Robert Frost, Napoleon, Gossip, and the “Thrill of Sincerity”
Frost, at about the time his first book appeared (1913).
Most readers place the often-taught (because ubiquitously-anthologized) “Home Burial” among Frost’s most remarkable achievements in making literary art out of “sentence sounds,” as he called them: in short, the sounds of animated speech, in all its changeable tones (from under- to overstatement; from the subtlest irony to the bluntest sarcasm; anger; surprise; teasing and flirtation; anguish; fear; queryings both closed and open; and so on). I am going to assume some familiarity with the poem in the remarks that follow. (The text is readily available via the link given above.)
Frost composed “Home Burial” in England at precisely the time when he was composing also a remarkable series of letters, dating from mid-1913 to 1915, outlining his interest in what he called, variously, “the abstract vitality of our speech”; or “the sound of sense”; or “the intonation [of the voice] entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom and meaning of a sentence”; or “sound postures”; or “real cave things” in the “cave of the mouth” that “were before words were.” “Home Burial,” in addition to being a poem composed almost entirely out of talk—that is, out of those “real cave things” that inhabit the cave of the mouth—is also in some sense about the possibility of “talk,” about the outer limits of talk. It is a poem about the limits (both moral and sympathetic) of a husband, the father of a dead child, who stands accused not merely of thinking that “the talk is all,” but of living as if it were—even in the face of his own child’s death. (His wife damns him utterly: “If you had any feelings,” she says, “you that dug / With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave…”) The possibilities in this for a vocational parable of some kind are hard to mistake, at least as I see it. Here, I will sketch out, if only tentatively, a few such possibilities.
William Stanley Braithewait (1878-1962), from 1906 to 1931, influential literary editor of The Boston Evening Transcript.
What distinguishes a man like the one in “Home Burial”—who stands accused by a grieving and aggrieved wife of “thinking the talk is all,” even unto the point of unfeeling heartlessness—from a man (a poet, say) who concedes, as Frost did in a 1915 letter, that “his conscious interest in people was at first no more than an almost technical interest in their speech”? What distinguishes a man who “thinks the talk is all” from a man (a poet, say) who, above all things, likes his talk “fixed to the page” with all the “body heat” out of it (which is to say, all of the confessional and personal “sincerity” out of it)?
Cover, first American edition (issued by Henry Holt)
A merely “technical interest” in the speech of men and women may, let’s suppose, abstract a man from his fellows—may withdraw him from them at one or two removes. Some such retrospective worry doubtless accounts for the beguiling, apologetic air with which Frost describes this youthful tendency of his in a 1915 letter to William Stanley Braithewait, editor, at the time, of the literary pages of the Boston Evening Transcript. I have in mind not merely his teasing impeachments of himself, as when he reports to the genteel Bostonian, with easy confidence, that A Boy’s Will (1913), his first book, “is an expression of my life for the ten years from eighteen on when I thought I greatly preferred stocks and stones to people.” I have in mind also this utterly engaging confession:
Detail, cover of the 1914 first edition of the book.
“I say all this biographically to lead up to Book II (North of Boston). There came a day about ten years ago when I made the discovery that though sequestered I wasn’t living without reference to other people. Right on top of that I made the discovery in doing The Death of the Hired Man that I was interested in neighbors for more than merely their tones of speech—and always had been. I remember about when I began to suspect myself of liking their gossip for its own sake. I justified myself by the example of Napoleon as recently I have had to justify myself in seasickness by the example of Nelson. I like the actuality of gossip, the intimacy of it. Say what you will effects of actuality and intimacy are the greatest aim an artist can have.”
"The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries," by Jacques-Louis David, 1812.
These remarkable sentences merit close attention. But first let us address the allusion to Napoleon. This allusion is cunning in the way Frost’s allusions often are, given that the letter playfully mocks the poet’s youthful pose of misanthropy, the merely instrumental relation he purports to have entertained to his neighbors as a literary artist, and his Napoleonic (if callow) ambition to “measure his strength,” as he says elsewhere in the letter, “against all creation.” My guess is that Frost has in mind Emerson’s essay on Napoleon in Representative Men, and I want to take a brief look at it here because it associates Napoleon’s interest in gossip with all kinds of behaviors (manipulative, ambitious, secretive) that Frost comically adopts—and winks at even as he adopts—in the letter to Braithewait. “Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments,” Emerson says. “He is a boundless liar. The official paper, his ‘Moniteurs,’ and all his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed.” In addition to everything else he is attempting to do in the letter, Frost is enlisting the literary pages of the Boston Transcript to propagate what he “wished to be believed” about him and his first two volumes of poetry. If ever a poet wrote with the “theatrical éclat” Emerson ascribes to Napoleon, Frost does in this letter to Braithewait—and does so, in fact, precisely with a roguishly charming allusion to Napoleon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But there is still more of interest to us in that essay from Representative Men: “[Napoleon] has a passion for stage effect,” Emerson says. “Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation. He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity; but mere vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip; and opened letters; and delighted in his infamous police; and rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and women about him, boasting that ‘he knew everything.’”
Title page of Les Fourberies de Scapin by Molière (1680)
“In short,” Emerson concludes, “when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a kind of Scamp Jupiter” (the epithet was first applied to Napoleon by his secretary Abbé de Pradt, who borrowed it from the name bestowed on the scampy valet in Molière’s comedy, Les Fourberies de Scapin). I have no way of knowing what Braithewait made of Frost’s allusion to Napoleon in that 1915 letter. I can hardly be certain Frost was inviting him, or anybody else, to recall what Emerson said of the Little Giant. But anyone not innocent of Lawrance Thompson’s biography of Frost can see where the poet’s talk of “justifying” himself “by the example” of Napoleon might lead an ungenerous (and tone-deaf) reader like Thompson;—especially if, as Thompson was, a reader not at all innocent of Emerson. Letters of the kind we are reading, here, are precisely what led Thompson to paint his portrait of The Poet as Scamp Jupiter in the second volume of his perniciously iconoclastic three-volume biography of Frost—as a poet who (to borrow Emerson’s words for the business in the essay on Napoleon) “pulled the ears and whiskers of men”; who was “a prodigious gossip”; an impostor and a rogue “who rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and women about him”; a poet whose chief aim in life was to “dazzle and astonish” (“I only go / When I’m the show,” Frost often said); who felt instinctively that if he were “to give the liberty of the press” his “power could not last three days”; a poet and a man whose “passion for stage effect” meant that his every generosity was “poisoned” by “calculation.” As it happens, Thompson saw in his own reading of the letter to Braithewait a perfect instance of all of this: a poet’s cynical courtship of an influential literary editor well situated to advance his Napoleonic ambitions, as Frost mischievously puts it in the letter, to “measure” (again) “his strength” if not against “all creation” than at least against all the other poets who came in for notice in the pages of The Boston Evening Transcript in 1915. Thompson calls the letter to Braithewait “a thoroughly successful campaign strategy.” The biographer thought he found the “poison of calculation” tainting most all the letters Frost addressed, with notably winning ease and charm, to editors, anthologists, and critics on his return to the United States in 1915.
Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, 1758–1805. Portrait by Lemuel Francis Abbott (c. 1760 – 1802).
But Thompson misses the essential point: Frost’s “calculations” are entirely above-board, and most winningly charming. Letters such as the one to Braithewait invite their recipients—Braithewait, Louis Untermeyer, Sidney Cox, John Bartlett, and others—into complicity in what is, after all, not simply a “campaign” to advance one poet’s career, but a happy parody of the “campaigns” poets are forever on to advance their careers and to cut a figure in the general business.
Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), American writer, poet, literary critic, anthologist, and editor.
The 1915 letter inasmuch as says to Braithewait:
Here I am, a freshly minted poet—a poet hailed already as among the two or three most promising to have emerged from America in a generation. Here I am, giving you, a literary journalist, the straight dope on how the last twenty years of my life are to be measured against all creation. Now, ain’t that a peach?
I doubt Braithewait felt that he was being used, or that Frost was using the pages of the Transcript as Napoleon used the pages of the Moniteur. I see no reason to suspect Braithewait of a being so dull a reader as not to the see the mischief in a poet who “justified” himself, in a single sentence, with reference both to Napoleon and to Nelson (the admiral who defeated Napoleon’s fleet at Trafalgar).
And yet there is guile in the letter, though of a “theoretical” kind. The narrative it lays out is not what it appears to be—and this fact, so far as I can tell, Braithewait did not discern. How much does an interest in gossip “for its own sake”—that is, for the sake of what is said—really differ from a “technical” interest in gossip for the “tones of speech” it “somehow entangles” in its “syntax, idiom, and meaning”? The question is the more intriguing given that Frost’s Napoleonic interest in poetry is not, in fact, an interest in “gossip” per se, but instead in “effects” approximating the “actuality” of gossip. We arrive at the point, here, where theme and technique merge—the point where the “subject” and the “enterprise” of poetry merge; the point where what the poem is about and how the poem works amount to the same thing; the point where the “subject matter” of a poem becomes merely one more resource for making it sound as different from every poem as is possible (to borrow Frost’s way of putting it in “The Figure a Poem Makes”).
Let me venture a suggestion. Not much separates Frost’s youthful interest in his neighbors “merely” for “their tones of speech” from his mature interest in “effects” that approach the “actuality” of their “gossip.” I do not think I am picking nits, here. On the account given in the letter to Braithewait, Frost’s interest in the talk of his neighbors was as vocationally instrumental (so to speak) as Napoleon’s ever was. The difference is that no Russians, and no Britons, ever died because of it. In short, the letter to Braithewait outlines not so much a development or progression in Frost’s life as an artist—though that is what it first appears to do—as it describes a sophistication of his life as an artist. Which makes it harder, at first anyway, to understand the story he tells about this poet who matures out of a “great preference” for solitude—this poet who was fugitive from a world that seemed to him to disallow him—into a love of, and a delight in, communion. The poet’s vocational investment in his fellows never really alters. The talk is still all. Frost had found, in his art, a way to reconcile the imperative of solitude with the experience of communion, or of “correspondence,” as he calls it in his “Introduction” to E.A. Robinson‘s King Jasper. He would live not so much with people as not without reference to them. He would have it both ways. He would fold his subject matter into his form.
The narrative Frost tells in the letter to Braithewait is one he would retell, all differences allowed for, twenty-four years later in “The Figure a Poem Makes.” “Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers,” Frost says in that essay. “But it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day”:
The book in which "The Figure a Poem Makes" first appeared, as a preface.
“Why can’t we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in thought. Then it will go hard if we can’t in practice. Our lives for it. Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context—meaning—subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety.”
In the letter to Braithewait, Frost makes his youthful self out to have been an “abstractionist” who toyed with a merely “technical interest” in speech—an interest merely in the “abstract vitality” of speech. He wanted to have the sound of it out alone and dispense with the inessential. And it fared with him as it does with the abstractionist in “The Figure a Poem Makes”: he ran smack up against the idea that he could never have his “sentence sounds” out alone, abstracted. He discovered, at last, an interest in talk for “its own sake,” as against talk merely as a medium for “the sound of sense.” The idea, I take it, is as follows. We cannot make good talk—we cannot make good gossip—about nothing; we must have the help of context, meaning, subject matter. And yet “meaning” and “subject matter” are never the end of any poem we might make out of talk. They are instead one of its best means toward “variety” in sound—that is, given the relative poverty of harmonized vowels and consonants, metrical variation, rhyme, and so on. Frost never repudiated his commitment to what he called “the abstract vitality of our speech”—his commitment to “pure sound” and to “pure form.” But he acknowledged, he accounted for, the necessary impurity of meaning, of talk “for its own sake,” if he were to realize the kind of art he wanted to make in North of Boston. As he says in the letter to Braithewait, he “liked people,” and needed them, “even when [he] believed [he] detested them.” No poet, no literary artist, whose aesthetic demands that all poems “sound different” from one another can sequester himself from the world.
The 1982 issue of Raritan in which Margery Sabin's fine essay first appeared.
Frost’s almost technical interest in the talk of his neighbors (here’s my essential point) led him into a larger kind of communion: an “intimately impersonal” communion (so to speak); a communion in which he might retain his fugitive sequestration; a communion that might replace the too intimately personal one he forsook as “fugitive from a world that disallowed him.” In short, a communion with and through the common repertory of the “brute sounds” we men and women make—the sounds we have made in “the caves of our mouths” since “before words were.” In speaking of an “intimately impersonal” communion, I have in mind something that Margery Sabin, in an essay published in Raritan, describes better than I so far have: “a life-force more than personal, more than private, and more than socially conventional—a force of human life, transmitted over time and from person to person through the intonations of a given language.” Frost wanted to believe, says Sabin, “that human vitality takes on a supra-personal existence in the established intonations of speech, intonations which the individual may draw on for personal expression and, perhaps even more important, for the reassuring recognition that his single life is connected to other lives. The connection need not have anything to do with love or sympathy.” That latter point is what I would stress here. The “connection” in question instead “invokes, more radically, the shared possession of a repertory of gestures that is the sign of a common range of human experience. What Frost calls ‘the abstract vitality of our speech’ gives reassurance that the life within us in not eccentric or monstrous. It ceases to be monstrous once it participates in the verbal forms through which other people also enact their lives.” I think Sabin is right about this—more perceptive, in fact, than any other person who has put pen to paper on the subject. This is where Frost sought his refuge as fugitive from a world that disallowed him. And it is what brought him back, in thought and in vocation, to the world he never left: communion through a medium that is not personal but “supra-personal,” a medium that need have nothing to do with intimacy or sincerity—with love or even sympathy—but which instead has everything to do with being “human.” His vocational commitment to the sound of sense was at once his abstraction from community and his substantiation in it. His vocational commitment to the sound of sense allowed him to be both fugitive and available.
In this Frost is like the husband in “Home Burial,” who says—in trying to preserve, to shore up, his failing communion with his wife Amy—”Tell me about it, if it’s something human” (my emphasis). That is perhaps the most curiously forbidding remark any husband is on record as ever having made (at least in my acquaintance). Amy, for her part—and she is responding to a felt impersonality in her husband, for whom, as she says, in her most damning remark, the “talk is all”;—Amy, for her part, all but arraigns him of having fallen well out of love, and even sympathy. That’s one of the problems—one of the moral problems, so to speak—that “Home Burial” brings into view. What are we to make of people who believe that the talk is all, and who hold this belief, moreover, because they suspect that the life within may be, or may become, “eccentric” and “monstrous,” and need some reassurance against that possibility? What are we to make of people who—to make matters even more complex—seek that reassurance in a conversation not personal but (somehow) supra-personal—who seek that reassurance not so much through intimacies as through “effects” of intimacies? The worst that can be said of the husband in “Home Burial,” as it happens, is the best that can be said of Frost as a literary artist: “He seeks not so much the possibility of greater sincerity or a fuller communion with a listener,” as Sabin puts it, “but a connection of a more indirect sort, as when our physical gestures—ways of bending or stretching, lying back or keeping stiff—join us to others because they are, recognizably, the forms of their physical life too.” Sabin speaks advisedly. Frost is dealing in what he himself called vocal “postures.” Good talk is simply another kind of “body language,” and, like body language, it is intimate without ever being confidential or confessional.
Frost felt most at ease, found his deepest and most satisfying rapport, not through anything we might usefully call intimacy or sincerity, but through what, in the letter to Braithewait, he calls, speaking precisely, “the thrill of sincerity” and the “effect” of intimacy. The phrasing, here, encourages me to suppose that Sabin is correct in her suggestions. Frost sought an impersonal, “supra-personal” form of communion—a communion that requires neither sympathy nor love, though it is of course compatible with both. That form of communion, to turn again to “Home Burial,” Amy simply cannot bear. But it is the only kind her husband, as she sees it, has to offer. She must take it or leave it. It is as if there is a certain inflexibility there with which she has had to deal, and to which she has had to conform. In reading the poem we watch her escape it.
Elinor Miriam White and Robert Frost at the time of their marriage, 1895.
Let me clarify what I am not suggesting. I am not suggesting that Amy’s husband is somehow to be identified with the poet. I am not suggesting that “the child’s mound” in “Home Burial” is that of Elliot, Frost and Elinor’s first-born, dead at the age of three in the year 1900. I have no interest, here, in biographical claims of that kind, though I can see how and why some may wish to make them. I am suggesting instead that “Home Burial”—at least for my purposes here—concerns a matter of great interest to Frost as an artist, and perhaps also as a man: namely, what it might mean (again) to commit yourself, vocationally and personally, to something like the idea that “the talk is all.” I am suggesting (to put things still another way) that the poem involves a question of the most immediately consequential kind for Frost. Had his commitment to vocation—to fixing “good talk” to the page, to the abstract vitality of our speech (a commitment he made, and kept, with astonishing intensity);—had this commitment entered into some kind of invidious competition with other possible commitments, among them, those to his family? I do not claim that it did. But Frost was self-critical enough to wonder about the matter. He is on record to this effect, in fact, in several letters dating from the period immediately following Elinor’s death, and the apprehension had been with him always, even in that decade during which he was a fugitive from a world that disallowed him—that decade during which he made sound poetry of his family, and of his farm, in Derry; that decade during which he began to see how the vitality of a life led “with reference to other people” might be “abstracted” from them into a poetry of vitally “pure form” (as he called his poetry of “sentence sounds”)—a poetry, even in the precincts to which “Home Burial” introduces us, with all the “body heat” out of it.
A Soviet war poster, ca. 1941: "Don't chat! Chatting leads to treason" (according to our Wikipedians in their entry on "gossip").
We are getting deep into Frost’s problem of vocation, here. I want to return, for a few moments more, to that 1915 letter to Braithewait, which has so much to tell us about Frost’s calling as a poet and as a man:
“I like the actuality of gossip, the intimacy of it. Say what you will effects of actuality and intimacy are the greatest aim an artist can have. The sense of intimacy gives the thrill of sincerity. A story must always release a meaning more readily to those who read than life itself as it goes ever releases meaning. Meaning is a great consideration. But a story must never seem to be told primarily for meaning. Anything, an inspired irrelevancy even to make it sound as if told the way it is chiefly because it happened that way.”
If anyone would specify, or try to specify, what “effects” of intimacy are like, he need look no further than the letter we now are reading. “I’ve got as far as finding you the copy of Book I I promised you,” Frost begins. “Perhaps as a busy man you won’t resent my telling you what to read in it if you are going to read it at all. It is the list I always give to friends I wish the minimum of suffering: pages 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 14, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 34, 41, 42 (once printed in The Transcript) 45, 46, (8-18—first poetry I ever wrote that I could call my own—year 1892) and 49. Don’t read those unless you have to, but don’t read the others on any account” (684). Start a letter like that and you’ve got your man; you’re holding him. He now numbers himself among the friends you wish the minimum of suffering. Frost shows himself—and the showing himself is essential—to be perfectly at ease disparaging his own work in ways that he tacitly assumes Braithewait will know how to discount. What’s more, Frost deftly brings Braithewait into complicity in his enterprise, with his confidences off the record, so to speak: “You are not going to use anything [I say] directly, I take it. You will be sure to veil what is too personal,” he says later in the letter. The more personal matters he reserves for the more intimate encounter he looks forward to (or claims to) in closing the letter: “May I hope really to see something of you when I am Boston again? I’d like to have a talk about poetry by ourselves alone.” There is a disarmingly available disingenuity in this, because, even as he holds Braithewait, Frost is also holding him off. He treats Braithewait more instrumentally than otherwise, at the end of the day. He is framing himself as a poet and as a man, managing the way he is to be read, thought of, spoken of, written about. He freely (if winningly) avails himself not so much of Braithewait’s sympathies as of the sympathies of the literary pages of the Boston Evening Transcript. Frost’s generosity in the letter is hardly “poisoned” by calculation, as Napoleon’s generosity was. But calculation doubtless qualifies the generosity such that we may well ask whether we have to do, here, with “sincerity” proper or instead with the “thrill” of it. And of course, what the letter achieves, and remarkably achieves, is an “effect” of intimacy, a “thrill” of sincerity. The confidentiality is perfectly simulated. It is too good to be true. The letter sounds too manifestly “frank” to be taken altogether at its word, and yet, truth be told, there’s nothing “insincere” about it. We have here a tertium quid, something neither sincere nor calculating. We have, in other words, literary art.
Title page, first American edition.
The letter, you see, is self-descriptive. It is a document in which the “thrill of sincerity,” as distinct from sincerity, is not simply named but also achieved. There is real candor in this, if candor of an unusual kind. Frost tells a story about himself. He is the young man who, with forgivable arrogance, forswore the world, swore off on the world, only to find that his vocation, poetry, inexorably called him back through that most worldly of media: “gossip.” Of course, Frost tells this tale of himself as refracted through a book published in his 39th year but titled A Boy’s Will—a book, in fact, enclosed with the letter we are here considering; a letter, moreover, that specifies for Braithewait both what to read in it, and what to make of it. As it happens, the story told in the letter—about a youth giving leave to his vagrancy—is not at all to be distinguished from the story told in the book, which already features a meta-fictional bracketing, of a kind, in the form of the glosses Frost affixed to its table of contents. A collection of poems that comes with its own frame is herewith being framed again. I cannot say whether Braithewait made a fast distinction between the poet speaking to him from the book and the man speaking to him from the letter with which the book arrived. But I can say that he would be mistaken if he supposed the letter to be any more or any less “sincere” and “intimate” than the book. If Braithewait were especially alert, he must have felt that, in the letter as in the book, Frost certainly doesn’t seem to be telling his story “primarily” “as it happened” and “for meaning”; and felt also that he, Braithewait, must be on the lookout for “anything, an inspired irrelevancy even,” laid into the better to make the story sound “as if told the way it is chiefly because it happened that way.” This is not exactly the same as advising an interlocutor that anything you say may be a fiction, but there is paradox in it. I should like to think that Braithewait smiled at the “inspired” impertinence of this demurral off the cuff: “I have run on unpardonably. I couldn’t write a whole biography; so I just had to plunge into the middle of things. I have pretty well jumbled the story of how I see my own development.” That’s a hoary one, of course—to introduce your fiction with apologies for its artlessness, or to make bold to speak self-effacingly. I suspect that Frost, again (and with a wink), invites Braithewait’s complicity, as who should say: This is exactly the kind of thing the most artful and ingratiating poets always do when writing to well-placed reviewers at the Transcript, now, isn’t it? Frost reveals himself to be a man uncommonly adept at “effects” of self-revelation, at “effects” of intimacy and sincerity. And he does this the better to intimate to his reader, his interlocutor, his correspondent, that the “effect” is the main thing, and should satisfy. Why ask for anything more? Why suppose that we ever need disentangle intimacy from “effects” of intimacy, or sincerity from the “thrill” of sincerity? Why should we ever care whether or not we ever touch “the man” in the “work”? Let him be as fugitive, and as self-sequestered, as he will.
All of which begs a question not unknown to journalists and lovers. How can we tell where “effects” of intimacy leave off and intimacy proper begins? How can we mark the boundary between the “thrill of sincerity” and “sincerity” proper, whatever that might be as distinct from the “thrill”?
Official Hallmark logo.
The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare, author of at least one sonnet (#130) about the difficulty of writing a sonnet un-dominated by convention.
How do we touch another person, meet the mind of another person, and know that our instinct in the matter has not somehow been fooled or taken in? How do we grieve, love, befriend, antagonize, conspire in anything other than more or less conventional ways? Anyone who ever read a Hallmark card, or an Elizabethan sonnet, knows that’s hard to do, harder than we might suppose. Even in the most immediate and durable of our relations—in a marriage or a family, for example—we often fall well wide of the mark. We have Frost’s word on this in his 1935 “Introduction” to E.A. Robinson‘s book King Jasper : “Correspondence is all. Mind must convince mind that it can uncurl and wave the same filaments of subtlety, soul convince soul that it can give off the same shimmer of eternity. At no point would anyone but a brute fool want to break off this correspondence. It is all there is to satisfaction; and it is salutary to live in fear of its being broken off.” I’m suggesting that “Home Burial” is written out of, and from, and also about, the fear that our “correspondence” shall be broken off; that we shall no longer be “together”; that we shall no longer be able to talk; that even our “supra-personal” effects of intimacy shall no longer satisfy. And “Home Burial” is haunted not so much by any particular spirit inhabiting the child’s mound in the “little graveyard” where the husband’s “people are,” as by something unspeakable, something inhuman, something eccentric or monstrous, something beyond “living people” and “things they understand,” as Amy puts it with no small measure of contempt. So far as her husband is concerned, her real problem—setting aside a dead child and a dying marriage—is that she no longer lives in fear for her “correspondence.” Insofar as her husband sees this in her, it spooks him, as things “inhuman” will. So he falls back on “the talk,” which, to him, “is all.”
Title page of the volume that first collected the Frost-Cox correspondence.
But I have yet to discuss another letter, in which Frost tries manfully to compel a hopelessly “sincere” friend to make do with “effects” of intimacy alone. He is writing to Sidney Cox, a friend, and the author, by this date, of one book about Frost, but more importantly the would-be author of a second book: a biography. Frost is writing to warn him off of the project. He spent years in this unhappy endeavor. And his manner, his tone—irritable, forbidding, a little imperious—suggests what might have awaited anyone who asked more of Frost than the “thrill of sincerity” and the “effect of intimacy.” The letter dates from 1932, by which time the two men had known one another for twenty years. “Honestly, Sidney,” Frost begins, “you are getting out of hand. I’m afraid you aren’t going to let yourself be unduly influenced by me anymore.” Right there you get it. The “unduly” turns the trick. Frost was more comfortable when he could play Cox like a fiddle. Well, at least he is frank enough to say so. (Come on, Sidney, it works much better when you let me call your shots.) He leaves his friend no dignified alternative: either “get out of hand” or else be “unduly influenced.” The added complication is this: “Getting out of hand” in this case means admiring Frost too much. It is quite as if Frost said: Damned if you haven’t found yet another way to be submissive toward me, Sidney. I preferred your old way. There is a nice lesson in this. Frost flirted with two idolatrous biographers (Cox and Robert Newdick) before committing himself to one (Lawrance Thompson) who would not allow himself to be unduly influenced in his admiration, and who began in idolatry and ended in iconoclasm. Apparently, it’s simply impossible to manage these things.
In any case, in the letter to Cox, Frost continues by generalizing the occasion so as to speak of “the poet’s mind” instead simply of his own: “I grow surer I don’t want to search the poet’s mind too seriously. I might enjoy threatening to for the fun of it just as I might to frisk his person.” Come in on a poet too closely and you arrest him, you frisk him. That’s literary criticism as police work—which, in other guise, we had too much of in the 1990s, when English professors spoke too freely of “interrogating” texts and authors. The poet needs his insurance against that kind of thing. He must maintain his strategic retreat. “I have written,” says Frost, “to keep the over curious out of the secret places of my mind both in my verse and in my letters to such as you.” That’s a way of saying (again) that he’d sequestered himself—still fugitive, as he was, from a world that might yet (who knows?) “disallow” him or his art. He is bristling at Sidney Cox. There is more than mere condescension in the phrase “in my letters to such as you.” Frost continues: “A subject has to be held clear outside of me with struts and as it were set up for an object. A subject must be an object.” Frost is like his own abstractionist. He is trying to have the gold—to project the gold—out of the ore of himself, if I may put it that way. He is trying to sustain his fugitive ethereality even as he substantiated himself in what for a modern American poet was a remarkably “available” career. His difficulties with Cox replay themselves in his relations with his wider circle of readers, some of whom never fail to mistake the “thrill of sincerity” that his poetry and public persona often offer for sincerity itself. There follows in the letter to Cox a chastisement that is a standing reproach to anyone who would write about Frost. He slips out of theory—out of talk about “the poet’s mind,” or of “subjects” and “objects”—and into a highly particular exasperation: “There’s no use in laboring this further years,” he says, making an issue of Cox’s obtuseness as to the main point. “My objection to your larger book about me”—here again he alludes to the proposed biography—”was that it came thrusting in where I did not want you. The idea is the thing with me. It would seem soft for instance to look in my life for the sentiments in the Death of the Hired Man. There’s nothing in it believe me. I should fool you if you took me so. I’ll tell you my notion of the contract you thought you had with me. The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse. But I have always had some turning up in talk that I feared I might never use because I was too lazy to write prose. I think they have been mostly educational ideas connected with my teaching, actually lessons. That’s where I hoped you would come in. I thought if it didn’t take you too much from your own affairs you might be willing to gather them for us both,” Frost writes, suggesting that the contract, properly understood, would secure credit to poet and critic alike—that is, so long as Cox bore in mind that he was being offered not so much a subject to know as an object to be tactfully aware of. In the letter to Braithewait, a relative stranger, Frost is much better able to manage this “contract.” He never has to insist on it outright. Tact suffices. “I trust you will veil what is too personal,” the poet says there. But here, in the letter to Cox—a man, after all, who had known him fairly well for going on twenty years—he has to warn his correspondent not to “reckon” with “the personalities. I keep to a minimum of such stuff,” Frost adds, “in any poet’s life and works. Art and wisdom with the body heat out of it.” The “body heat” would be the “subjective,” the “personal”—the ore from which all things truly sound in a poem are quarried and refined.
James Shirley, engraving by William Henry Worthington from a drawing by J. Thurston.
The better to drive his point home Frost sequesters himself, as it were, all the way in the 17th century, with the poet James Shirley, whom Cox had mentioned in an earlier letter. “You speak of Shirley,” he says. “He is two or three great poems—one very great. He projected, he got, them out of his system and I will not carry them back into his system either at the place they came out of or at some other place. I state this in the extreme. But relatively I mean what I say. To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.”
Title page, A Swinger of Birches
In short, the problem with Cox is (again) that he mistook the thrill of sincerity and the effects of intimacy for the things themselves. Surely Frost must have something like this in mind in the preface he wrote for the book Cox ultimately produced about him, A Swinger of Birches. There, in introducing the reader to what will follow, Frost speaks with undisguised astonishment. “[Sidney] was all sincerity and frankness,” the poet says. “He once wrote an article for the New Republic about my sincerity.” Which only goes to show how far sincerity and frankness will get you in reading Frost well. In that preface Frost is holding Cox and also holding him off. He is putting the reader of A Swinger of Birches on notice: “This ought to be a good book. Everybody who has seen it in manuscript says it is. The author probably knew me better than he knew himself and consequently contrariwise he very likely portrayed himself in it more than me.” Very deft, this kind of qualification, with its implied announcement that Frost has neither read nor intends to read the book he prefaces. Frost entertains the book while committing himself to none of it. And all the while he is never particular about the matter. He never tells the reader what to discount and what not to. Instead, he establishes a general mood of dislocation, so as to make it impossible to find him out in the pages that follow. A Swinger of Birches is like bad intelligence from Guantanamo. You never know what to trust in it. That’s the idea.
Screenshot from the web-site: http://www.4therapy.com/
What we hear in the letter to Cox and in the preface Frost wrote for his book is this: the intensity with which the poet could push back anyone who came in on him presumptuously. Frost’s reaction indicates that Cox had laid his finger on a nerve; he checks his friend with animosity. What was Cox’s offense? Acting on the assumption that art and friendship were matters of “intimacy” and “sincerity” instead of “effects” of the one and the “thrill” of the other. He didn’t know how to take a hint, which is always exasperating. He hadn’t the tact to know where not to touch Frost. And any reader of Frost who sees only pettiness or meanness in his rebuke of Cox is simply not listening. Frost is not cold in his letters “to such as” Sidney Cox. He simply has what the pop-psychologists now call “boundary issues.” What are the letters on “the sound of sense” about if not this? What is the letter to Braithewait about if not this? In speaking of the “sound of sense” Frost speaks of the only medium for touching another person, for corresponding with another person, that he ever cared deeply about as an artist. It is a medium he kept rigorously impersonal, or rigorously “supra-personal,” if you prefer Margery Sabin’s word for it. Frost tells us this plainly (if subtly) in the letter to Braithwaite. Being interested in what he called the “sound of sense” was his way of “living with reference to other people,” his modus vivendi and modus operandi alike. The great benefit of this “supra-personal” resource is that it allows for intimacy without the presumption of encroachment. Margery Sabin expresses the idea better than I can: “The voices we meet in Frost’s poetry,” she says, “are often too discontinuous to constitute a personality in a dramatic sense,” and that discontinuity “corresponds to the double motive of reaching out and holding back that pervades Frost’s entire activity as a poet. Sentence sounds,” she adds by way of summary, “are meant to embody and dramatize human feelings. But one of the chief feelings they dramatize is the desire to control the dangers of proximity, to control the desire for full presence that may be a less ambivalent motive for readers than for the poets they want to meet.”
Mark:
Absolutely dead-on, which is why Frost so much prefered the 19th century style of biography to the modern. To read Elsie Sergeant’s biography of Frost is to see how the thrill and effect can be shared and conveyed without intrusion or presumption. I think Frost came to miss the decorums and assumptions about decorum of late-Victorian manners.
Many thanks, Don. If you think I got it right, then I got it right. Your work on RF’s biography & biographers and on––well, I want some word pertaining to biography parallel to “historiography” that would mean the theory & history of the form itself, but can’t fetch it up or make it up;––your work on all this is the best out there by a long shot.
See you in SF. Hope things have thawed a bit in N/E PA. My best to Hass. Rattle his cage for me.
Yours, Mark