to capture a fading or old New England. In many respects,
this Frost can be looked at and has been regarded as preserving some kind of
lost or disappearing New England landscape. That appears to be one aspect of
his claim to the pastoral tradition, an affection for contemplation of a fading rural world. But that sentimentality may be precisely what is deceptive about
Frost and, indeed, what is deceptive about the pastoral in general.
“A Hundred Collars” should be viewed as a satirical pastoral with strong
political overtones. The chance encounter between a professor, Dr. Magoon,
and a shady figure, Lafe, short for Lafayette, occurs when Magoon is forced
to find a room for the night when he missed his train at Woodsville Junction
(the name, of course, is suggestive of the borderland between town and coun-
try). When he finds that the only available hotel room in the little village has to be shared with Lafe, the professor learns immediately that his uninhibited
roommate likes to drink. Particularly striking, though, is his physical appearance and size, and the ever-expanding girth of his neck in comparison with the professor’s:
The Doctor looked at Lafe and looked away.
A man? A brute. Naked above the waist,
He sat there creased and shining in the light,
Fumbling the buttons in a well-starched shirt.
“I’m moving into a size-larger shirt.
I’ve felt mean lately; mean’s no name for it.
I just found what the matter was tonight:
I’ve been a-choking like a nursery tree
When it outgrows the wire band of its name tag.
I blamed it on the hot spell we’ve been having.
’Twas nothing but my foolish hanging back
Not liking to own up I’d grown a size.
Number eighteen this is. What size you wear?”
The Doctor caught his throat convulsively.
“Oh – ah – fourteen – fourteen.”
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“Fourteen! You say so!
I can remember when I wore fourteen.
And come to think of it I must have back at home
More than a hundred collars, size fourteen.
Too bad to waste them all. You ought to have them.
They’re yours and welcome; let me send them to you.
What makes you stand there on one leg like that?
You’re not much furtherer than where Kike left you.
You act as if you wished you hadn’t come.
Sit down or lie down, friend; you make me nervous.”
Surely the joke is on Dr. Magoon, who at this point has been terrified by
Lafe, despite his generosity about the collars. Frost conveys much to the reader about what might be frightening about Lafe. His general appearance might be
enough – half naked, already a little oiled, fairly irreverent, and quite large – to scare the refined scholar who has insisted on a bed. Other simple social facts would have been obvious to Magoon and to Frost readers. Lafe is French Canadian, and in the early part of the twentieth century in New England and, espe-
cially in Vermont, French Canadians were looked down upon as racially inferior, degenerate, and even threatening to the pure Anglo world. This encounter has,
&n
bsp; in addition, the threat and fear of an ethnic or racial encounter. We might
suspect that Lafe knows full well of Magoon’s fear and plays with it just a little by underscoring the differences in neck size.
All Lafe’s joking about collars, too, makes a joke of the fashion of the time.
Lafe has outgrown his shirt, and particularly his collars. He seems a man out
of fashion altogether, too big for the constraints of town-imposed form. One
notable item of fashion of the turn of the twentieth century was the detachable collar, particularly for men’s shirts. Stiff and often made of celluloid, they often came to distinguish business or “white collar” men from working-class men.
Frost in his depiction of Lafe outgrowing the collars may have also been sati-
rizing another icon of contemporary American fashion advertising: the Arrow
collar man. A handsome figure who appeared in hundreds of advertisements
for Arrow shirt collars from 1905 to 1912, the years Frost was most actively
engaged in composing the poems for North of Boston, he came to represent the ideal of the handsome, athletic, self-confident American. President Roosevelt
once called him the portrait of “the common man.” The creation of adver-
tising artist J. C. Leyendecker, the Arrow collar man became a vision of the
polished Anglo-Saxon figure, and he received as much fan mail as many movie
stars.
Lafe, the shirtless French Canadian, becomes the antithesis of the Arrow
collar man, at least in so far as he refuses to conform to an image of
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Anglo-Saxon perfection. At the turn of the century, Vermont and other areas
of the United States were experiencing a resurgence in nostalgia for lost Anglo-Saxon perfection, which many felt had been diluted by immigration and racial
degeneration. The birth of the eugenics movement in America coincides with
the raging debates about Darwin and the possible application of natural selec-
tion and evolutionary theory to the immediate improvement of society. The
sentiment that birthed the eugenics movement in Vermont can be seen in a
poem of 1897 by Walter M. Rogers entitled “Vermont’s Deserted Farms,” in
which the abandoned farms also suggest lost “races”:
A sound is heard throughout the land
Which causes vague alarms;
You hear it oft, on every hand,
“Vermont’s deserted farms.”
Where once the strong Green Mountain boy
Pursued his honest toil,
And harvests rich were reaped, in joy,
By tillers of the soil.
You now behold the shattered homes
All crumbling to decay,
Like long-neglected catacombs
Of races passed away.
When Magoon sees Lafe as a “brute,” he is certainly not one of those strong
“Green Mountain boys” of the old colonial stock but part of the threatening
influx of French Canadians who were seen to be undermining the strength of
the old.
For all that Lafe may be much more physical, more open than “Professor
Square-the-circle-till-you’re-tired” Magoon, we might be too hasty in envi-
sioning him as a sensuous figure or one quite of pastoral contemplation, even
though he combines work with play, business with fun. He works for a Vermont
Republican newspaper, presumably collecting subscriptions. In spite of that,
he insists that he is a “double-dyed” Democrat and will not help them re-elect William Howard Taft. His job – such as it is – is to ride around and get the
sense of public sentiment. His allegiances appear to shift with his shape. His description of his journeying around to different farms gives a strong sense of his pleasure, but it also conveys the barrenness of some of those farms and the obvious awkwardness, if not fear, those farmers and their families seem to have of him. He says “he likes to find folks” but ultimately they seem rather scarce when he comes around, and he is indifferent to their labor:
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I like to find folks getting out in spring,
Raking the dooryard, working near the house.
Later they get out further in the fields.
Everything’s shut sometimes except the barn;
The family’s all away in some back meadow.
There’s a hay load a-coming – when it comes.
And later still they all get driven in:
The fields are stripped to lawn, the garden patches
Stripped to bare ground, the maple trees
To whips and poles. There’s nobody about.
The chimney, though, keeps up a good brisk smoking.
His horse naturally turns in at every house because “She thinks I’m sociable.
I maybe am.” We also learn that he “seldom” gets down “except for meals.”
What kind of collecting is Lafe truly about? While he represents a spirit of
freedom from all manner of constraint, does this portend something slightly
threatening about the double-dyed spirit of democracy of the future?
Frost’s pastoral mode reaches its darkest and most ironic in “The Vanishing
Red.” If the perennial theme of “Et in Arcadia Ego” had come to mean “Death
is also in Arcadia,” this gothic dramatic poem takes that to its extreme, which is nothing less than genocide in rural New England. The title of the poem becomes particularly poignant when taken in the context of the time of its publication, 1916. The phrase “The Vanishing Red,” and variants such as “The Vanishing
American,” had been widely used in North America for more than two cen-
turies in reference to the racial extinction of Indians. Such phrases did not so much describe a statistical reality as express and justify attitudes and, eventually, policies from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century.
Behind the phrase lies a myth that the Indians are a vanishing race, disap-
pearing before the advance of the white man. And the phrase often embraced a
tension: sentimentality toward a noble, savage race that was sadly but inevitably disappearing according to various laws of change and, above all, progress.11
Frost published “The Vanishing Red” in 1916, a time when a sense of the
inevitability of racial absorption had replaced the frontier hatred and desire to exterminate Indians. Discussions of Indian citizenship also gained momen-tum because of their service in World War I. Depictions of Thanksgiving,
which had formerly focused predominantly on the landing at Plymouth,
shifted to the feast of Pilgrims and Indians.12 But the liberal abolition-
ist spirit of nineteenth-century New England had also grown decidedly
xenophobic by the early twentieth century. Fear of immigrant populations
and racial mixing had fueled the growth of interest in eugenics and the
rhetoric of Aryan purity. It seems to me that Frost’s poem would have been
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particularly poignant at that moment as an ironic rhetorical gesture. For
it would have suggested to New England readers in particular that racial
hatred and extermination were neither a thing of the past nor part of some
grand process of racial attrition before the inevitable forces of progress but the sum total of individual acts of hatred and sadism. If Frost’s “Miller” is
supposed to represent progress and technology, he comes off as just about
the opposite – brutal and inarticulate. And John – hardly an Indian name –
fails to fit James Fennimore Cooper’s representations of the Indian as either
devil or noble savage. The mill itself is – like grindstones, scythes, and axes –
a very old form of technology. Frost’s poem thus provides a sharp undoing
of much of the traditional sentiment and ideology lurking in the phrase “The
Vanishing Red.”
When we first encounter the Miller, we learn little about his motives or
character except that the narrator barely grants him elevated stature even in
his simplest vocal gestures: “And the Miller is said to have laughed– / If you like to call such a sound a laugh.” Whatever laugh he might emit, he is hardly generous, and one senses from the very beginning of the poem that he, for
reasons that are frighteningly not more but less than anyone can understand,
saw it as his grim duty to do the inevitable and exterminate “the last Red Man in Acton”:
But he gave no one else a laughter’s license.
“Whose business – if I take it on myself,
Whose business – but why talk round the barn? –
When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.”
While the narrator does not justify the Miller’s intentions, he neither moralizes nor attempts to explain the history of continental relations by casting blame
on who started the trouble. It is “just a matter / Of who began it between the two races,” which may be to look chillingly on the actors in this little drama as part of an ongoing, brutal drama of extermination.
The mill itself then becomes an instrument and figure of that extermination,
one that hardly heralds progress. What finally inspires the Miller to throw John, the Indian, into the wheel pit? Visceral disgust because John dared to utter
anything at all, dared to presume the right to be heard from:
Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red Man gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big thumping shuffling mill-stone
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming
From one who had no right to be heard from.