Books: The Roads Taken

ROBERT FROST—A PICTORIAL CHRONICLE by KATHLEEN MORRISON 133 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $10.95.

In addition to being a great poet, Robert Frost was the most dazzling performer on the American literary stage since Mark Twain. The impersonation of a mischievous, lovable old sugar maple of a man that he gave while lecturing during the last three decades of his life is still vivid to anyone who came near a college auditorium during that period.

Undoubtedly it was because of the brilliant success of this impersonation that the news of Frost’s actual character struck so hard. After the publication a few years ago of his Selected Letters and the first two volumes of Lawrance Thompson’s biography, there could be no doubt about it: Frost never matured emotionally, and the dark side of a powerful and childish nature frequently dominated. He was often malicious, vindictive and jealous to a degree that could not be passed off as the mere crankiness of a sensitive man. He was insatiably greedy for attention and praise. He was a tormented man who hurt those around him in ways that could not always be mended.

Biographer Thompson died before finishing his third and concluding volume on Frost (it is now going forward under other hands and is expected to be ready next year). In the interim comes a fascinating sketch of Frost’s last 25 years, written by the woman who became his secretary after the unexpected death of his wife Elinor in 1938. Kathleen Morrison, the wife of Harvard English Professor Theodore Morrison, was Frost’s friend and principal day-to-day protector until his death in 1963.

She remains a protector in her recollections, which favor Frost and reticence. Still, she does not turn aside from what must be admitted about the man. When he was angry, she recalls, he would sometimes hide in the woods near his farmhouse, apparently hoping that his friends would think that he had come to harm. In the years after Elinor’s death, she notes, “his incautious use of pills always stopped short of the ultimate message it was meant to convey.”

Frost owned a succession of farms in Vermont; during the winter he lived in Boston and later in Cambridge. He was a “halfway farmer,” although the half sometimes got out of hand—as when in 1940 it became necessary to eat outdoors at Frost’s Ripton, Vt, farm because he had installed a tribe of 100 baby chicks in his kitchen. Eventually a way of life worked itself out: Frost allowed Kathleen Morrison and her husband (then director of the Breadloaf Writers Conference) to live summers in the Ripton farmhouse while the poet moved to a nearby cabin during the warm months. She cooked his meals, handled his correspondence, and provided massive daily doses of stability.

Mrs. Morrison had been a hero-worshiper since 1918, when she and other students invited Frost to lecture at Bryn Mawr. He attracted a large circle of personal and professional friends—Mrs. Morrison very much near the head of the list—who thought his pouts and tantrums worth putting up with, and who conspired elaborately to ease him through the last half of his life.

Whatever largeness of nature Frost believed himself capable of is now visible almost entirely in his great body of poetry. Kathleen Morrison focuses mostly on the small things that went into making Frost the man. He knew Latin well. He hated banks, perhaps because when he was a young man a teller mocked him for having a small unearned income. He was a shrewd house carpenter. He loved his collie. He was mortified when he visited Russia and thought (mistakenly) that he was not to be permitted to see Khrushchev.

Here is a piece of Frost, written with diffidence and pictured in a large batch of welcome photographs, many of them done by LIFE’S Howard Sochurek during Frost’s 1957 visit to England. The poet is elsewhere, though never so remote that he cannot inform anything that has been written about him. For example, these lines from his long poem on New Hampshire:

I make a virtue of my suffering From nearly everything that goes on round me. In other words, I know wherever l am,I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake.