A Man with a Mask

In Robert Frost, a poet and man of letters so doggedly and triumphantly American, one sees perhaps two basic aspects of American culture embodied and exemplified: on one side gregarious optimism, on the other side solitary pessimism; on one side the abstract cosmic statement, on the other side a deeply rooted regionalism; on one side an aggressive certainty that man carries within him some seed of divinity, and that this seed has so far flourished best on American soil, and on the other side a sense that all human relationships and aspirations are deeply ephemeral and that in the long run the game of living may be hardly worth the candle. It is as if the two halves of Frost’s personality are disguised from one another, are hardly on speaking term; as if he is a man with a mask who has allowed the mask to become part of his face. His poems speak continually of inward effort and suffering, yet the cause of the suffering is rarely if ever clearly identified. If the world were truly as harsh a place as Frost seemed to find it, then the American dream of progress is indeed a dream – yet we can believe him to be sincere when he says among the last of these interviews that he can go to sleep more peacefully for knowing that the Stars and Stripes are waving somewhere above him.

The interviews are inevitably uneven in quality, ranging from casual newspaper reports to the model interview tape-recorded in 1960 by Richard Poirier for the Paris Review. It seems that the technique of interviewing had itself improved enormously between 1913 and 1960, no doubt by way of the development of radio methods; and Frost’s own conversational maturity adds to the scale, so that one observes in effect a steadily rising graph throughout the book. I do not quarrel with the unevenness of the interviews. The one quarrel I have with this book is the intolerable misplacing of pages, to my mind wholly unacceptable in a volume that costs over five-and-a-half New Zealand dollars.

My first impression is that Frost himself became much more fluent, urbane and analytical in his later years. One could compare him in this regard to W.B. Yeats; except that Yeats’s last period is also the period of his greatest verse, whereas Frost, though his creative powers did not fail, has certainly left us the bulk of his intuitive legacy in the great rural dialogues of his early middle period. Those bare narratives of discouragement and survival spring from the inner self, the solitary, regional, pessimistic source which Frost in later life uneasily harboured without actually disowning. But, like many another artist page 384 whose strength is in his middle years, he tended unconsciously to assume the mantle of public prophet, and to regard the later work as equivalent to the earlier, though in fact it was more abstract and less human. The philosopher seemed gradually to take over from the poet; and I suspect that it was the philosopher whom the American colleges welcomed with open arms, since he could compromise well enough with an egalitarian pattern of education, and offer his own highly individual works to public scrutiny, as if the sources of his knowledge were no different from theirs. It may have been for Frost an act of humility; though I think it was a dangerous one.

Another impression is one of economic hardship; not so much of physical poverty as of a sense of economic failure, a sense in Frost’s own mind that he had not achieved the specifically American goal of material success, which is to a Puritan the sign of divine approval. When a chattering woman congratulated him on writing so well about the poor, he replied with biting sarcasm that he himself had been poorer than the poor, and that the distinctions made by the moneyed group had never been his. Thus one can see how his eventual acceptance by the colleges as a kind of tame lion and itinerant lecturer may have been a real temptation to him, to which he partly succumbed, since it seemed to offer the best of both worlds – a niche for his poetry, and alongside it a moderate material success.

The last impression is that Frost was a more absolute critic of society, more of an iconoclast, than his benign public mask would lead us to believe. In 1960, in an interview with Roger Kahn, he remarked: ‘There is more religion outside church than in; more love outside marriage than in; more poetry outside verse than in. Everyone knows there is more love outside the institutions than in, and yet I’m kind of an institutional man’.

These boulders of disillusionment no doubt sank without a trace in the great bog of the public mind, where one man’s opinion is as good as another’s, and neither means anything; but they are, I think, directly connected to the man who wrote the poems – a more solitary, more angry, less comfortable man than the public mask was ever able to accommodate.

1967 (451)