Robert Frost, Pure Americana / Jay Parini

Show Notes

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Howdy, welcome to another episode of Canon Calls. This week I speak with Jay Perini, who once wrote a biography of Robert Frost. I've recently been down a rabbit hole on Robert Frost and I've set aside his complete poems to go through and then I also picked up a biography just to learn more about him and I happen to pick up Jay's. So I highly recommend going and getting that. One book off the Canon shelf I wanted to mention that I think pairs really well with sort of the world of poetry or what I enjoy about poetry and its Douglas Wilson's Angels in the Architecture, a Protestant vision for Middle Earth. From the book he says, the modern view of the world is empty and lifeless. Nothing more than a bunch of matter in motion with life by the thousandth chance emerging from chaos. The modern world as a result can only conceive of progress as more efficiency, more technology, more domination. And start contrast to this, Christianity presents a glorious vision for culture and the vision of a world with truth, beauty and goodness built into the very molecules of the universe. Medieval and Protestant Christianity began a conversation about truth, beauty and goodness but secularism ended the conversation mid-sentence. I highly recommend Angels in the Architecture. It's one of my favorite books on the Canon shelf as someone who didn't grow up in a robustly Christian culture. It portrayed to me exactly what I had been missing all along, which is the sweetness of Christ's forgiveness and a culture brewing over years and years and years and years. So go get that at CanonPress.com and without further ado, meet Jay Perini. All right. Now welcoming on special guest Jay Perini. He's an American writer and academic. He is known for novels, poetry, biography, screenplays and criticism. He has published novels about Leo Tolstoy, Robert Frost and Herman Melville. Jay, thank you so much for giving us your time today. Jay, glad to be on with you. Well, I wanted to talk to you about you written all over the place about all kinds of fascinating people. I am deep down at Robert Frost, rabbit hole currently and I am reading your biography about him and I thought I'd love to have you on and hopefully introduce a batch of people to who he is if they've never heard or we can properly guilt people into reading him if that has to be the case. So that sounds good. It sounds good. Let's make them feel very guilty. Awesome. Now, how did, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to the idea of writing a biography for Frost? Well, it's funny. Frost is sort of, I've been in Frost's shadow my whole life. I grew up in small town in Pennsylvania and I never read poetry. My family was not literary. My father was a Baptist minister. Okay. I never read poetry. And I am one day and ninth grade my teacher said, Jay, you're going to, here's Robert Frost, a poem by Robert Frost, stopping by woods on a snowy evening and I want you to home and I want you to think about this poem and write a three page paper and have it ready for me on Monday morning. I thought all my life is ruined. I can't believe this has happened to me. What's gone wrong? And so I went home and I, and then I read the poem and I was like so astonishingly blown away. I read it again and again and again. I thought, how does that happen? How does somebody do that with language? And so that really turned me on to poetry. I was writing poetry of my own at the time and I got really excited and I then I got Frost's collected poems from the library and I started reading Frost and I read them as seriously and then my family was going on a vacation. I said, they said, where do you want to go? I said, I want to go to New England. I want to visit where the Frost country and my father said, what? I said, I want to go see where Frost lived up in New Hampshire and Vermont. And oddly enough, we went driving up to New Hampshire and Vermont. We went to Montpelier, Vermont, drove over to Breadloaf and to Middlebury where I've been living my entire adult life in Frost Shadow. So it's almost unbelievable. And so my first job was in fact at Dartmouth College, which is where Frost was an undergraduate. Right. And I started there in 1975, almost half a century ago. And I remember going in, my office was right next to the Rare Books Room and I went to the Rare Books Room and I said, you got anything interesting here? And I said, yes, we just got all of the notebooks of Robert Frost and maybe a thousand letters. So I sat down and started reading them and I decided then and there to write a biography of Frost. And so I started reading Frost notebooks and letters and taking notes. And then I started interviewing people at New Frost, you know? The old president of Dartmouth, John Sloan Dickey, I met him and all these people at New Frost. So pretty soon I had endless notebooks filled with interviews. I had tape recordings of interviews. I went over to other libraries, Amorous College, Middlebury and listen to Frost tapes and look to manuscripts. And so, but it was over about a 25 year period I worked on this book and published it in like 19, 2000, I published it the year 2000. So that's like 20 years ago, right? That's right. So I published it 20 years ago and I've never frosted it but he's never been out of my life. I did teach Frost every year. I continue to read Frost constantly. I'm asked by people like you to come and talk about Frost probably about 10 times a year. So or more. So I'm constantly thinking and talking about Robert Frost, even though I've worked on you know, Zillian, other writers and people and other I've written, and I've written 30 books. I've written a lot of books. Now I was going to ask out of all the people that you have written about, it sounds like he's the one you're asked about most. Do you have any, do you have any guesses to why? I think I get mostly asked to talk about Frost because Frost strikes a chord with the American soul. And I think that you know, when people read Frost, they're blown away, the simplicity, the clarity, the deep connection to landscape, the kind of natural theology of his work, you know, his connection to spirit and nature. I think it's just so affecting and it's so like anything else you can find anywhere else that I think people love it and go for it and want to be around it. I mean, people want to live in that world of Robert Frost, of birch trees, farm fields and farmers working. It's a field. Remember, it's a poetry of people and work. There's hardly a poem which isn't as if I have a person somewhere, a boy swinging on a birch, a man plowing the field, somebody out there mowing hay, you know, picking apples after apple picking is one of his great poems. I mean, Frost was himself, remember, actually a farmer. He was a farmer, a new hamster. So he knew farm work. Is it the case that he is who you're asked to talk about most out of what you've done? Yeah, I'm sure. Okay. I'm sure of all my books. Yeah, Frost is certainly the person I'm most frequently asked to talk about. There's no question about it. I wanted to maybe start with sort of his younger years. Could you set the stage for us of like, what is somebody's childhood look like who ends up becoming who he was? Well, nobody, everybody's startled to read my biography and realized that he spent his first 10 years, his first decade, 11 years in living in the center of San Francisco. So he was actually a city boy. And so he didn't come to New England until he was like 12 years old. And I always say it's like people who get converted to the Catholic Church or something. They become usheres very quickly. And it's the convert to take up the collection. So Frost took up the collection for Vermont and country. He was so blown away by what he saw. Made such a deep impression on him when he was a young teenager. He stayed, you know, for the rest of his life. He wanted to live in the country and on a farm. And he was not raised to farm boys. I mean, his father went to Harvard. His father was a newspaper editor. And then his father died. And when he was 11 and he and his mother and sister had to go by train back to Massachusetts where, and they moved in with Mr. Fraud, Mr. Frost's family, the father's family. And they took the, again, the son and grandchildren, daughter and grandchildren. So Frost then went to high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he split the valedictory honor is with Eleanor, his wife. They were married, you know, soon after they graduated from college. And he, Frost, by the way, never did graduate from college. He always said schools and he didn't get along very well. And so he lasted. He was, Dartmouth makes a big deal out of them. When I thought there was a maze, everybody had, oh, Frost went here. But Frost only spent six weeks at Dartmouth before he quit. And then he went to Harvard for a couple of years and dropped out a second time. Now one, one thing that was like really striking to me was, I believe his, you mentioned it, the valedictory, he shared valedictorian honors. And his speech was something to the effect of a monument to afterthought unveiled. Yeah. Now he, he was homeschooled for most, you know, for the early years. Right. I mean, like if I were, I was not a valedictorian. Right. For sure. And if I had been, it would have been like a really, it would have not been something like an after a monument to afterthought unveiled. What, what is this, is that a indictment on today's education? Is that a, is that sort of an ode to who he was as a person? Yeah. How do I make sense of that? I think, I think you make sense of it. But the fact that Frost really understood that all education is self-education. Frost was an extreme individualist. I think that's one of the appeals of him as a person. Sure. And I think he believes that, you know, yeah. In schools, you can get something out of a school, but not too much, he thought. And he did. So interestingly enough, in starting in middle age, he began being a poet and residence at Amherst College, then he taught, then he sort of often on it, middlebarian places like that. But he was really never an academic and never really a system, he was never a systematic scholar of any kind. But in his own shelter, shelter way, he was deeply, deeply learned it. I mean, he could read Greek and Latin. He read all the time. He was interested in science. He was subscribed to Science Magazine. He was scientific American. He was really interested in the world, the natural world, the processes of the natural world. He was interested in everything. Yeah. Like I said, it blew me away. I don't know what 18-year-old is ready to sort of, you know, do a contemplation on the effects of afterthought. You know, it was very, it was very striking. Now you did mention he, he didn't quite finish college. He was in and out. What were the, is it because he couldn't handle it? What were the reasons he never finished college? Well, he could handle it. He just would see, we'd get bored with classes. And he would just not stop turning, he would just stop turning up. And if he turned up, he did very brilliantly, but he didn't turn up. And so finally, and they didn't kick him out. He just left. He said, I can't take it. And I'm not interested anymore. And so he wanted to get into the, quote, real world, unquote. And his grandfather supported him instead of listening. You, what do you want to do? He said, I want to be a farmer in New Hampshire, up in the country. And his grandfather, who had a little bit of money, bought him a small farm in dairy, New Hampshire. And Frost had gotten married early. He had, you know, four or five kids really right off the bat. And so he and his young family moved to dairy. And Frost, you know, raised some vegetables and chickens mainly. He was a chicken farmer. And in fact, his first poems were published not in poetry magazine as people think, but in poetry magazine. Oh, what? Chickens. So, and the truth is, Frost was at first a failed poet. He wrote poetry from the age of 18 to the age of 40 without getting published, except in poetry magazine. Right. And then he was a little newspaper, local newspapers. So he was not known. And then in about 19, I forget the year 1011, his grandfather died. And Frost came into a reasonable, a reasonable inheritance. He had got some real money. And so he sold the farm and he took his young family on the boat and his wife and he moved to England, moved to London and then Gloucestershire, the countryside outside of London. And there he wrote poetry and he ran into some of the great poets of the era. He met yates. He met Ezra Pound. He met a whole bunch of younger poets and fell into the literary scene. And his first two books of poems, he had already finished two or three books in manuscript, were published in a fell swoop by a London publisher. And then then he was rediscovered back into America from there. Henry Holt in New York published his poems after that. And so World War I started and Frost took off, got his family on the boat and went back to America. And just as his book started coming out in America, so he was, from the time he got back to America in 1915 onward, he was a reasonably well-known American poet. And popular by 1920, he was pretty popular. Can you tell us where in particular was it that like poetry got him thinking this is what I want to do? Was that an early on thing? Was that a later thing? No, Frost was from early age a reader of poetry. So even as I would say at 10, 11, 12-year-old, he was reading the classic poets, Jack, John Greenleaf, Whittier, Robert Lowell, Henry Wasworth, Longfellow, the American poets. He read Wordsworth, he read William Blake. Then he got into his teenage years. He was reading some Shakespeare and Milton, Chaucer. But he really knew the English and American literary traditions very, very well. And so, and he was writing an imitation of that at first, you know? His first poems, The Boys Will, do read a bit like sort of pretty classic 19th century poetry, very, very orderly rhymes and so forth. And then he breaks into his own voice here and there. But by his second book, he's really, in north of Boston, he's really himself. And it's got some of the most amazing poems in the language in there. A lot of them were written in England. You were talking about his individualism was, it seems like at a time, especially when you were saying, what do people love about him? I think there's sort of this pure Americana to him. How did that go socially in his time over in the UK? How, what were his relationships like with Ezra Pound and Yates? Well, to some degree, they saw him as a very peculiar fellow. This very American guy who has kind of rough, strange American accent. But he did try to put on a bit of an English accent, which didn't work. Of course. But then he just tonned him. And then he went back to, he wrote to a friend, he said, I want to come back to America and become Yankee and Yankee. So he put on this role of being a kind of Yankee, New England farmer and moved to the farm. He was never a tremendously good farmer. He was a lazy farmer because he spent too much time reading and writing poetry. And so, you know, a lot of his money in the later years came from the lecture circuit. Okay. But once his book started being published, he kind of was one of the inventors of the poetry reading circuit. He'd go from college to college, library to library. Giving readings and making a bit of money, getting a bit of money. So he didn't need that much money. Sure. He lived very, very modestly, all of his life. There's a, I don't remember if this was in yours, but reading an account of him and Yates not getting along very well in terms of their dispositions, frost being sort of cheerful and enjoying sort of the surprising element, the spontaneity of that poetry can offer. And then I'm getting in quite a discussion about, I guess, Yates never wrote anything without chewing his fingers and spitting blood. And I just, I loved that account. I loved that our American hero sort of going over and just showing them how to be cheerful a little bit. Well, I mean, Yates was, of course, one of the great poets of all time. Of course. Of course. And Frost did admire it. Frost thought there was something very special about Yates. And I think he'd learn from Yates, you know? Sure. And I remember Frost was a formalist always, like Yates. Yeah. Neither of them ever wrote free verse. Frost once said he spent too much time, you know, trying to learn how to write and meet her to do a write in free verse. He said writing free verse. His famous line is he said writing free verses is a bit like playing tennis with the net down. So he went the net up there. Yeah. Right. Right. In terms of his influence, do you think he ultimately lost that battle given to no means for no, no, well, no, Frost won the battle in the sense that, you know, this is what poetry looks like. Frost wrote in every form except free verse. He wrote him in sonnets. Great. Some of the great sonnets of all time. Yeah. He wrote blank verse. Wonderful. That's unriomed. I am big pentameter. Great blank verse. That poem is like mending wall. He wrote in lovely little stanzas that are rhymed. He wrote in ballad form. He wrote dramatic monologues like death of a hired man. He wrote, you know, dramatic play poems. I mean, there almost is no genre of poetry in which Frost didn't, that's in some way Excel. So, you know, but then again, yeah, most poetry today is blank is free verse. And I hate to say it. Most poetry today is quite forgettable. Unreadable. Yeah, yeah. It's unreadable. Nobody reads poetry much. I mean, people write poetry. More people write poetry nowadays than read it. Sure. Sure. And those little books are published. Chat books here and there. But you know, how much of it's really memorable? I mean, I always think of poetry as it should be memorable language. And Frost's had this way, a framing align, such that it stays in your mind. Right? Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a particular quote of his that I enjoy the, and it, I thought it could frame our discussion on maybe biographies of Frost. He said, no sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Now, and believe me, there was a clash too. I mean, you know, he made the big mistake of making Larry Thompson, who was a friend of his, his, his official biographer. Yeah. Can you tell us about this? Yeah. What was, what, what are the biography wars for Frost like? Well, there was, there was a, the first biography was this massive three volume, very, very dark negative biography, which portrayed Robert Frost as a monster. The guy's name was Lawrence Thompson. And as it were, Thompson was having an affair with Frost's secretary. Oh, wow. And Frost was having an affair with his secretary as well. Okay. So they, they were rivals in love. And this was after the death of Eleanor Frost's wife. And he, so there was a tremendous tension between them. And so, and, and I think that Lawrence Thompson really, on some level kind of hated Frost. You don't want to have your enemy retro biography. Sure. It's a very bad idea. Sure. You know, my work was trying to unbend that. So my biographical journey was the work of un, unbending Lawrence Thompson. And, and trying to find, you know, I don't, I don't say Frost was a marvellously sweet guy because he wasn't. He was an ordinary, difficult, individual, you know, not easy. Yeah. But he was certainly no monster. And he was, you know, there was a deep sympathy for the human condition there that is pervasive in the poems. I have a recent biography on Richard Wilber here in the office. And there was one night I spent chugging through your biography and I came to work the next morning and I was like, oh, yeah, I've forgotten. I know they mentioned, are they talked about Frost and Wilber and sort of that influence on Wilber. And so I opened it up into, to the first quote where they were talking about how grateful Wilber was for Frost. And they added, you know, there was somebody, there was no one that could be more critical at times, especially there was no greater critic of Yates or Ezra Pound. And I thought that was very funny. Right. Well, Richard Wilber certainly owes a huge amount to Frost. I knew Wilber fairly well. And it was, he was a lovely man. He was a lovely man and heard him read many times and had dinner with him many times. He was a sweet guy and his wife was a deep lover of Frost. When my biography came out, she wrote me like a seven page handwritten letter telling me how much she liked it. Wow. Jay, we made just derail this entire thing just to talk about Richard Wilber. But I will. Yeah. One thing I was interested to see too though was when we were talking earlier about Frost, poems finally finding a place to be published was he was, he was published in the independent and he had developed sort of a friendship with, I believe her name was Susan Ward. Mm-hmm. It turned out to be Charlotte's grandmother. Mm-hmm. Charlotte Wilber's grandmother, right? Oh, that's right. Yes, right. There was a connection there. Wasn't there? Anyway, I thought that was super fascinating. Yeah. And that being one of the things that sort of helped that friendship along. Yeah. And they had the, of course, Amherst. Amherst, they're all having an element. Right. And that was a big, they had this love of Amherst and Frost lived, you know, right there in Amherst for many decades. Yet a house there. I'm curious. Did Wilber ever talk to you about Frost? Oh, a constant. We talked about Frost a lot, yeah. And he said that he was really just Frost way of occupying a poetic space, so influenced his own way of occupying a poetic space. And the impulse toward formal verse was something he said he understood they both shared tremendously. Sure. Sure. Super great. Super great. Now, are there other biographies sent? So yours came out in about the year 2000. What else have you seen? So if you would consider your work sort of intention with Lawrence Thompson's? You know, there's other biographies, but I don't think anything else that's ever really caught my attention. Sure. Sure. I mean, there was a very, very finely written biography of Frost by Henry Hart. Okay. About two years ago came out. And it's a very, Henry Hart is a, is a teacher at William & Mary College. He's a very smart guy and a poet himself. And I like his take on Frost. It's very good. Now you also have a book. Why poetry matters? Why poetry matters? Yeah. Tell me about. So why would you set pen to paper about that? Well, I sent, a lot of poets write what you would call a defensive poetry. It's a standard kind of genre for every poet writes a defensive poetry at some point in his or her life. Sure. And I for a long time was asking myself the question, what's important about poetry? How does it actually function in this world where people don't care much about poetry, frankly? Right. I mean, poetry was, was in the 19th century in America a pretty, a pretty central position. Right. You know, well, Whitman, Henry Walseworth, Longfellow, these were very central figures in the culture. And in the 20th century, 21st century, we don't really much focus on poetry. People don't know it. It's not studied in schools, increasingly in colleges. People don't read poetry in the way I read poetry when I was in school in college. And when I was in high school, I had read Milton. I had read Frost. I had read T.S. Eliot nowadays. And high school students are lucky to read anything. I don't know what they read, but I mean, Mike, I've had three kids go through high schools fairly recently and didn't weren't given much poetry to read. Now is that all T.S. Eliot's fault? Just kidding. Now, Eliot, you know, Eliot is one of the most brilliant poets of all time, but he's a very complicated poet who put a lot of people off poetry. And so it's just, I don't know what it is about is I just think that the attention span has wavered and also poetry has been overtaken by film, by visual culture. Sure. And so, you know, how do you compete with a movie? How do you compete with Netflix? Right. How does a poet compete with Netflix nowadays? Why would somebody in the evening sit down and read a book of poems by Frost rather than sit and watch a TV series? So it's difficult. There's only so much attention available. And also, it does take a certain, at least minimal base level of education in poetry to appreciate it. It's like anything else. You can't even, you can't really appreciate Bach unless you have a little bit of knowledge of counterpoint and how things, so you understand. How Bach is being so remarkable in his innovations. So it's like with anything, you have to know a little bit about the discipline or the genre, even to appreciate what's being accomplished. But I always say the poetry is essentially, people say to me, oh, aren't poets crazy? I say, oh, no, no. It's actually the opposite of the opposite of crazy. I say, poetry is a drive towards sanity. It's a way of finding a language adequate to experience. That's how in that book, why poetry matters? I define poetry. I say, poetry is the language adequate to our experience. And so it's a sophisticated response in language to the pressures of being a human being in the world. How have you found it in terms of besides handing somebody your book, possibly, if you maybe a family member at a holiday and they just mentioned, I just couldn't get into poetry, have you found effective ways to talk about it in a way that might interest people? Maybe when I go, I give a lot of lectures in public. I have over the last 50 years, I've given lots of lectures, often about poetry, and often even reading my own poems. And I'm always trying to awaken people to what it is about the rhythms of poetry, the seductive qualities of a poem that can draw in readers and audience and make them say, wow, I now see what all the fuss is about. This language is really speaking to me. This is taking a piece of my own experience and giving it some shape and form. So would you say then in terms of, are you optimistic about poetry's lifeblood in the public? Or would you say kind of what I got from that answer was somewhat optimistic in terms of the academic halls, where you can maybe find some common ground with the students you're lecturing and backdoor it. What would you say about your optimism or pessimism looking forward? Well, I try to avoid either optimism or pessimism. If you look at the culture, generally speaking, it's a shambles. America has been going downhill in some ways, in some ways, not in some ways, but in some ways, been going downhill for a very long time. And we become less articulate, knowledgeable, our knowledge base is very slight. I mean, you could then counter that by saying, you know, at least, you know, I see that my children have, do have some tremendous literacy in, and they, they reading a lot of blogs, people are more alert to the news. I think maybe people are more aware of, of different things now, like global warming. They're aware of racism. They're aware of, said, different kinds of things. And so, you know, I'm not sure about, but, but, but where poetry stands in all this and where literature stands. I mean, I'm very nervous about where it's all going. Usually things come back in the end of the day to the basics. And I think one of the basics is language. And I think that great poetry is not going anywhere. Its audience will wax and wane. And I think we'll always find people who are interested. So I'm curious, do you think that that poetry is or you were even saying just like the letters in general, maybe, are you, uh, you do seem optimistic that it will never go anywhere. Yeah. You know, even if Rome burns, it'll find a way, you know, even if America goes end up up into ashes. Right. I mean, just like, you know, the Roman Empire completely faded. There's nothing left, but a bit of rubble on the Palatine Hill over in Rome. But, you know, people are still reading the Oads of Horace. They're reading the plays of Plotus. They're reading the epics of Virgil, the Ineid. You know, so, you know, things like what lasts is the monuments of a culture can, can be, can last long after the culture's gone. And I think one of the monuments of American culture will be the poetry of Robert Frost. That's something that people will go back to in centuries to come. I think you're exactly right about Frost and, and he is sort of come across as just pure, you know, barrel aged, hundred proof Americana. And everyone would do well to, uh, to go read more. So I've always found in terms of my own, you know, how, like getting into poetry, I suppose, is sort of as you were saying, I just needed people to tell me how to appreciate it, what to look for. And, and, and one way that's helped is, you know, learning about the poets themselves. So I highly recommend Jays' biography of Robert Frost, if that's one way, at least to, to learn about, you know, an American in letters at the very least. I'd have to agree. I think read my book, but also, you know, just like we said, you asked me how I got interested in Frost. I said, my ninth grade teacher gave me, um, you know, a poem of Frost, stopping by woods in a snowy evening. And I went back and sat in my little bedroom in, in Pennsylvania and I read whose woods these are. I think this house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here who watches woods fill up with snow, you know, on and on. It's just so gorgeous. Yeah. Yeah. Infinitely delighted on this little rabbit hole that I'm on and I want to thank you for, uh, for your biography to sort of put alongside the complete poems. Like I said, is there anywhere you would want folks to find out more about you? Is there a website I can send them to? Oh, yeah, sure. They can just, I would, anyone can just Google me and the Wikipedia page on my own website jprinney.com will basically give you the scoop. Awesome. Awesome. Jay, thank you so much for giving us your time. Jay, appreciate it. Cheers. Bye bye.