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Forward, you understand, and in the dark

For somebody who made himself so intensely, incorrigibly available, [Robert Frost] is a well-guarded figure. You could say his availability became his way of maintaining his guard. Here’s his reply to a critic who wrote in 1915 to congratulate him on his success:

Dr Mr Eaton:

It’s not your turn really. Before I have a right to answer your best letter of all there are a whole lot of perfunctory letters I ought to write to people who have been rising out of my past to express surprise that I ever should have amounted to anything. You may not believe it but I am going to have to thank one fellow for remembering the days of ’81 when we went to kindergarten together and once cut up a snake into very small pieces to see if contrary to the known laws of nature we couldn’t make it stop wriggling before sundown.

Like many of the letters, this has the makings of a Frost poem: an intimacy conjured up out of thin air, coupled with an unpredictable sense of where that intimacy might lead; talk of triumph over recalcitrant circumstances, alongside an implicit reservation about what the triumph really amounts to; and a dark toying with ‘the known laws of nature’ to see where your limits lie. A page later, Frost is talking to Eaton as if he has known him for ages (‘you know I don’t mean that’), while offering tips to the newcomer (‘I am really more shamefaced than I sound in a letter’). Eaton should feel privileged to be told that some things do not need saying, even as he is left wondering about what these other things are that are not quite being said ...

Sometimes this slippery, furtive posture makes you wonder what Frost is hiding, and sometimes it makes you wonder what you’re hiding if you don’t play along. He’s not generally the sort of person who makes a joke and then says, ‘but seriously’. His letters are instead interrupted by the phrase ‘but seriousness aside’, as if to imply that a certain type of serious thinking is holding him back from what’s really worth saying. ‘Perhaps you think I am joking,’ he warns one correspondent. ‘I am never so serious as when I am.’ He is ‘Sinceriously yours, Robert Frost’, and he wants it understood that words like ‘sincerely’ and ‘seriously’ may be overrated. This roguishness can become wearing (he sometimes flaunts it merely to get himself off the hook), but more often it indicates his willingness to explore the values as well as the dangers of being precariously placed. Humour becomes a sort of confession:

Any form of humour shows fear and inferiority. Irony is simply a kind of guardedness… At bottom the world isn’t a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone … Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.

This is revealing, although the exaggerated, almost self-lacerating tone is dropped elsewhere when Frost conceives humour not only as ‘engaging cowardice’, but also as a method for engaging with cowardice by reimagining avoidance as an achievement.

Inside and outside the letters, he appears to be searching for ways to be afraid that won’t make him feel like a coward. In his introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s King Jasper, he quotes a couplet from Robinson’s ‘Flammonde’ – ‘One pauses half afraid/To say for certain that he played’ – and adds:

his much-admired restraint lies wholly in his never having let grief go further than it could in play. So far shall grief go … and no further. Taste may set the limit. Humour is the surer dependence … His theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful … One ordeal of Mark Twain was the constant fear that his occluded seriousness would be overlooked. That betrayed him into his two or three books of out-and-out seriousness.

... ‘My poems … are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless,’ Frost wrote in 1927. ‘Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.’

Several letters in this volume – especially those in which Frost explains the acoustics of literary craft – have long been considered essential for casting light on his dark arts. ‘Free rhythms are as disorderly as nature,’ he writes to one correspondent, ‘metres are as orderly as human nature and take their rise in rhythms just as human nature rises out of nature.’ Frost wants to get into print sounds that appear to come from the body before they come from the mind. The sounds are creaturely, uncivilised things:

[A poem] begins as a lump in the throat … It is never a thought to begin with.

A certain fixed number of sentences (sentence sounds) belong to the human throat just as a certain fixed number of vocal runs belong to the throat of a given kind of bird.

All I care a cent for is to catch sentence tones that haven’t been brought to book … They are always there – living in the cave of the mouth. They are real cave things: they were before words were.

Like the strongbox, or the dark house, or the woods, the cave of the mouth is another of those Frostian dark places both cherished and feared – sometimes a shelter and sometimes a place from which one must emerge. Edward Thomas appreciatively remarked that North of Boston contained language ‘more colloquial and idiomatic than the ordinary man dares to use even in a letter’, and the letters are similarly daring. Their recipients are told that the only way to read them satisfactorily is to ‘renew in memory from time to time the image of the living voice that informs the sentences’. ‘This pen works like respiration,’ he observes, and once he’s paused for breath insists on having a conversation rather than a correspondence: ‘What do you say?’; ‘Let’s see what I was going to say’; ‘You don’t listen with much patience, I notice.’

Those who are willing to listen will notice that Frost keeps returning to one of his central principles – he calls it ‘the sound of sense’ – with devious energy. Whatever else this tricky phrase signifies, it points to the way tone enhances and complicates meaning: ‘Suppose Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by rewriting the ostensibly toneless – ‘The dog is in the room. I will put him out. But he will come back’ – as the vividly toneful: ‘There’s that dog got in. Out you get, you brute! What’s the use – he’ll be right in again?’ His most famous example, in a letter to John Bartlett, is full of provocations:

The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. Ask yourself how these sentences would sound without the words in which they are embodied:

You mean to tell me you can’t read?
I said no such thing.
Well read then.
You’re not my teacher.

This is a bracing yet wily prose poem of sorts. It focuses on one person’s possible misinterpretation of what the other person means, and yet just because they ‘said no such thing’ doesn’t mean they are in fact saying that they can read. ‘You’re not my teacher’ could be stalling for time or covering for embarrassment, or it could be a genuine refusal to take a lesson from this upstart pedagogue. The sound of sense can be heard clearly, but the sense that lies within or behind the sounds is not wholly clear. And that’s when we know the words, not when we’re behind the door. If that is indeed ‘the best place to get the abstract sound of sense’, what is obtained is an intimation of meaning, not its confirmation. Whichever side of the door you’re on, things are murky.