Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
generations of Frosts had assisted in forming: he revolted so strongly
against New England that his flight ended only when he reached San
Francisco.
But before recording that grimly energetic career, a pause is due,
since “what counts is the ideals and those will bear some keeping
still about,” to ask concerning the congruity of Robert Frost with
his ancestry. What is noticeable first of all in this stock is
its closeness to the soil. It was given, not to wandering, but to
settling, to making a sturdy fight with local conditions, to seeing
matters through on the terms of the environment. That environment
happened to be, in its wider sense, successively colonial America,
the consolidation and growth of the United States, and the beginnings
of the industrial era. In a smaller sense, it was New England and
the family is dyed in the older qualities of both America and its
small northeastern corner--hardihood, resistance, decency and kinship
to the soil, to mention a few. One is tempted to make a second
generalization. The way the Frosts trod was the middle road. In their
family there is no touch of the eccentric or extravagant or fanatic.
They were church-going, but not zealots of puritanism. They served in
the army and navy when occasion pressed, but they were not soldiers
of fortune. They were small business men and local officeholders, but
made no unusual motions in either rôle. What stands out seems to be
a temperamental conservatism, adapting itself to changes in history
and environment, but never reactionary or radical--until we come upon
a variant in the father of Robert Frost. But Robert Frost is heir to
the progressive conservatism and the closeness to the locality of the
forebears of his father.
II. “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC”
Shortly after the Civil War an immigrant ship from Scotland was coming
up the Schuylkill River. It had taken weeks to cross the Atlantic and
now it was close enough to be gaily bombarded by peaches thrown from
the shore. The passengers caught the strange fruit in their hands and
learned to eat it and the taste was welcome after so protracted a spell
of ship’s provisions.
There was a fifteen year old girl passenger from Edinburgh who did not
take part in the pastime. She came of a lowland Scotch family, a family
of seafarers: her father, a sea captain, had been lost at sea and so
also had her brother. Bred to patience, she now sat quietly watching.
But one of the men came over and dropped the peach he had caught into
her lap. “You should eat it,” he explained, and she replied, gazing at
the fruit, “It’s too bonnie to eat.”
This Scotch girl was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, to live with an
uncle in business there. A few years later she came to Lewiston,
Pennsylvania, to teach school. And here it was that Isabelle Moody
encountered William Prescott Frost, Jr., on his rebound from New
England. Young Frost had his eye on other projects of ambition, but for
the time he too was a school teacher in Lewiston. They were married,
and the husband went on to San Francisco to work on a Democratic
newspaper, the _Bulletin_. A little later he wrote his wife that the
windows of the newspaper office had been shot out but he was unharmed.
The paper had, it seems, printed derogatory statements about some stock
and those who were interested in it had resorted to gun play. Into this
smoldering and sometimes violent community Isabelle Moody followed
her husband and there on March 26, 1875, a son, christened Robert Lee
Frost, was born.
The christening tells the story of the father’s political sympathies.
Too young to fight in the Civil War, the boy had been an intense
copperhead and had meditated on somehow slipping South to join the
Confederates. Now he was a States’ Rights man and once he showed Robert
a map of the United States and divided it into five nations into which
he predicted the country would sometime split.
The father liked San Francisco. He liked the spirit of plunging which
diffused through the community and he was himself always playing the
stock market. He liked to spend money liberally. And he liked the
threat of grimness which one experienced by simply observing that men
wore revolvers with the frequency New Yorkers today wear sticks.
One Sunday afternoon Robert and several other children were permitted
to walk along the beach with his father and a few associates. A bottle
was found and stopped up and tossed into the waves. Out came the
revolvers of all the men and they fired at the floating target. It was
no more uncommon than throwing stones.
One Christmas Eve Robert, his sister and his mother returned to their
house quite late. They were about to prepare for bed when his mother
asked Robert if he had locked the door. He answered that he had, but
it at once became indisputable that he had not, for the door was heard
to open without benefit of key and someone, to their consternation,
entered. Mrs. Frost rushed her children into a room, locked its door,
shooed them under a table, and extracted a revolver from a drawer.
“I’ll shoot if you come further!” she spoke with a quaver. There was no
answer, and she repeated her threat. Then Mr. Frost’s laugh was heard,
relieving a tension that was likely often to seize San Franciscans of
that period.
On the Fourth of July the plunging editor broke loose. It was his day
and it was neither safe nor sane. An old fashioned celebrator, he made
the greatest racket possible, set fire to outhouses and destroyed minor
properties. He went to the limit on political celebrations, too. In
politics or the stock market he would soon make a lucky stroke if he
played hard enough. Then after success had burgeoned, he would take
care of that consumption that threatened him. He would take a trip to
“the Islands”; that is, to Hawaii, the favored resort of that time for
consumptives. In the meantime he drank liquor to keep up his pace, he
drank warm blood at the stockyards to alleviate the disease, and he
did all the celebrating possible when his party triumphed. Robert was
a celebrant too, riding, costumed, on floats in the big parades or
trudging in torchlight processions until he was sent home to bed from
weariness.
But the political ambitions yielded only small fruits. Mr. Frost did
go as a delegate to one Democratic National Convention and he was
city campaign manager in 1884 when Cleveland was elected President.
He was defeated, however, when he ran for election as tax collector
of San Francisco. In that campaign the boy Robert was his constant
companion--his job was to visit the saloons with his father’s campaign
cards and to impale these on the ceiling by flinging upwards a card
with a tack through it and a silver dollar beneath the tack which
worked as a sort of flying mallet--and this, one fancies, remains to
this day the most active participation in politics of Robert Frost.
In 1885 consumption won the contest for the body of William Prescott
Frost and silenced its teeming hopes and plans, its explosive moods
and tense restraints. His wife who had suffered for weeks at a time
from his gloomy silences and his son who had suffered from his grim
severities mourned for him--and found that his extravagance had led
to letting his insurance lapse. It was necessary to return to the
New England the dead man had hated, to seek refuge with Robert’s
grandparents in Lawrence.
So the little boy relinquished the tiny chicken farm he had started
in the backyard at San Francisco and on the long ride sat beside his
surviving parent, both sunk in memories of the grim dignity of the
deceased, he who had never worn anything but a top hat, who had always
been drily polite without the least ingratiation, and yet had been
pathetic, too, since he had been _terrible_ to himself. If anything
planted tragedy in Robert Frost, it must have been, one surmises, the
vision of his father, friend on the one hand of Buckley, the notorious
blind boss of San Francisco, and on the other of Henry George with whom
for a brief time he managed a single tax newspaper.
Perhaps from his father he acquired a certain recklessness of
temperament, less extreme, but discernible in the drifting ways of his
life: his father was energetically imprudent and the world, one knows,
judges the son gently imprudent in the affairs of practical living. But
the presence of the mother is also implied in the poetry. Her Scotch
blood, transmitted, courses perhaps in the canny good sense, in the
slightly oblique humor, and above all in the thriftiness of the poetic
productions. She was herself an occasional versifier and reviewed books
for her husband’s newspaper. In religion she was a Swedenborgian, and
these facts are sufficient to suggest that she probably awakened an
emotional area in her son that the father left untouched, that area
that was later to fructify into a new contribution to American poetry.
III. “A BOY’S WILL”
Robert and his sister had been trained by their father to no love
of New England. Circumstance, however, had now deposited them among
the despised children of this section, and for the first time they
saw pennies. They made up a little game. First, they would hold up
a nickel and say, “San Francisco!” Then they would exhibit a penny
and scornfully pronounce, “Boston!” But this childish snobbism soon
vanished as they became more at home in the East.
Robert received the usual schooling and in high school clearly
outstripped his class. He was apparently in full possession of
valedictorian honors as graduation neared when a rival emerged coming
rapidly forward from a lower class. The rival was a Lawrence girl,
a descendant of the Whites of Acton who fought at Concord and of
Peregrine White on the _Mayflower_. Elinor White was completing her
high school course in two and a half years, thus catching up with
Robert’s class, and when the averages were computed it was found that
she had tied him for the honor of valedictorian. It was decided,
nevertheless, that Robert Frost should deliver the address, while on
the graduation program the names of Elinor Miriam White and Robert
Frost should appear together as holders of the office. This happened
to forecast the future, for the boy and girl, already friends, were
married in October of 1895 and their names have ever since been joined
in a union of singular idyllic beauty.
Another courtship was developing during the same phase of Robert
Frost’s life which was also to ripen into a lifelong devotion, and that
was the courting of the Muse of Poetry. Before he left San Francisco,
he had begun a serial story. It concerned the doings of a lost and
forgotten tribe living in a ravine no one of the outside world knew
about. After he came east, he continued this serial from time to time,
filling in the details of scenery and inhabitants.
Here we strike a master-image, one that constantly recurs in Frost’s
life, for aside from the varieties of it to be found in his poems--for
example, in such lines as “Me for the hills where I don’t have to
choose” and the first two stanzas of _Into My Own_--the poet has
confessed that often he puts himself to sleep by dreaming of this
inaccessible and sometimes happy tribe defending its canyon. One hopes
that this recurrent and dominant image will not be subjected to the
ingenious but suspect leaps to conclusions of the psycho-analysts.
Better far the slower method of the behaviorist who is in closer accord
with the commonsense of man which tells us that we do not thoroughly
know people until we have seen them in many situations over a lengthy
span of seasons.
When fourteen Robert Frost began to open books with a new zest.
Hitherto he had been content to have his mother read to him and
his favorite story had been _Tom Brown’s School Days_ which