North of Boston by Robert Frost
I can’t tell – I don’t know – how much of the popularity of Robert Frost among middlebrow Americans, popularity that TV told me was rife when I was growing up, remains. (‘All in favour of skipping the poem?’ Homer Simpson asks.)
Frost was certainly well rewarded for his talents. He won many prizes; he was the most famous poet of his day. In time, he was to be Poet Laureate. This book is a fairly early work but seems to show off a poet almost complete in his view of the world. This one was a rural world, a world of people who farmed – some well, some badly; who made marriages – some good, many bad; who feared the things all men and women fear.
The most appealing thing about Frost is his seemingly plain language. He is still obscure when he wants to be. One or two poems, I must confess, had a different meaning – at least to my faltering interpretation – that did not strike me immediately. Some of those deeper meanings left me a little cold. They might not have been worth the effort to decipher.
Simplicity is a dangerous thing. It can be dull, agonisingly so, in the work of people without talent. In other writers, a collection like this would be artificial and painful. Plainness and a kind of rural simplicity are each often a terrible pose. With Frost, things are better. His style is not completely demotic.
There are enough American writers of the period who are entirely unreadable now because they wrote in dialect so foreign and impenetrable that it is hard even to sound the words out phonetically and make them make sense. That wasn’t Frost’s game.
I don’t detect much false naturalness. It does seem as though someone might have said this piece of contrived dialogue. It does seem that this is the kind of conversation two people of this class might have said, on meeting for the first time. ‘You riddle with your genealogy /Like a Viola. I don’t follow you’; and ‘One ought not to be thrown into confusion / By a plain statement of relationship, / But I own what you say makes my head spin.’
It’s not all roses, however. Sometimes Frost is so slight and sparing that he ducks making a point entirely. Frost is good at human suffering – how it comes for everyone, from everyone. But he does not give it very firm footing. Some of his characters are ciphers intended to do nothing but suffer for artistic reasons. I suppose we have met some people who seem to do nothing but suffer. In the same way every time, or in new and different ways visible at each checking in. But I don’t know if, in pure poetics, it makes the right case every time Frost deploys a character of that kind.
(‘”When was I ever anything but kind to him? / But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said. “I told him so last haying, didn’t I? / ‘If he left then,’ I said, ‘that ended it.’ / What good is he? Who else will harbour him / At his age for the little he can do?”’)
Some of his dialogue, which is not unreal, seems without reason. Of course, people do talk without meaning to say very much. That’s oh so natural. But must the writer who wants to appear natural give in to the same temptations? For instance: ‘“Well, if it’s true! Yours are no common feet. / The lawyer don’t know what it is he’s buying: / So many miles you might have walked you won’t walk. / You haven’t run your forty orchids down. / What does he think?—How are the blessed feet? / The doctor’s sure you’re going to walk again?”’
This is a little obscure.
There’s an interesting dance here between what we might think of as restrained, repressed language and the language of hysterics and anger. In anger the unrich country people say what they feel – or what anger and fear might make them feel. ‘“Do go along with him and stop his shouting.” / She raised her voice against the closing door: / “Who wants to hear your news, you—dreadful fool?”’
They seem taciturn, even simple, until something provokes them to speech. When a man is told by a woman that he must not talk this way about an awful subject (‘“Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried’), or someone suffering with legal trouble as well as a terrible illness or decline. (‘“A thousand wouldn’t be a cent too much; / You know it, Mr. Lawyer. The sin is / Accepting anything before he knows / Whether he’s ever going to walk again. / It smells to me like a dishonest trick.”’)
That’s when we appear to have the cold mask giving way to histrionics. There are people like this in life, certainly. How accurate they are to the place and time Frost portrayed can no longer be known. Perhaps some were all mask. It’s possible some others were all hysterics.
They’re separated by some time and many other things, no doubt, but there is something about this book of Frost’s that puts me in mind of John Cheever’s short stories. Cheever, of course, wrote inter-war and post-war stories about the ugliness of a certain lifestyle, the misery of purely theoretical material success. In this book of poems, Frost’s characters are not successful; they do not necessarily have the material goods or freedom from debt they might want. But they have the same quiet desperation about them. They have the same great fears.