Mortal Play

By Christopher Porterfield

FROST: A LITERARY LIFE RECONSIDERED by William H. Pritchard

Oxford; 286 pages; $15.95

It has not always been easy to make the case for Robert Frost as one of America's greatest poets. His younger colleague Randall Jarrell tried in the 1950s and ran smack up against the self-created public figure, the "Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity": a singer of homely New England scenes, "full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy." Then, shortly after Frost's death in 1963 at age 88, his friend Lawrance Thompson began publishing a three-volume biography; inadvertently or not, it replaced the cracker-barrel sage with a monster. Thompson piled up a chronicle of "jealousies, obsessive resentments, sulking, displays of temper, nervous rages, and vindictive retaliations" that threatened to eclipse even Frost's jauntiest lyrics.

The task that William H. Pritchard has set himself in Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered is to create a plausible portrait somewhere between these two extremes. Pritchard, a professor of English at Amherst College, succeeds admirably by emphasizing a fundamental principle in Frost's makeup: the sense of play. The poet, Pritchard maintains, held the universe in a teasing, ironic suspension, indulging his imagination in, as Frost put it, "play for mortal stakes."

Pritchard does not deny that the play was rough. With friends and supporters, Frost was sometimes manipulative and dissembling. Toward rivals, he was hostile at worst, wary at best (when invited to share a platform with other poets, here plied with the ditty "I only go/ When I'm the show"). Yet Pritchard sets all this against Frost's compelling need to establish his poetic voice. The poet knew that his technique--the colloquial tone played against traditional meters, the apprehension of unnamed mysteries in ordinary experiences--was far more original and subtle than it appeared, and he was determined to assert his distinctiveness.

Frost's self-absorption exacted a heavy toll in his private life. His family often found him hard to love and harder to please. A sister and a daughter went insane; a son killed himself. Pritchard repeatedly uses the word shocking to describe the sardonic hardness with which Frost inured himself to these blows. "As I get older I find it easier to lie awake nights over other people's troubles," the poet wrote to a friend after committing his sister to a mental hospital. "But that's as far as I go to date. In good time I will join them in death to show our common humanity."

Meantime he had his uncommon gift. His refuge was form, which for him equaled "sanity." After his favorite daughter and his wife died within a few years of each other, he could still produce poised, masterly poems that, as Pritchard poignantly notes, "bore out his spiritual persistence." They were Frost's way, if not of redeeming a harsh life, at least of transforming it and trying to make it inseparable from art. Ultimately, he confessed in another letter, he had only one anxiety: "Am I any good? That's what I'd like to know and all I need to know."

--By Christopher Porterfield