Memories of The Great and The Good (12 page)

For the past quarter century, Cooper's worldwide image had grown so rounded, so heroically elongated rather, that only some very crass public behavior could have smudged it. There was none. After a short separation he was happily reunited with his only wife. He spoke out, during the McCarthy obscenity, with resounding pointlessness and flourished the banner of “Americanism” in a heated way. Most recently, there has been a low-pressure debate in progress in fan magazines and newspaper columns about whether his “yup-nope” approach was his own or a press agent's inspiration, like the malapropisms of Sam Goldwyn, another happy device for blinding mockers to the knowledge that they were losing their shirts. This was decided a week or two ago by the
New
York
Post
, which concluded after a series of exhaustive interviews with his friends that Cooper's inarticulateness was natural when he was in the presence of gabby strangers, that gabbiness was his natural bent with close friends. He could probably have transcended, or dimmed, bigger scandals or more public foolishness than he was capable of, because he was of the company of Chaplin, Groucho Marx, W. C. Fields, Bogart, Louis Jouvet, two or three others, give or take a personal favorite. He filled an empty niche in the world pantheon of essential gods. If no cowboy was ever like him, so much the worse for the cattle kingdom. He was Eisenhower's glowing, and glowingly false, picture of Wyatt Earp. He was one of Walt Whitman's troop of democratic knights, “bright eyed as hawks with their swarthy complexions and their broad-brimmed hats, with loose arms slightly raised and swinging as they ride.” He represented every man's best secret image of himself: the honorable man slicing clean through the broiling world of morals and machines. He isolated and enlarged to six feet three an untainted strain of goodness in a very male specimen of the male of the species.

I
t was a splendid day in Vermont when they buried Robert Frost, the sky without a cloud, the light from the white landscape making every elm and barn as sharp as a blade, and the people crunching quietly through the deep snow and squinting in the enormous sun.

It is a harmless sentimental custom to bury men who have been supreme in some craft with a visible symbol of their mastery: one thinks of composers whose tombstone is inscribed with a lyre, and cricketers who were laid to rest with a floral wreath of a bat and a ball. Few men must have gone to their graves amid such an exhibition of the tools of their trade as Robert Frost did the other day. From the smallest object on the horizon, a clump of evergreens or a mountaintop, to the most domestic scenery that was close at hand—a maple tree, a country store, a spade—everything the mourners saw or passed among had been the subjects of his poems and the objects of his lifelong meditation. He was once called “an original ordinary man,” but whether we ordinary men are ready or able to understand an original among us is another question. And I wonder how many Americans could have honestly agreed with President Kennedy that Frost had “bequeathed this nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” Because if his poetry was as plain as its surface, it was very ordinary indeed. And if it was as deep and difficult as his best admirers said, the understanding audience for it must have been as small as it always is for great poetry.

However, President Kennedy had taken him up, and in the last year or two he became a sort of unofficial Poet Laureate more honored, I suspect, for his connection with the White House than for any spontaneous response of the American people to the body of his work. At any rate, when he died, either eighty-seven or eighty-eight years of age (no one is quite sure), his last days were full of honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, as his early days had been full of menial farm chores, odd jobs that never paid off, and easygoing obscurity.

He was born in San Francisco of a New Hampshire journalist and a Scottish mother. His father died when he was ten, and his mother took him back East to settle in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and he became and remained a New Englander. From his nineteenth year to his thirty-eighth he managed to get only fourteen poems in print. In the meantime, he had tried and failed to be a student at Dartmouth College, but he did later stick out two years at Harvard. In the five years between these two grim efforts to be formally educated he was a bobbin boy in the mills, a cobbler, a small-town editor, a schoolteacher, and at last a farmer. But the soil of New England, as he came to reflect later, is a glacial relic, for most of the year the victim of alternating fire and ice. For this reason, or possibly because he was too obsessed with the natural objects of the countryside to be a good farmer, he had to eke out a living; which he did by going from his chores to teach English at one country school and to try teaching “psychology” (a new fetish discovered by William James) at another.

So in his thirty-seventh year he was neither a prosperous farmer nor an accepted poet. From his long meditations on the country life and landscape of New England he had shored up two small books of poems:
A Boy's Will
and
North of Boston
. Neither of them found a publisher until he moved to England in 1912 with the set intention “to write and be poor without further scandal in the family.” There he lived and walked in the West Country and was befriended and admired by Wilfrid Gibson and Edward Thomas, two early Georgians with whom he seemed at the time to have a lot in common. He had left America with a family reputation as a dilettante, but when he came back he was greeted, by a small audience, as a pro. He had no more trouble making a modest living, and for nearly thirty years, on and off, he lived on another farm, was the so-called poet in residence at Amherst, and did other agreeable stretches as a teacher at the University of Michigan, at Harvard, but mostly at Middlebury College in Vermont, and then again at Dartmouth. He put out his books of poetry at about five-year intervals until the 1940s saw him at the peak of his productivity and his authority, bustling around “collecting sticks”—as he used to put it—for what he would ignite as annual “poetic bonfires.”

From 1924 on he took the Pulitzer Prize for poetry at regular—about six-year—intervals. This habit, because it set him up as a solid Establishment poet, made his more intellectual admirers begin to think that there must be less in his work than met the eye. Indeed, Frost suffered for a long time from the incapacity of the critics to overcome certain stock responses to various schools of poetry that were then in fashion. Because he had been a friend of the English Georgians, he was for too long taken by some people to be an oversimple rebel against the developing technology of modern life, an expatriate cricket-and-ale rustic. And because, when he got back to America, he met the high tide of the “new” poetry of the Chicago school, he had to be looked on as a New England Sandburg. And because, in the 1930s, he maintained his lifelong lack of interest in politics, the socially conscious writers of the New Deal dismissed him as a cranky escapist. We never seem to learn—though the evidence is stacked high in any library—that contemporary prejudices about a writer very rarely seem relevant in the long view. Frost was, in fact, as absorbed, and in some ways as difficult, a poet as Emily Dickinson, whose entire meditations on life were conducted inside the house in Amherst, Massachusetts, from which she barred all visitors and rarely stirred in more than twenty years. Frost was, let us say, an outdoor Emily Dickinson, which is a curiosity almost too bizarre to bear thinking about. Even when he was writing what later was admitted to be his finest poetry, his admirers were again of the wrong sort to satisfy the literary lawmakers. The people who called him “our classic New England poet” also tended to see Will Rogers as the Mark Twain of the 1920s, and Pearl Buck as the traveling George Eliot of the 1930s. This is a kind of reverse sentimentality and a usual reflex of highbrows, who are often more concerned to validate a man's reputation than to enjoy him. It never troubled Frost much, and it would be a mistake to think of him at any time as a martyr. But for many years it made good men back away from him.

Other people, who were willing to be impressed, were put off by more honest reasons. They turned with pleasurable anticipation to his work, and what did they find? They found verses as limp and bare, and frequently as limp with bathos, as the verses on a country calendar. But if you persisted with him, you found that he persisted ahead of you. Sometimes he reads like a man with no poetical gift whatsoever who is determined to slog his way through some simple fact of nature and discover, at all costs, some universal truth. But what ought to give pause to the unwary is that there
is
always a mind at work, a wriggling, probing, and in the end a tragic mind. The very titles of his poems are deceptively ordinary. “The Cow in Apple Time,” about a cow drooling cider, sounds like a humdrum thing. But it is not. Listen.

It was not until after the Second War, when the flame of the Harriet Monroe revolution had died down, and left so many of its fiery figures mere cinders along the way, that another generation of critics noticed Frost still there, still writing his knotty monosyllables. They began to be excited by the suspicion that here possibly was an American Donne, or a Yankee Theocritus, or—a harder thing to grapple with—Robert Frost, an original. The idea that a huckleberry or a birch tree, or the games a boy played—with that birch tree—who was “too far from town to learn baseball”; the idea that these things could bear the most unsentimental and profound contemplation was at first frightening, until the reader inched his way through the roughness of the underbrush and, like “A Soldier”—in Frost's poem—discovered that

By the time that he was being accepted as a pure and gritty-minded pastoral poet, about as far removed from the Georgians as Thomas Hardy or Brer Rabbit, he himself was rejecting the physical world as a tremendous harbinger of winter and sickness. You could say more simply that he was a genuine poet and the oncoming of old age stirred him:

At the age of seventy he was ready to upbraid God for the fate of Job and for His general cruelty to the human race. This challenge, in “The Masque of Reason,” was too much for him, but by now the critics were ready to grant that unlike any poet before or since, Frost had used the ordinary vernacular of a New England farmer to probe a few fundamental doubts. In poetry that is subtler in structure even than most vernacular, he transmuted rocks and flowers, wind and berries and hired men, and striking mill workers, and boys swinging on trees, into the purest symbols of what is most hardy but most perishable in the human condition.

To the great mass of Americans, I suppose, he was simply a noble old man, said to be a great poet, who had come to be a colorful human adjunct to the refurbishing of the White House, rather like one of those plain hooked rugs, woven by a grandmother, with which wealthy New Englanders or Virginians living in exquisite Colonial houses will sometimes pay a small tribute to their origins. He must have learned to live with the knowledge that to most of his countrymen he was known only by a couple of lines from one poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” just as John Donne must groan in his grave at all the twentieth-century people who know him only by the thought that “No man is an island.” In our time, which is the age of mass marketing, we have to package our great men as quickly and simply as possible to make them acceptable to the family trade.

At the end, though, there was a lucky occasion on which his true readers and his uncomprehending large public could see him alike for what he was. In the icicle brilliance of Kennedy's inauguration he stood in twelve degrees of frost and tried to read aloud a poem specifically written for the great occasion. The sun stabbed at his failing eyes, the wind slapped at him, the white light from the snow was too much for him, and he finally gave up and spoke out, stumblingly, what he knew, his fingers kneading his palms in a secret fury and his white hair blowing in sloppy waves against his forehead. It was an embarrassing moment for the president and the officials who had brought him, and for the huge crowd. But it was as good an end as any he might have imagined: an old farmer stripped down at last to a blinded oak of a man, tangled in his own branches, made foolish by the sun and the cold and the wind, by the simple elements he had once rejoiced in but which now he had come to mistrust as the mockers of humankind from Eden to Washington, D.C.