Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election. It tells you something about our school that the prospect of his arrival cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy, which for most of us was no contest at all. Nixon was a straight arrow and a scold. If he’d been one of us, we would have glued his shoes to the floor. Kennedy, now—Kennedy was a warrior, an ironist, terse and unhysterical. He had his clothes under control. His wife was a fox. And he read and wrote books, one of which, “Why England Slept,” was required reading in my honors-history seminar. We recognized Kennedy; we could still see in him the boy who would have been a favorite here, roguish and literate, with that almost formal insouciance that both enacted and discounted the fact of his class.
We would never have admitted that class played any part in our liking for Kennedy. Ours was not a snobbish school—or so it believed, and we wanted this to be true. It was understood that some of the boys might get a leg up thanks to their famous names or great wealth, but, if privilege immediately gave them a place, the rest of us liked to think that it was a perilous place; you could never advance in it, you could only try not to lose it by talking too much about the débutante parties you went to or the Jaguar you had earned by turning sixteen, and meanwhile, absent other distinctions, you were steadily giving ground to a system of honors that valued nothing you hadn’t done for yourself.
Or that was the idea, an idea so deeply held that it was never spoken; you breathed it in with the smell of floor wax and wool and boys living close together in overheated rooms. Never uttered, so never challenged.
If our school had a snobbery it would confess to, it was its pride in being a literary place—quite aside from the glamorous writers who visited three times a year. Our headmaster had studied with Frost at Amherst and once published a collection of poems, “Sonnets Against the Storm,” which it now pained him to be reminded of. Dean Makepeace had been a friend of Hemingway’s during the First World War and was said to have served as the model for Jake’s fishing buddy Bill in “The Sun Also Rises.” The other English masters carried themselves as if they, too, were intimates of Hemingway, and also of Shakespeare and Hawthorne and Donne. These men seemed to us a kind of chivalric order. Even boys without bookish hopes aped their careless style of dress and the ritual swordplay of their speech. And at the headmaster’s monthly teas I was struck by the way the other masters floated at the fringe of the English masters’ circle, as if warming themselves at a fire.
How did they command such deference—English teachers? Compared with the men who taught physics and biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They would put it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion; even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.
There was a tradition at my school by which one boy was chosen for a private audience with each writer who visited. We contended for this honor by submitting a piece of our own work (poetry if the visitor was a poet, fiction if a novelist), with the winner to be chosen by the writer a week or so before the visit. By custom, only sixth formers, boys in their final year of school, were allowed to compete. That meant that I had spent the past three years looking on helplessly as boy after boy was plucked from the crowd of suitors and invited to stroll between the headmaster’s prize roses in the blessed and blessing presence of literature itself, to speak of deep matters and receive counsel, and afterward be able to say, You liked “By Love Possessed”? You’re kidding. I mean, Jesus, you ought to hear Mary McCarthy on the subject of Cozzens. . . .
It was hard to bear, especially when the winning manuscript came from the hand of someone you didn’t like or, worse, from a boy who wasn’t even known to be a contender—though this had happened just once in my years of waiting in the wings, when an apparent philistine named Hurst won an audience with Edmund Wilson for a series of satirical odes in Latin. The visiting writers didn’t know us, so no one could accuse them of playing favorites, but that didn’t stop us from disputing their tastes. How could Robert Penn Warren, for instance, prefer Kit Morton’s plain dying-grandmother story to Lance Leavitt’s stream-of-consciousness monologue from the viewpoint of a condemned man smoking his last cigarette while pouring daringly profane contempt over the judgment of a world that punishes you for one measly murder while ignoring the murder of millions? It didn’t seem right that Lance, who defied the decorums of language and bourgeois morality, should have to look on while Robert Penn Warren walked the garden with a sentimentalist like Kit (whose story, through its vulgar nakedness of feeling, had moved me to secret tears).
I’m not exaggerating the importance to us of these trophy meetings. We cared. And I cared as much as anyone, because I not only read writers; I read about writers. I knew that Maupassant, whose stories I loved, had been taken up when young by Flaubert and Turgenev; Faulkner by Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway by Fitzgerald and Pound and Gertrude Stein. All these writers were welcomed by other writers. It seemed to follow that you needed such a welcome, yet before this could happen you had somehow, anyhow, to meet the writer who was to welcome you. My idea of how this worked wasn’t low or even practical; I never thought about making connections. My aspirations were mystical. I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written stories and poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.
Frost’s visit was announced in early October. At first the news made me giddy, but that night I grew morose with the dread of defeat. I couldn’t sleep. Finally I got up and sat at my desk with two notebooks full of poetry I’d written when taking a break from stories. While my roommate muttered in his dreams I bent over the notebooks and read piece after piece like:
There the poem ended. Beneath it I had written “fragment.” I’d written “fragment” beneath most of the poems in the notebooks, and this description was in every case accurate. Each of them had been composed in some fit of ardor or philosophy which deserted me before I could bring it to the point of significance. The few poems that I had finished seemed, in the hard circle of light thrown by the gooseneck lamp, even more disappointing. The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness. I thought of stitching several of them together into a sequence, à la “The Waste Land,” but that they would thereby become meaningful seemed too much to hope for.
I would have to write something new. The deadline for submission was three weeks away. I could write a poem in that time, but what kind of poem should I write? Aside from being good, it would have to stand out from the poems of my competitors, that was the problem. At least I knew (barring some dark horse like Hurst) who my competitors were.
There were three.
George Kellogg was the editor of our literary review, Troubadour, and a proficient writer, mainly of poetry. He wrote in traditional forms, especially the villanelle, and you could tell, reading his poetry, that he knew his stuff. His lines scanned, he used alliteration and personification. Metonymy. His poems always had a theme and were full of sympathy for the little people of the world: an old man picking his way across a fairground the morning after the fair; an old woman slowly gathering her things in a darkened theatre after everyone has left.
I didn’t really believe that George would win. He had a certain mastery and he gave occasional intimations of power in reserve, but his poems bored me stiff. He seemed more professor than writer, with his hairy tweed cap and watch chain and slow, well-considered speech. The effect was less stuffy than dear, and that was his problem; he was too dear, too kind. I never heard him say a hard word about anyone, and it visibly grieved him when the rest of us made sport of our schoolmates. At our editorial meetings, he argued for almost every submission, even knowing that we could take only a fraction of them. It was maddening. You couldn’t tell whether he actually liked a piece or just hated turning people down. George’s benevolence did not serve his writing well. For all its fluent sympathy, it had no bite. Still, I knew better than to write George off. If he just once let a strong feeling get the better of his manners, he might land a hard one. He might win.
So might Bill White, my roommate. Bill had already written most of a novel, of which we’d published the first chapter in Troubadour. A surgeon and a famous actor and his wife are isolated in a hunting lodge during a blizzard. The men are old friends, but it emerges that the actor’s wife is having an affair with the surgeon, who, it turns out, once saved the actor’s life with an impromptu tracheotomy during a safari:
Bill hadn’t let me read the rest of his novel but I doubted that the hunting party’s meticulously described rifles would stay locked in their cases for long.
Bill was a contender. His characters were stilted but he had confidence, and his stories were eventful and closely detailed. Most of the work in Troubadour suffered from generality. Bill’s talent was particularity. How the snow creaked underfoot on a very cold clear day, how the low white sun looked through a tangle of black branches. The tackiness of a just-oiled rifle stock, the sound of a bored woman brushing out her long hair in front of a fire. Everything in his work was specific and true except the people. That was a problem in the longer pieces, but in Bill’s shortest, most implicit stories, and in his occasional poems, the exactitude and poise of his writing could carry you away. He had me worried.
So did Jeff Purcell, known as Little Jeff because we had in our class another Jeff Purcell, his cousin—Big Jeff. In fact, Little Jeff wasn’t little and Big Jeff wasn’t big, just bigger than Little Jeff, who resented Big Jeff, partly no doubt for inadvertently imposing this odious nickname on him. Little Jeff was a friend of mine, so, like his other friends, I called him Purcell.
Purcell habitually kept his arms folded across his chest, like a Civil War general in a daguerreotype. This bellicose pose suited him. Under his bristling crewcut, he cultivated a sulfurous gift for invective and contempt. He was the Herod of our editorial sessions, poised to strike down every innocent who presumed to offer us a manuscript. He had exacting standards: moral, political, aesthetic. Purcell even flouted the timeless protocol of pretending to admire the work of his fellow-editors. At one of our meetings, he declared that a story of mine called “Suicide Note” read as if it’d been written after the narrator blew his brains out.
Purcell came from a rich, social family, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his stories and poems; or maybe you would have. His subject was the injustice of relations between high and low. He had written a ballad about a miner being dispatched deep into the earth to perish in a cave-in while the mine owner hand-feeds filet mignon to his hunting dogs, cooing to them in baby talk; and his last Troubadour piece was an epistolary story in which a general writes congratulatory letters to various widows after sending their husbands to be slaughtered:
This story was, I felt sure, inspired by a certain passage in “A Farewell to Arms,” but when it came up for consideration I bit my tongue and let it go. It wasn’t bad. Cartoonish, of course, like all of Purcell’s work, lurid and overwrought, but venomously alive. Anyway, I myself was in debt to Hemingway—up to my ears. So was Bill. We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship:
All of us owed someone—someone, and more than someone. We wouldn’t have admitted it in so many words, but the knowledge was surely there, because the charge of imitation was the only charge we never brought against the submissions we mocked so cruelly. There was no profit in it. Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have been fatal to the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own. Even Purcell kept mum on the subject.
He was a threat. His attack was broad, even crude, yet if he humanized his targets, muted his voice, used a knife instead of a cudgel . . . But he didn’t necessarily have to do any of that. In a field of stiffs, one of his cartoons could win for simply being alive.
These, then, were the boys who stood between me and Robert Frost. Of course there were other self-confessed writers in my form, but in our English classes and as an editor of Troubadour I’d read their work and I hadn’t seen anything to worry me except their desire. So much desire! Why did so many of us want to be writers? It seemed unreasonable. But there were reasons, and one of them had to do with the problem of class.
Despite our school’s hierarchy of character and deeds, class was a fact. It was not just the clothes a boy wore but the way he wore them. How he spent his summers. The games he knew how to play. His way of turning cold at the mention of money, or at the spectacle of ambition too nakedly revealed. You felt it as a depth of ease around certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world. A depth of ease or, in the case of Purcell and a few others, a sullen antipathy toward the padding that hemmed them in and muffled the edges of life; yet even in the act of kicking against it they were defined by it, and protected by it, and to some extent unconscious of it. Purcell himself had a collection of first editions you’d almost have to own a mine to afford.
Maybe that was why so many of us wanted to become writers. Maybe it seemed to us that to be a writer was to escape the problems of blood and class. Writers formed a tribe of their own and regarded the others from a position outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege—the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it. We had talked in class about Pasternak and his troubles, and the long history of Russian writers being imprisoned or killed for not writing as the Party wished. Augustus Caesar had sent our Latin master’s beloved Ovid into exile. Yet the effect of these stories was to make me feel not Caesar’s power but his fear of Ovid. And why would Caesar fear Ovid, unless he knew that all his legions could not protect him from a good line of poetry?
The weekend before our Frost submissions were due, there was a fire at the school. Fire was the great nightmare. Early in the century, a residential house had burned to the ground with thirteen boys inside, and the fire was said to have been started by a cigarette. How anyone could know that, we didn’t ask. It was revealed truth. And it led to a commandment: Thou shalt not smoke. Get caught and you were out, that day. Even the softest masters were without mercy on this point. A boy would return from swimming practice and find his roommate gone, hangers tinkling in an empty closet, the other mattress stripped and doubled over. No announcements made. No lessons preached.
Despite this, an unteachable cadre of resolutes, including me, kept smoking anyway. I’d sneaked the occasional gasper since eighth grade but at school it became an obsession. I was crazy for cigarettes, yet my true addiction was to the desperate, all-or-nothing struggle to maintain a habit in the face of unceasing official vigilance. I smoked in freezers and storage lockers and steam tunnels. I joined the Classical Music Club so that I could smoke in the bathrooms of the concert halls we visited, and went out for cross-country so that I could smoke while running in the woods. I kept a store of spearmint Life Savers to mask my breath and used a holder so my fingers wouldn’t stain. It was fretful, laborious work, but when I sucked down that first deep pang of smoke I went dizzy with pleasure.
Then I almost got caught. I’d been smoking in the basement of the chapel with another boy, who was discovered there by the padre just minutes after I left. I was putting music in the choir stalls—my chore that week—when the two of them came upstairs and walked down the aisle, the padre sad but decided, holding the boy by the elbow, and the boy . . . I could only glance at him, but I saw enough. He was in free fall, still trying to believe that he was only in a dream of falling. He lived in New York. It would be a long night’s ride down on the train, alone. I could easily see myself on that train. My journey wouldn’t stop in New York, though. I’d have to catch the gritty Century to Chicago, then change to the Great Northern—day after day of rolling past factories and fields and deserts and mountains but seeing none of it, gazing at my own stunned reflection in the glass. Lying sleepless in my bed that night, I saw the school as I would have seen it from an impossible distance, crossing the plains in a darkened railway car, headed back to the chaos and muddle I’d come from. I saw the school as if I were leaving it forever, and the thought made me sick at heart. I never smoked at school again.
But the temptation was persistent, and sometimes I could almost hear the old crew puffing away in the basements and attics. So my first thought when the sirens came wailing up the drive that Sunday afternoon was that one of those poor fiends had sparked a blaze somewhere and would pay the price that very hour. Who would it be?
I was coming out of the library. From the top of the steps I could see a thick braid of smoke twisting up over the old field house. I had been holed up most of the weekend, trying to finish my poem for the Robert Frost competition. What I’d been working on was a hunter’s elegiac meditation over the body of an elk he’s killed after tracking it for days through the mountains. This wasn’t typical of my poems, abstract and devoid of narrative as they tended to be. It fell into the pattern of a group of my stories in which a young fellow named Sam evaded the civilizing demands of his socialite mother and logger-baron father by fleeing into the forests of Washington State, where he did much hunting and fishing and laconic romancing with free-spirited women he met on the trail. I had begun this series innocently enough, in unconscious tribute to the Nick Adams stories, but over time it had evolved into something less honest. I wanted to be taken for Sam by my schoolmates, who knew nothing of my life at home.
But I was having trouble with this poem. For one thing, how was the hunter, having followed the elk so far into the woods, going to get it out? How big was an elk, anyway? Really big, I guessed. The hunter, having offered thanks to the spirit of the elk for giving him all that meat, was going to look ridiculous walking away with one lousy haunch over his shoulder. Maybe I should have made it a regular deer. But “deer” didn’t have the majesty of “elk.” There was a lot to fix, and not much time left to fix it. The poem was due the next morning.
A crowd was gathered at the near end of the football field. The firemen stood by their truck drinking coffee and taking turns with the hose. There were no flames, but the shingles had burned through at one end, exposing a sheet of charred sub-roofing that sent up a greasy hiss of smoke as the water played over it. I asked the boy next to me how the fire had started, and without taking his eyes off the field house he mumbled something about Jeff Purcell.
Purcell. The news gave me a knock because he was my friend, and because he had invited me to spend Thanksgiving vacation with his family in Boston, and now I could look forward to nothing better than another stretch with my boring grandfather and his boring wife in a housing development outside Baltimore.
False alarm! It wasn’t my Purcell, Little Jeff, who’d started the fire. It was his cousin, Big Jeff. Big Jeff had a passion. He believed that our destiny was to leave Earth behind and colonize other planets. In fifth form, he had started the Rocket Club, and though he couldn’t find any members in our class—we were too busy licking our chops for a great big bite of this planet—he did manage to recruit a few younger boys out of the Science Fiction Club. The Rocket Club met on the football field on Sunday afternoons under the eye of the chemistry master and shot off whatever they’d cooked up in the lab that week. Big Jeff had been experimenting with a two-stage rocket, but instead of going straight up the missile cut a few loops and took a dive onto the old field-house roof, where the explosive booster detonated in a clump of old pine needles and leaves. Whoosh!
I started a new poem that night. It was the fire that got me going, the fire and the firemen in their open rubber coats and high gaping boots, the looks they sneaked at us and the masters and the school itself, taking it all in. Their curiosity made me look around, too. For a moment, I saw this place as I had first seen it. How beautiful it was, and how odd. I felt its seclusion and the way we’d come to resemble each other in that seclusion. We dressed so much alike that the inflections we did allow ourselves (tasselled loafers for the playboy, a black turtleneck for the rebel) were probably invisible to an outsider. Our clothes, the way we wore our hair, the very set of our mouths marked us like tribal tattoos.
The firemen looked us over, and we looked them over. There was one fireman in particular I found myself watching. He had deep-set, tired-looking eyes, and held himself a little apart. He was less covert than the others in sizing us up. I thought about him after they had finished and driven away.
That was how I came to write my new poem, a narrative poem in which I described a fireman coming home the morning after a big blaze. He’s been the hero of the night, braving walls of flame to rescue a little girl. Now it’s over. He goes home, and it’s Saturday morning and his kids are watching cartoons and his wife is talking on the phone. She waves and keeps talking. He fries himself some eggs but doesn’t eat them. He’s oppressed by the crumbs on the kitchen table, the dirty cereal bowls, the smell of burned toast and last night’s fish. His wife laughs into the phone. The television is too loud. Then he’s on his feet and in the living room and he’s just yelled something, he doesn’t know what, and his children are looking at him with dislike and contempt.
I thought writing should give me pleasure, and generally it did. But I didn’t like writing this poem. I did it grudgingly, as if I had no choice, but in a kind of heat, too. In the end, I didn’t submit it. Maybe it was good, maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even a poem, only a fragment of a story in broken lines. I couldn’t tell. It was too close to home; it was home—the mess, the noise, the smells, all of this just like our place on a Saturday morning. The sense of time dying, drop by drop, of stalled purpose and the close, almost aquarium atmosphere of confinement and repetition. The convulsive, futile demand for recognition and respect. I could hear and see everything in that apartment, down to the pattern in the Formica tabletop. I could see myself there, and didn’t want to. Even more, I didn’t want anyone else to.
I submitted the elk-hunter poem. “Red Snow,” I called it.
The day after John F. Kennedy won the Presidency, George Kellogg won the audience with Robert Frost. Our school newspaper printed his poem in a box on the front page. It was a dramatic monologue in which an old farmer feels the bite of mortality on the first cold day of autumn. George had used an odd mixture of tones. At one point the farmer is lyrically drooling at the sight of a hired girl milking a cow:
A few stanzas down he becomes a terse fatalist:
The poem was entitled, shamelessly, “First Frost.”
In a telephone interview about the poem, Robert Frost told our reporter, “Young Kellogg has had some fun at this old man’s expense, and I guess this old man can stand some fun, if it isn’t too expensive.” He seemed to think that George had written some sort of burlesque; that he was using the poet’s manner and material—perhaps his very name—to give him the needle. He sounded like a man who’d been stung by a taunt, showing that he could take it and come back with some chaff of his own. But if anything stumped me more than Frost’s thinking that George’s poem was a dig in the ribs, it was the idea of the monumental Robert Frost letting some versifying teen get his goat. It didn’t seem possible.
I read the poem several times. I began to imagine that maybe it was satiric, and thus better than I’d first thought. But George set me straight when I went to his room that afternoon to congratulate him. He was sitting on his bed. He still had his tie on, a knitted tie with a flat bottom. It looked crocheted; it looked like a doily. Our biology master wore ties like that, but George was the only boy you’d catch dead in one. Most of the scholarship students, myself included, took some care with the figure they cut. Not George. He was both the oldest and the youngest of us, the most fuddy-duddy and the most innocent.
What did you think of the poem, he asked me.
I told him I liked it. Way to go! Robert Frost, George, you’re going to meet Robert Frost!
Did you think I was . . . how did Mr. Frost put it . . . having fun at his expense?
Well, I guess you could read it that way.
You could? Nuts. He slumped like a puppet.
But you don’t have to, I said. You can also read it as tribute. You know, the farm, the folksy tone, the snow. It’s like you’re paying your respects to him—tipping your hat, so to speak.
Exactly! That’s exactly the way I meant it. As an hommage, he added.
And, of course, the title, I said.
You like the title?
All those layers of meaning. “First Frost” as in, literally, the first frost of the year. Then “First Frost” in the symbolic sense, here comes winter; i.e. death, but also rest, right? The snow is soft, after all, after all the hard work he’s spent his life doing—soft and white like the girl’s hands. After all, in a funny way, he’s gonna get what he wants. Unless I’m just reading this stuff into it. . . .
No! No, it’s all there.
Then, I said, the crowning touch. “First Frost” as in First, Frost—as in Frost is tops, Frost is the best, Frost is literally No. 1.
Exactly! Exactly.
Robert Frost arrived at the school during dinner. When he appeared in the dining hall, slowly crossing from the side door with the headmaster, gingerly mounting the two steps to the high table, the ordinary din of the hall died almost to silence. We kept eating and tried not to stare, but we couldn’t help ourselves. Frost let himself down into the chair at the headmaster’s right, facing out toward the hall. He bent his big white head as he arranged his napkin, taking his time. He seemed deeply absorbed in the problem of the napkin. Then Dean Makepeace rose at the head of his table, turned toward Robert Frost, and began to clap in a measured, decorous way, each report of his hands sharp as a shot, and the rest of us jumped to our feet in a great scrape of chairs and made the hall thunderous with applause and the rhythmic drumming of our feet on the oaken floor. Frost gave a little bow with his head, but we kept the racket up, and finally his reserve broke and he smiled boyishly and rose partway in his chair and waved his napkin at us like a flag of surrender.
I was conscious of him through the rest of the meal, and held myself as though he were conscious of me. Some of the other boys at my table also suffered fits of dignity. The atmosphere in the hall had become theatrical. This had everything to do with Frost himself. There was an element of performance in his bearing—even the business with the napkin, awkward as it seemed, had a calculated quality. It charged the room and put us on edge, not at all unpleasantly—as if a glamorous woman were eating alongside us.
Frost read in the chapel that night. The headmaster climbed the steps to the pulpit to introduce him. He was a lanky, long-faced man with a wen over his right eyebrow. It was a big blistery-looking thing and when you first met him you could see nothing else, but he soon distracted you by holding your eyes with his, deep-set and attentive, and with the arresting beauty of his voice. He had a profound bass full of gravel, which he used to good effect and to his own satisfaction. I had expected him to use this moment to take a swipe at the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti crime family, which had a few soldiers among us. But no. Instead, the headmaster told a story of how, as a farm boy who’d never been interested in poetry, he had idly picked up his teacher’s copy of “North of Boston,” and read a poem entitled “After Apple-picking.” He’d approached it, he said, in a surly humor. He’d done more than a bit of apple-picking himself and was sure that this poem would try to make it fancy and romantic and get it all wrong. But what struck him first was how physically true the poem was, even down to that ache you get in the arch of your foot after standing on a ladder all day—not only the ache but the lingering pressure of the rung. And, once he had assented to the details, he was drawn to the poem’s more mysterious musings. What was that pane of ice about? Which part of the poem was dream, and which part memory? He borrowed the book, never suspecting where this act would lead him. Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
He came back down the steps. That was all. No recitation of Frost’s honors and awards, no witty, polished reminiscences. I had never before heard the headmaster speak of himself in this way, as someone with a particular past, and never did again. He was a mystery to us, and, like great generals and actresses, he guarded his mystery like the power it was.
He helped Robert Frost up the winding steps and then joined us in the pews. This left Frost alone at the front of the church. He arranged his books and some loose papers in a certain order, then rearranged them. The papers rustled loudly under the microphone. At this, he stopped and inspected the mike as if the device were new to him. He tapped it suspiciously. The tap made a resounding knock and he shied back a little. He picked up a book, rifled through the pages, set it down again. He peered out at us.
Can you hear me? You can hear me, you boys in the back? Well then. Good. That’s good. I suppose I should read you a poem. But I was just thinking about something Shelley said . . . you know, Shelley, fellow who wrote “Ozymandias”—it’s in your books. Friend of Byron, friend of Keats. Anyway, Shelley liked to say that we poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. They used to speak like that in those days—by the pound. Unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Wonder if it’s true. Wonder what it means. Does it mean we’re dangerous, like your headmaster says? What does your man Kellogg think? Is Mr. Kellogg here tonight?
Frost waited, gazing out at us until George stood up, a couple of seats to my right. He looked furtive and damp. He looked like a sinner in a Last Judgment painting, about to get his due.
And Frost, Frost looked like Himself up there in the pulpit. He was standing below one of the chandeliers, whose wintry light silvered his hair and made shadows on his weathered face. He didn’t look old; he looked eternal.
He took George in. So, he said. Mr. Kellogg. That was quite a piece of legislation you wrote. Bet you had some fun with it, too, holding the old man’s feet to the fire. Good for you, good for you. Old men should have their feet held to the fire—keeps ’em awake. All right, boys, they’ve brought me down here to sing for my supper, so I’d better do some singing. I wrote this one when I was lonely for home, many years ago, in England. I expect you boys know about homesickness. It’s called “Mending Wall.”
He lowered his eyes to read, and George wilted back into the pew.
Frost picked his way slowly through the first line, as if the thought were just occurring to him. And then his dry voice filled like a sail and became good-humored and natural and young. He was good at masking his eyes under those hanging brows of his, but now and then I saw him shift his gaze from the page to us without losing a word. He wasn’t reading; he was reciting. He knew the poems by heart, yet he continued to make a show of reading them, even to the extent of pretending to lose his place or have trouble with the light.
His awkwardness took nothing from his poems. Rather, it removed them from the page and put them back in the voice, a speculative, sometimes cunning, sometimes faltering voice. In print, under his great name, the poems had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being.
Frost read on, poem after poem, until the underclassmen began to cough and set their pews groaning. Then he raised his head and took us in. You boys are champion sitters, he said. You’ve got Sitzfleisch, as our great new friends the Germans would say. That’s enough for one night, eh? Maybe just one more, what do you think, for your man Kellogg. Yes? All right then. I have just the poem here.
Still looking at us, Frost recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Then he gathered his books and papers while we applauded. The headmaster went up the steps, conferred with Frost, came down again and raised his hand for silence. He told us that Mr. Frost had agreed to take a few questions, if we had any.
I had questions. How did he know he was a good writer all those years when nobody else knew? What did it feel like to write something really great? Why did he choose George’s poem?
Sir, if I may.
I looked around. It was Mr. Ramsey, one of the masters. He was standing in his pew. Even in this dimness his chubby cheeks showed their youthful English bloom. Mrs. Ramsey plucked at something on her sleeve. He had married her four years earlier out of some Southern women’s college where he’d taught right after leaving Oxford. She was just a freshman at the time and Mr. Ramsey lost his job and brought her north to Putney and then to us. Mrs. Ramsey worked in the library and never lacked for boys needing help. She wore her honey-colored hair in long girlish braids, and she had a teasing way with us. She looked at us as if she knew what we were thinking. She had still been in love with Mr. Ramsey when they’d arrived two years back. We had all seen it. She’d hung on his voice, quoted his pronouncements. Lately, this had changed. I’d seen her look bored at dinner, while Mr. Ramsey was going on about something. On occasion, she turned away while he was still talking and began to chat with the boy next to her.
Your work, sir, Mr. Ramsey said, follows a certain tradition, shall we say, a formal tradition, as in that last poem you read, “Stopping in Woods.” I wonder—
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost said. He put both hands on the pulpit and peered at Mr. Ramsey.
Yes, sir. Now that particular poem is not unusual in your work for being written in stanza form, with iambic lines connected by rhyme.
Good for you, Frost said. They must be teaching you boys something here.
There was a great eruption of laughter, more caustic than jolly. Mr. Ramsey waited it out as Frost looked slyly around the chapel, the lord of misrule. He was not displeased by the havoc his mistake had caused, you could see that, and you had to wonder if it was a mistake at all. Finally he said, You had a question?
Yes, sir. The question is whether such a rigidly formal arrangement of language is adequate to express the modern consciousness.
Modern consciousness, Frost said. What’s that?
Ah! Good question, sir. Well—very roughly speaking, I would describe it as the mind’s response to industrialization, the saturation propaganda of governments and advertisers, two world wars, the concentration camp, the dimming of faith by science, and, of course, the constant threat of annihilation. Surely these things have had an effect on us. Surely they have changed our thinking.
Surely nothing, Frost said. He stared down at Mr. Ramsey. Don’t tell me about science, he went on. I’m something of a scientist myself. Botany. You boys know what tropism is? That’s what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don’t have to chase down a fly to get rid of it—you just darken the room and leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct . . . that aspiration. Science can’t—what was the word? dim?—science can’t dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights in the room so the true light can get us home.
Mr. Ramsey began to say something, but Frost kept going. So don’t tell me about science, he said, and don’t tell me about war. I lost my nearest friend in the one they call the Great War. So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters. There’ve always been wars, and they’ve always been as foul as we could make them. It is very fine and pleasant to think ourselves the most put-upon folk in history, but then everyone has thought that from the beginning—it makes a grand excuse for all manner of laziness. But about my friend. I wrote a poem for him. I still write poems for him. Would you honor your own friend by putting words down anyhow, just as they come to you—no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of their sound, the sound of their meaning?
He broke off and let his eyes roam over the room.
I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous grief . . . that terrible grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe sort of cry, sincere maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance, but you don’t have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry. Does that answer your question?
I’m not sure—but thank you for having a go at it.
You wouldn’t have guessed, seeing Mr. Ramsey settle back with a smile, that he’d just been stepped on by Robert Frost in front of the whole school. He had been my fifth-form English teacher and though I hadn’t liked him I had found him interesting, as I had found his question to Frost interesting. But many of his students thought him a humbug for his high diction and unyieldingly intellectual tone. They had surely enjoyed this little show.
The headmaster stood and led us in a last storm of applause and then we filed out of the chapel into a hard, freezing wind. I asked George if he was headed to Blaine Hall, where it was rumored that Robert Frost might drop by for a cup of mulled cider with the English Club. No, George said. He was going back to his room.
Why? Scared he’ll give you the business? He was just teasing you, George.
He shook his head. Mr. Frost really thinks my poem is some kind of mockery of his work.
He’s the one who chose it. If it bothered him, why did he choose it?
I don’t know why Mr. Frost chose my poem, he said. But he seems out of sorts about it.
What the hell. You can clear things up with him when you have your audience tomorrow.
If I have my audience.
What, you think he’ll blow you off?
I didn’t say that.
George. Hold up. Hold up!
We stopped on the path. The line of boys shuffled past us. A derelict kite flapped frantically in a tree. George looked away from me, tweed hat pulled low on his head, back to the wind. I think I’m coming down with something, he said.
George, you can’t stand up Robert Frost.
It wouldn’t count as standing him up if I was in the infirmary.
You chickenshit. You big baby.
George hunched deeper into his coat, hands jammed in the pockets.
You don’t stand up Robert Frost, I said. This is something special. This is something to tell your kids about. Your grandkids!
He won’t mind. He’ll be glad.
George. This is really dumb. Where are you supposed to meet him, anyway?
Headmaster’s parlor.
When?
After breakfast, George said, then he turned and looked at me. Why?
Just wondered. Are you really going to back out?
I don’t know.
It’d be a complete waste if you backed out. I mean, he’s here, George. Robert Frost is here. This is the chance of a lifetime. He’s what, eighty-six, eighty-seven years old. It’s now or never.
I understand that.
So are you going to back out? Because if you are, there’s no point in a chance like that going to waste.
I saw George begin to understand me. This has nothing to do with you, he said.
I’m just saying, why throw a chance like this away? He’s willing to spend some time with one of us. If you won’t meet with him, let somebody else.
He didn’t choose your poem. He chose my poem. Would you actually accept an honor you didn’t earn?
Oh, like you earned it with those rhymes of yours? Please—we’re not talking about “Paradise Lost” here.
George looked at me with cold curiosity. It unsettled me, but my blood was up and I couldn’t stop myself. Would I accept a meeting with Robert Frost? I said. An unearned meeting, as opposed to an earned meeting, like yours? You bet your sweet ass I would.
George turned and started across the quad.
I followed. Are you backing out or not?
He didn’t answer.
Wait’ll he gets you alone, you baby. He’ll chop you into little pieces.
I stopped and watched him bend into the wind, coattails streaming.
Robert Frost didn’t turn up in Blaine Hall that night, but Mrs. Ramsey did. Her solitary entrance put everyone on alert; it was as though a song were going up an octave. Faculty wives didn’t attend such gatherings without their husbands, and as the adviser to the English Club Mr. Ramsey was supposed to serve as host. Mrs. Ramsey said that he had a touch of the flu, and wanted her to stand in for him, and pay his respects should Robert Frost appear. I heard her tell this to some masters and their wives as she carried a plate of cookies around the crowded room.
Bill White and I were standing by the fireplace when she approached us with the cookies. We each picked one, and as she repeated her brave little lie Bill reached out and took the plate from her and set it on the mantel. I was struck by his confidence. Somehow I didn’t like it, but I liked the result—having Mrs. Ramsey linger with us.
She said she had seen Robert Frost read once before, when she was a student at Foxcroft, and afterward he had met with the lit’ry girls and talked about everything under the sun. He’d been very funny, which surprised her, though she supposed it shouldn’t have, and a terrible flirt. Of course, he got plenty of encouragement.
The heat from the fire brought a flush to her face and made her perfume thicker, headier. She turned to Mr. Rice, an English master and a Southerner himself, who was tapping the ashes from his pipe into the fireplace. Do you think he’ll come tonight? she asked.
Frost? I doubt it. He seemed pretty well played out, by the end there.
Shoot, she said.
Just then some of the boys started to sing, and others chimed in, the masters and their wives looking on tenderly. When I first arrived at the school I had wondered at the way a bunch of boys would suddenly give voice like this, on the bus coming home from a game, in a sound-swelling stone hallway. Now I knew the songs, too, and I quickened to those moments when we leaned together, watching each other for cues, and joined our voices.
The singers began to gather around the fireplace. Mr. Rice gave way and drifted back toward the other masters, but Mrs. Ramsey stayed with us and was soon surrounded by the chorus we’d become. She swayed to the music, laughing softly at a witty stanza, closing her eyes at a romantic line. She didn’t so much listen to the songs as receive them, as if we were serenading her. And we were serenading her. She was a woman alone among us, eyes shining, color high, a pretty woman made beautiful by tribute of song. We could see our power to charm her and make her beautiful, and this gave boldness to our voices. It was exciting and not quite proper. When one of the masters called a halt to it after several numbers, pleading the lateness of the hour, we broke off as if coming out of a trance, hardly knowing where we were.
Mrs. Ramsey seemed a little dazed herself, and skittish. She collected some dirty cups and wandered back to the cider bowl, where I saw her in conversation with the Greek master’s elderly wife. The next time I looked she was gone.
Frost never showed. I stayed until the end, even offered to help with the clean-up, but the wives stuffed my pockets with cookies and sent me packing.
After breakfast, I chanced some demerits and skipped my warm, easy chore—helping sort that morning’s mail—to stand by the gate to the headmaster’s garden. I kept my vigil for half an hour or so. No one came. I figured George had chickened out after all.
But I was wrong. We walked to our dorm together after dinner that night—George couldn’t hold a grudge—and he told me he’d spent more than an hour alone with Frost in the headmaster’s parlor. They’d started talking and never made it outside. Frost didn’t say much about George’s poem, not in so many words, anyway, but he recited a few of his own and gave George some pointers. He also gave him an inscribed copy of his “Complete Poems,” and an invitation to drop by for a visit if he should ever find himself in Frost’s neighborhood.
Ah, I said. Great.
We walked along. Then George said that Frost had left him with some advice.
What was that?
Do you know where Kamchatka is?
Not exactly. Alaska? Somewhere up there.
Mr. Frost told me I was wasting my time in school. He said I should go to Kamchatka. Or Brazil.
Kamchatka? Why Kamchatka? Why Brazil?
He didn’t explain. He was going to, but then he had to leave.
Jesus. Kamchatka. Kamchatka.
Later that night I went to the library and looked up Kamchatka. It was a peninsula in the remote far east of the Soviet Union, on the Bering Sea. Very few people lived there. It was dark half the year so they couldn’t grow much of anything. They lived on the salted meat of salmon and also of bears, which greatly outnumbered the people and proved a sorrow to the unwary. When the taiga wasn’t frozen over, it swarmed with biting insects. There were many volcanos and they were active. The only picture in the Kamchatka entry showed two figures in parkas watching the top of a mountain being carried skyward on a fist of flame.
I closed the encyclopedia and sat listening to the wind rattle the mullioned panes behind me. What was it about Kamchatka, that a young writer should forsake his schooling and go there? Spectacle, maybe. The drama of strange people living strangely. Danger. All this could be good matter for stories and poems. But Frost himself had lived in New England all his life at no cost to his art, and I wondered if he’d ever actually been there. I guessed not. But it meant something to him, Kamchatka, something to do with the writer’s life, and what else could it mean but hardship? Solitude, darkness, and hardship. But he had also mentioned Brazil. I rose from my deep chair and crossed the room past boys dozing over books and exchanged the “K” volume for “B.” ♦
