Robert Frost: A Biography
By Jeffrey Meyers
Houghton Mifflin, 424 pages, $30
When Stewart Udall suggested that America’s most popular poet read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the president-elect’s first reaction was: “Oh, no. You know that Robert Frost always steals any show he is part of.”
Kennedy’s fear proved well-founded. As 60 million people watched on TV, the 86-year-old Frost, his papers and white hair fluttering in the bitter wind, fumbled. Unable to read his commissioned poem because of the glaring sun, he finally gave up and recited, from memory, “The Gift Outright.” It was a triumph, a recovery so brilliant that some thought he’d staged it.
After a half-century of public performances, Frost did know how to seize the spotlight. On countless podiums, he not only promulgated his poetry but, equally important, perfected his persona. As cunningly crafted as his verse, this self-portrait of the rough-hewn but kindly sage and folksy poet-farmer endeared him to multitudes, helped his books sell in the hundreds of thousands, and made him a rich man.
Only three years after he died in 1963, this revered image was shattered with the publication of the first installment of Lawrance Thompson’s “official” biography. Here and in two subsequent tomes, Frost was depicted as a domineering family man, egotistical, cranky and fiendishly competitive. For 25 years, Thompson had not only worked on his biography but served Frost as general factotum. No man is a hero to his valet, and while gathering unsavory facts, Thompson harbored savage resentments. The “monster in human form” he presented shocked Frost’s fans and sullied his reputation.
“He knew too much and understood too little,” Jeffrey Meyers argues in the preface to his new study of the life and work. Despite the massive itemization, he finds that Thompson left vague, or left out entirely, much that was significant, most notably the widowed Frost’s long affair with a married woman, his amanuensis-turned-mistress, Kay Morrison. Drawing on the 2,000 pages of Thompson’s unpublished notes, information from Morrison’s daughter and many other sources, Meyers fills in the picture. He also attempts to rehabilitate “the Bad Gray Poet” (as Elizabeth Bishop called him), and largely succeeds, by exploring the dark family history and “secret places of (his) mind” concealed by Frost’s hearty public personality.
In contrast to Thompson–and the bloated, sensational exposes of writers now in vogue–Meyers’ biography is taut and well-tempered. While unsparing in his list of Frost’s faults, and they were many, he balances his account with sympathetic explanations. At the same time, he shows how deeply Frost’s grim experiences, as well as literary tradition, mainly English poetry, influenced his work.
“I am but a timid calculating soul always intent on the main chance,” the poet once admitted. “I always mean to win.” Frost’s boundless ambition, in Meyers’ analysis, was rooted in an insecure childhood. The “Yankee” poet was born in San Francisco in 1874 to a father who failed at politics, was frequently drunk and abusive, and died when the boy was 11. Frost and his sister and their overprotective mother were forced to move back East, where they struggled to keep afloat on less than $400 a year. The hypersensitive youth was determined to succeed as his father had not, but given his abiding anxieties, he could never be satisfied.
In high school, Rob excelled, particularly in Latin and Greek (the purity of the classics would inspire his own precise lines), but was bullied at Dartmouth and was expelled in his first year. He later dropped out of Harvard. Emotionally and financially insecure, working menial jobs, he was shaken when his co-valedictorian in high school, Elinor White, rejected his first, impetuous marriage proposal. She relented the next year, and they moved to his grandfather’s farm in Derry, N.H.
The early deaths of two children darkened Frost’s already pessimistic view of life. The surviving four, reared in relative isolation and home-schooled, became socially maladjusted teenagers. (The poet Louis Untermeyer, a longtime friend, was more blunt, calling them “the most obnoxious and unattractive children” he’d ever met.) Frost continued to support them in their troubled adult years. Irma, like Frost’s sister Jeannie, eventually had to be institutionalized. Carol, ever in his father’s shadow and a failure at business and writing, committed suicide in 1940. Lesley resented her illustrious parent, too, but capitalized on their relation after his death.
Fame came late to Frost. His first book, “A Boy’s Will,” appeared in 1913; his widely praised second, “North of Boston,” in 1914, when he was 40. He had labored in obscurity as a poet and incompetent farmer (a legacy from his grandfather helped sustain the Frosts for years) until moving to England in 1912. In London, Ezra Pound introduced him to the literati, helped secure a publisher and “promoted” him; he also praised him to Harriet Monroe and wrote a review for Poetry, Frost’s first major notice in the U.S. Though he learned from his “patron” the value of publicity, he resented Pound’s condescending ways.
Frost turned on Pound and many who helped him early on, and was notorious for his animosity toward fellow writers. “There’s room for only one person at a time . . . at the top of the steeple,” he once said. “I always meant that person to be me.” He resented the attention the Modernists received, particularly in the academy, which didn’t appreciate him sufficiently. He threatened “retaliation,” but Meyers shows this was all bluff. He did hate to be compared–on the basis of their white hair!–to his inferior, Carl Sandburg, but was on good terms with his peers. Meyers takes a chapter to outline how Frost repaid his debt to Pound by helping secure his release from St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, and notes how he encouraged many young poets and students.
Frost’s own painful college experiences soured him on academia. But, as usual, he got poetic justice: He virtually created the position of writer-in-residence and successfully played Amherst and Michigan off against one other for his services. Though undervalued by some administrators, he was a highly unconventional and inspiring teacher; and with light or non-existent class loads, he was able to pursue his incessant, lucrative reading tours. He eventually became a fellow at Harvard, received 44 honorary degrees (two from Dartmouth), and had his colorful doctoral hoods sewn into a quilt.
Meyers spends many pages on Frost’s complicated relationship with Kay Morrison. Elinor was his ever-dutiful wife for 40 years, but the poet felt she didn’t really support his aspirations. He once told Untermeyer, “Elinor has never been of any earthly use to me.” Yet he always remained faithful, and after her death in 1938, Frost was an emotional wreck. When Morrison stepped in to act as secretary and manager of Frost’s extensive literary enterprises, she was the wife of a low-key Harvard instructor, attractive, and 48. Love and passionate sex (something new to Frost) ensued.
Proud of their affair, and vain about his prowess at 64, Frost wanted to tell the world. Nothing doing, Morrison said; she wanted to maintain appearances and keep her family intact. Caution and Frost’s jealousy did not, however, prevent her from having simultaneous flings with a handsome handyman, an unattractive critic–and Lawrance Thompson. (Meanwhile, her husband played the proper New Englander and suffered in silence.) Thompson wanted to tell all in his biography, but didn’t dare: As Frost’s literary executor, Morrison could cut off access to the poet’s papers.
Meyers’ first public airing of the story is engaging, and sometimes amusing, especially when he shows how Morrison managed the Master, who was used to having it all his way. Meyers credits her with renewing Frost’s creativity, which resulted in the love poems of “A Witness Tree” (1942).
Inevitably, in trying to interpret Frost’s long life and nine books (almost 400 poems), Meyers is reductive. He does indicate the dynamics between the poet’s experiences and his art, and he offers a wealth of glosses on the poems, where Frost’s allusions are smoothly assimilated. (In an appendix, Meyers identifies many echoes, from English Romantic, and Victorian poetry predominantly.) Some readers may find his terse commentaries as helpful as those odd synopses in opera programs: fine if you already know the score. Those who don’t know all the texts by heart will want the Library of America’s new, definitive edition of Frost nearby.
Compared to the messy lives of writers of the next generation, as revealed in recent, tell-all biographies of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop–and Meyers’ own unflattering portraits of Hemingway and Fitzgerald–Frost’s behavior seems rather benign, and his response to personal tragedies almost heroic. But in the end, only the work matters. At their best, Frost’s poems continue to be for us what they were to him: “momentary stays against confusion.”
