Nothing availed. Harvard was as impregnable as Machu Picchu; it had no more use for a maverick than the New York literary world had had. It had made its feelings clear by March. The next month, it underlined them in red by appointing Granville Hicks, the exemplar of every intellectual affiliation that DeVoto despised, as a one-year Fellow of United States History and assigning him to Adams House, the house of the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, DeVoto’s ally Robert Hillyer.
That indeed looked like the work of a conspiracy, or like a deliberate attempt to humiliate the DeVoto-Hillyer faction. Hillyer thought so and was furious.8 The Crimson somewhere dug up the unpublished and more destructive portions of Hicks’s “Letter to Robert Hillyer” and printed them, either in pure enjoyment of the squabble or out of some obscure desire to take sides in it.
But the Hicks appointment had been too humiliating to DeVoto; it had made too plain what his friends were up against. Quietly he called them off, withdrew his claim, swallowed the pill that had been handed him, and gave up forever the hope, and at least outwardly the desire, of being a part of Harvard.
Elinor Frost died in Florida on March 20—one more reason that the year 1938 gave for gloom. When he went to Amherst for the memorial service, on April 22, DeVoto had an odd reminder of how commonly academic institutions undervalued their employees if the employees were outspoken non-conformists. One of the honorary pallbearers,9 along with DeVoto, Morrison, Hillyer, Untermeyer, David McCord, and others of the Cambridge-Bread Loaf fellowship, was Wilbert Snow, of Connecticut Wesleyan, the same Wilbert Snow who in 1915 had been fired from the University of Utah and whose firing had precipitated Bernard DeVoto out of Utah and into Harvard. They shared a sense of injustice, but there was a difference, too. Snow had benefited, rather than suffered, from being let go; the University of Utah had done the suffering. But Harvard, at least in DeVoto’s view, was a university from which all roads led down, and its prestige and self-esteem were proof against admission or correction of error, The only courses open to an ousted teacher were to go elsewhere and eat his heart out for lost beatitude, or stay on in the Harvard community without affiliation or status. He had already determined on the second. He would take his affiliation and status with him, as curator of the Mark Twain papers.
By the time of the Elinor Frost service he was already free of the Saturday Review and at work on the papers in the law offices of Charles Lark.10 From weeks of immersion in them he emerged with the conviction that Paine had taken more liberties as an editor than could be condoned, and that at least three books were visible among the manuscripts that Paine had rejected or suppressed. He agreed to assemble a volume of sketches, a volume of autobiography, and a volume of letters, and to edit and publish these for a fee of five hundred dollars each, without any participation in royalties, and he persuaded Lark to ship the papers to Widener Library at Harvard, where a secretary-typist under DeVoto’s supervision would put them in order.11
The agreement was signed on May 31. By that date the DeVotos had located a house on Coolidge Hill Road, in Cambridge, close to the Shady Hill School. On June 12, just before they were to start for a summer in the country at Walpole, New Hampshire, Collier’s bought the serial he had begun working on before he was even quite clear of the Review. They wanted it, naturally, to be completed within a month. On June 14, suddenly solvent but weighted down as usual with work, DeVoto left New York. His sentiments upon leaving, which he expressed in the August Easy Chair, were not calculated to endear him to the New Yorkers. He pitied them. He thought they lived a life of unbelievable artificiality, like the highly bred dogs they led around muzzled, or turned loose for a little exercise with a rubber rat on the greasy grass of Central Park.
Theology tells us that sin sunk to acceptance is depravity, and psychiatry tells us that even a psychosis is an adaptation, a way of staying alive, and four million people are adapted to living with the aorta tied off.… But I no longer have to live under that ligature.… I’m moving away.… I’m getting out. I’m going back to America, to civilization.… I had my rubber rat: I came here to write about other men’s books, and that gives the measure of this maniac town. In this air it seems sensible, it has the town’s logic—and it is quite as functional as any dog stretching his legs on a treadmill in a steam-heated room.12
New Hampshire for the summer, Cambridge in prospect. After what he had been through, and even without a Harvard connection, it sounded like Beulah Land.
First he gave defeat the satisfaction of the last word by writing his Easy Chair “On Moving from New York.” Then he dug in and finished the serial. Then he wrote the introduction he had promised to write for Hired Man on Horseback,13 the biography of Eugene Manlove Rhodes by his widow; and with the generosity that was his frequent impulse, because he knew she was in need, he directed Houghton Mifflin to send his fee to May Rhodes. Finally, his immediate jobs done, his spirits high and going higher, the summer tidied up and the temptations of the road upon him, he yielded to Avis’ desire to revisit her home town of Houghton, Michigan, which she had not seen in fifteen years. On the way, he made his wife’s nostalgia pay research dividends by routing them through the Oneida Colony and past the Hill Cumorah, where the Angel of the Lord had directed young Joseph Smith to dig up the Golden Plates.
By August 9 they were back in the God’s country of the Connecticut Valley, with just enough time for an Easy Chair before Bread Loaf and “the best time of the year.” This time it would not be unalloyed pleasure. The session of 1938 would see the beginning of his filial quarrel with Robert Frost.
6 · An Incident on Bread Loaf Mountain
DeVoto was a Bread Loaf regular of six years’ standing, but Frost’s association with both the place and the idea had been much longer. He had been dreaming about some sort of literary farm with himself as its focus as early as 1915,1 when he was just back from the stimulating companionship of Edward Thomas and Lascelles Abercrombie in the English countryside, and when DeVoto was a raw sophomore transfer student at Harvard. When the School of English was created to make use of the Bread Loaf Inn in 1920, Frost had immediately written to Wilfred Davidson and offered to participate. He had been at the English School nearly every year since 1921, and had become the genius loci, shedding his light around and getting back worshipful reflections. It was the place, above all others, where he went to shine and be admired.
His relations with the Writers’ Conference, though its program interested him more, had been less congenial. He participated in 1926, its first year, but thereafter, because of disagreement with some of John Farrar’s policies, he held aloof. In 1929, when Farrar was to be replaced, Frost was announced as the new director, but someone—Thompson thinks President Paul Moody of Middlebury College—vetoed that, and after serving through the 1929 session Frost did not return again until Morrison and DeVoto, during the intimate Cambridge winter of the Norton Lectures, persuaded him to come in the summer of 1936. He came again in 1937, and would be there in 1938.
But 1938 was the year of his disaster. With his wife’s death, his life had been cracked like a dropped cup. He suffered not only from her loss but from his children’s resentment and their feeling that he had always neglected his family for his poetry. His own profound guilts gnawed at him, his dependence of many years left him fearing the future without her companionship and support. “She could always be present to govern my loneliness without making me feel less alone,” he had written DeVoto in April. “It is now running into more than a week longer than I was ever away from her since June 1895.” In the time of loss he did not trust himself. “I expect to have to go depths below depths in thinking before I catch myself and can say what I want to be while I last. I shall be all right in public, but I can’t tell you how I am going to behave when I am alone.”2
For a time it seemed that he was right about being “all right in public.” Once past the illness that made him delegate his wife’s cremation to their daughter Lesley, he rallied. The memorial service at Amherst
on April 22 went so well that DeVoto reported it as more like a reunion of old friends than a funeral.3 When it was over, Frost cleared his future by resigning his Amherst professorship, to which he had never paid more than minimal attention, and selling his house back to the college. He got through a painful visit to the Derry farm, where Elinor had wanted her ashes scattered along Hyla Brook, and when he found the farm in the possession of unfeeling strangers, he made the difficult decision, with his children’s concurrence, that it was best not to carry out her wish. He came to Bread Loaf in mid-August, direct from Shaftsbury, where he had been staying with his son Carol, and only the ashes of his wife, which he kept in a jar in his room, knew how he behaved when alone.
But shortly most of Bread Loaf knew how he behaved in public.
Hindsight, reviewing Frost’s behavior during the year or two following Elinor’s death, concludes that during that time, and erratically and at intervals for a good while afterward, he was not quite sane. That is the belief of some who knew him best. Nothing entirely new and aberrant marked his actions. But during the time when he was, as he put it, “living with his dead,” he simply gave way with less provocation to the vanity, pettishness, and malice that had always been mingled with greatness in his nature.
Lawrance Thompson’s superb biography demonstrates, in a hundred contexts, how much irritable self-love lay beneath the rumpled white thatch and the rumpled clothes, behind the piercing blue eyes, back of the teasing smile. It suited Frost to wear in public the mask of the humorous sage, to speak in jokes and riddles and eclogues, to talk his poetry and poeticize his talk, to probe and ruminate as if artlessly, to touch off, as one admirer put it, “a slow fuse of wit”; and yet he never failed to give the true impression of being deeper than he seemed, deeper than almost anybody else, saner, wiser.
That was the Frost whom the Bread Loaf patrons had always known. In 1938 he came back to them apparently unchanged, except that his stoical bearing and their pity for his loss gave his wit a sharper poignancy and his wisdom the depth of sadness. And yet all his friends knew that he had much of his father’s brutality in him, that he tolerated rivals badly, that he was a prima donna who was never content to share the center of the stage. His self-love demanded admiration and demanded it undiluted and unqualified; and when his self-love was wounded he struck back like a child in a tantrum. He would permit his worshipers no other gods, and he had knives in his tongue and thunderbolts in his rages. Louis Untermeyer, who knew him as well as anyone, referred to him privately as Jahweh.
A jealous god. But a god. No one was in his presence for five minutes without feeling his voltage. He enforced the admiration he fed on, and many a person who had been whipped with his wit, and suffered from his jokes that drew blood, put away anger because the man who wounded him was so clearly a great man and a great poet.
Add that he could be cruel to people he loved, and even especially to these. That he could punish family and friends for his own pain. That his malice was at least as notable as his wisdom. That he could speak out of six sides of his mouth at once, and mean everything he said from every side, and not quite mean any of it. That he profoundly understood the human heart, including his own. What he did in petty anger or jealousy or injured vanity he could comprehend with the coldest sort of self-knowledge, and then as often as not hide the knowledge from himself. Better than others did, he knew his own desert places, and sometimes scared himself with them, and sometimes acted as if he were rather proud of them. Public or private, in his poetry or in his personal relations, he looked simple and was in fact a demon of complexity. While she was alive, Elinor Frost had guided and to some extent controlled or concealed the vanity and malice in him. Without her—and with the bosom serpent of her bleak and speechless death devouring him internally—he began to dismay his friends with his petulance. On the night of August 27 he dismayed half of Bread Loaf, and in particular DeVoto, not so much because of what he did as because what he did was so far beneath the greatness in him.
One of the more formal aspects of the Conference was the evening lectures by staff members and visitors. Frost had opened the series with a talk and reading on August 18. He had sat in the Inn parlor with people at his feet, and had autographed books and dispensed authentic wisdom. He had even attended some of the lectures of others, and had followed the crowd over to Treman Cottage afterward, and talked away two or three hours, always at the center of an attentive group; and as often as not he had ended the evening by picking out some awed young writer to walk and talk and count stars with him along the midnight road to Middlebury Gap. More than one Fellow or junior staff member crawled into bed at two or three o’clock after such an expedition, his mind dizzy with the altitudes it had been in and every cell in his body convinced that Robert Frost was the wisest and sanest man alive.
Then, on August 27, Archibald MacLeish came visiting, and that evening read from his poems. Once one of the expatriates, he had gone through a conversion to the notion of poetry as urgent public speech. He had a political intensity and a humanitarian social conscience that were attractive to many who in 1938 had suffered eight years of Depression and were now confronted with Hitler’s campaign against the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia and God knew what more. Most of his hearers at Bread Loaf had read his “sound-track” called America Was Promises, most had listened respectfully to his anti-Fascist radio play The Fall of the City. He was a friend of most of the staff, an old Bread Loafer, and warmly welcomed. Of all the poets who had been on the mountain that summer, he was the only one who could have been said to rival Frost, though neither he nor his most fanatical admirers would have made any such claim. But without intending to, he dimmed the local sun, and the dimming was less tolerable because MacLeish’s politics, though definitely opposed to those who said Comrade, seemed to Frost mawkish with New Deal welfare sentiments.
At MacLeish’s reading, Frost sat near the back. Early in the proceedings he found some mimeographed notices on a nearby chair and sat rolling and folding them in his hands. Now and again he raised the roll of paper, or an eyebrow, calling the attention of his seat mates to some phrase or image. He seemed to listen with an impartial, if skeptical, judiciousness. About halfway through the reading he leaned over and said in a carrying whisper, “Archie’s poems all have the same tune.” As the reading went on, to the obvious pleasure of the audience, he grew restive. The fumbling and rustling of the papers in his hands became disturbing. Finally MacLeish announced, “You, Andrew Marvell,” a tour de force that makes a complete thirty-six-line poem out of a single sentence. It was a favorite. Murmurs of approval, intent receptive faces. The poet began. Then an exclamation, a flurry in the rear of the hall. The reading paused, heads turned. Robert Frost, playing around like an idle, inattentive boy in a classroom, had somehow contrived to strike a match and set fire to his handful of papers and was busy beating them out and waving away the smoke.4
Those who knew Frost of old laughed and shook their heads over him. Those who did not know him that well thought his bonfire the comic accident he made it seem. But later, over in Treman, a circle of people gathered around MacLeish and persuaded him to read his new radio play, Air Raid. There he was, still on center stage, and there was Frost again in the audience, on the periphery—a thing he could not stand.
In Air Raid the announcer, waiting with the inhabitants of a nameless town for the coming of the planes, repeats several times the dry refrain, “We have seen nothing and heard nothing.” Some of the people in Treman Cottage that night, not paying much attention or not comprehending, could have made a similar report. One was myself. Another was Charles Curtis, gifted with an enviable capacity for enjoying a party, who went smiling around through the whole evening remarking on how wonderful Bread Loaf was, what good talk, wonderful people, wholehearted good times. But others, including DeVoto, interpreted every rattle of ice in a glass, every cough and murmur, as sight or sound of war.
For Frost was quite deliberately trying to break up
the reading. His comments from the floor, at first friendly and wisecracking, became steadily harsher and more barbed. He interrupted, he commented, he took exception. What began as the ordinary give and take of literary conversation turned into a clear intention of frustrating and humiliating Archie MacLeish, and the situation became increasingly painful to those who comprehended it. Once, DeVoto got up and went outside and walked around the house to get over his agitation. When he came back, the inquisition was still going on, MacLeish patiently going ahead, Frost nipping and snapping around his heels, and now and then sinking his teeth in with a savage quick bite that looked playful and was not. People sat where they had been trapped, and looked into their drained glasses and did not quite dare look around.
Eventually DeVoto, who more or less agreed with Frost’s opinion of the play, but who completely sympathized with MacLeish, being systematically humiliated by a man he enormously respected and would not reply to, said something. No one who was there seems to remember exactly what he said—something like “For God’s sake, Robert, let him read!” Hardly more than that—not enough to catch the attention of the ones like Charles Curtis who were enjoying the literary evening. But a rebuke, and one did not rebuke Jahweh.5
It does not appear that Frost replied at once, or directly. But shortly he elected to take offense at something—DeVoto remembered it as his taking personally a derogatory remark that was meant for Stephen Spender. He said something savage, got up and went out on the arm of the cheerfully oblivious Charles Curtis. The reading went on, lamely but with relief, to its end, and people escaped to their rooms.
But the incident was not over. Frost apparently steamed all night with fury, envy, shame, whatever it was that fueled his agitation. The first thing in the morning, he summoned Herschel Brickell and asked to be driven over to Concord Corners, a hundred miles to the east, near the New Hampshire line, where he had recently bought a house in which his daughter Irma was living with her family. Brickell drove him over, left him there, and returned to a Bread Loaf buzzing with rumors and replays of the night before. It was said that, either after he left Treman Cottage with Curtis, or on the way over to Concord Corners, Frost had deliberately eaten a cigarette. Why? To make himself sick and pitiable? To punish himself for his childish ill temper? It was anybody’s guess. By the following morning, rumor had something else to dissect and distort. Frost had telephoned Brickell to come and get him. Brickell did. It seemed that Irma had infuriated her father by putting him in a bedroom that had no way in or out except through the bedroom of her and her husband, and had told him that she would keep him but would receive none of his friends. To a man who had recently lost his wife, who felt the spoken and unspoken blame of his children, who blamed himself and had just made an unmannerly fool of himself, there was no escape except from the intolerable into the humiliating. He came back to Bread Loaf and the subdued greetings of his friends. Maybe it was on the way back that he ate the cigarette—by this time, rumor and the distortions of memory have made nearly everything obscure.6
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Page 28