34 The New York Reviewwas the stone cottage a mile or so away
where Frost’s “real trouble” lay. Carol
had, in a way, laid claim to the cottage
even before Frost could give it to him.
Two years earlier, in 1922, after an ar-
gument about a plan to spend thirty-
five dollars on a rooster, Carol, then
nineteen, walked out the front door
of the Frosts’ house in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, and set out on foot for South
Shaftsbury, vanishing for days. He
turned up at the stone cottage, where,
according to Frost, he was “having a
fine time building a hen house.”
The portrait of Carol in the third vol-
ume of Lawrence Thompson and R. H.
Winnick’s biography of Frost leans too
heavily on his father’s own account of
his son’s misery. The chapter is melo-
dramatically titled “The Death of the
Dark Child.” Thompson and Winnick
cannot, as Frost and his family could
or would not, address Carol’s mental
illness and need for psychiatric care.
(If Lowell’s sonnet is to be trusted,
Frost saw his son as capable of commit-
ting murder.) Instead the biographers
pass down Frost’s own folk diagnosis
of his son’s troubles. In June 1911 the
Frosts’ landlord in Derry, New Hamp-
shire, committed suicide. “Frost tried
to comfort and reassure his children
that Russell’s life had been a happy
one, that it had reached a kind of
fulfillment,” Thompson and Winnick
write.But the children, in their play with
neighborhood friends, soon heard
the word “suicide,” and gradually
they picked up the details of how
Lester Russell had killed himself.
For nine- year- old Carol, there
seemed to be a curious problem
in trying to correlate his father’s
word “fulfillment” and the other
word, “suicide.” Thereafter, at var-
ious points and crises in his life, he
often spoke of committing suicide
when it seemed to him that he, too,
had reached “fulfillment.”Frost’s answer was to keep Carol sup-
plied with tasks, land to manage, ani-
mals to care for, out of fear he would
decide he was “fulfilled.”
Sometime in the early 1930s, though,
Carol Frost began suggesting to his
family that, according to Mark Rich-
ardson, he “hoped to publish a volume
of poetry.” In a letter from January
1932, Elinor Frost alerted Lesley, Car-
ol’s sister, to the potential trouble
ahead. “It isn’t that papa doesn’t think
there is some good in what Caroll [sic]
has done,” Elinor wrote, but that “Car-
oll isn’t willing to be told things, & also
that he fears Caroll’s ambition will get
away with him.”
Writing poetry seemed not only a
dangerous investment of Carol’s hopes
but, increasingly in these letters, an
ambition he’d picked in order to pro-
voke his father’s discouragement. In
short, Frost and his son are on a col-
lision course throughout this volume,
with the issue of Carol’s writing poetry
a dangerous accelerant. Frost does all
he can to somehow steer out of this
awful trajectory, often with patience,
sometimes with pique. Carol was not
“bookish,” as Frost told Van Dore. His
being “fond of the land” was the offi-
cial party line, the strategy, the therapy.
Carol has “put in a cement reservoir
and laid iron pipes,” Frost boasts. He
“is off this minute buying three or four
pedigreed sheep.”Careful readers of Frost have long
noted that his dramas of human agency
are set against a huge, cosmic backdrop,
where a choice such as which path to
take at a fork in the woods is ultimately
meaningless. “The Road Not Taken”
has taken many earnest students down
a road toward concluding that their
own belief in nonconformity and per-
sonal courage is shared by Frost. Their
teachers then disabuse them of those
quaint misperceptions. This is also the
pedagogical cat- and- mouse game that
plays out in many of Frost’s letters to
aspiring poets, but never to his son. Van
Dore’s poetry had won Frost’s admira-
tion, though his presentation of his first
book, Far Lake, dedicated to his men-
tor, caused Frost to draw back: “Dont
do a thing for me you dont want to do.
I can reconcile myself to watching you
dream your life away.” Frost could not
so easily reconcile himself to Carol’s
dreaming his life away, since he knew
the kinds of dreams that taunted him.“Frost is almost never at a loss as to
how to ‘carry himself’ in letters, ex-
cept when writing to Carol, to whom
his manner of address is seldom sure,”
writes Richardson, in the brilliant in-
troduction to this volume. There is
precision in Frost’s writing advice to
Carol, and often cautious support, but
on the whole the letters radiate dread.
The word that keeps cropping up, on
both sides of the correspondence, is
“mistake.” “Quite often I can control
my speed on the typewriter to do per-
fect work, but not today,” Carol wrote,
in 1932.There has just been a bunch of
boys playing on a piece or [sic] the
larger section of the lawn I have
spent all week spading and getting
mellow for new seed, which has me
riled up so I can’t keep my mind on
the work. That seems to be the big
difficulty, as one learns ones [sic]
speed increases thereby making
just as many mistakes, control of
ones nerves is the main factor.Carol’s fear of making mistakes in his
writing rises above subtext in these
letters. It becomes their subject, their
fixation; and even as he deplores his
own mistakes, he makes new mistakes:
“I wrote this letter in some what of a
hurry on the spur of the moment to
take down and mail today. There are a
few more mistakes than usual.”
As his son’s letters about his mistakes
pile up with mistakes, Frost’s letters
back become more explicitly aimed at
calming his nerves. In 1931 Frost wrote
to Carol, then living with his family in
California, of a couple who had rented
the stone house in his absence and
wanted to grow sweet peas:Before I forget it: a nice thing you
could do for the Shaws would be to
write them out very carefully and
clearly all you know and think they
should know about raising culti-
vating handling and selling sweet
peas.... Make it simple and easy
to follow. Emphasize the import-
ant things. Tell them about the ro-
tation you planned and about the
brush string and wire supports. I
tried to tell them a little but I didnt
know enough. Introduce the sub-
ject by mentioning me and telling
them I told you of their interest.This is a connect- the- dots: Frost’s fear
that having to write a simple note will
cause his son extraordinary distress
comes through, as it must have come
through for Carol, too. The advice is
not even really about writing but about
the sequencing of thought (“write them
out very carefully and clearly”) and the
calm presentation of Carol’s mind. As
always, Frost denigrates his own knack
for one sort of work—the planting of
peas—in order to even out his advan-
tage in another sort of work, writing.
It seems clear that he did not rank one
above the other, but admired prowess
in either equally. Writing was as much
a metaphor for physical labor as physi-
cal labor was for writing. To judge from
Frost’s own anxieties about farming, he
valued Carol’s skill with sweet peas as
much as he admired the merely com-
petent verse, often imitative of his own
poems, that was written and sent to
him by many a young admirer.
Often, therefore, Frost accentuates
his own mistakes. “It cuts down the size
of the Un ited States to have someone i n
our own family cross it in a small car on
the highway in ten or twelve days the
way you do,” he wrote to Carol on Sep-
tember 9, 1933. Driving his own new
car while sick with the flu, Frost could
barely manage the mountain roads
near Franconia: “I had in mind what
you said about the art of holding a per-
fectly even rate and made that my inter-
est and object.” Again and again Frost
tried to assume the role of apprentice
to his son’s gnosis. When Frost’s be-
loved Newfoundland, Winnie, was at-
tacked by porcupines, Frost killed the
dog while trying to save it. “You man-
age to cross the whole continent with-
out making any mistake,” he wrote to
Carol on September 18, 1933.And I can’t stay in one place three
weeks without making one of the
worst mistakes I ever made. I let
Winnie out when I shouldn’t have
in the late evening when the por-
cupines are all round the house.
She went for one and got her face
so full of quills there seemed noth-
ing for it but to cloroform [sic] her
to get them out.... But I over did
the dose and killed her.... I can
see now that I should have roped
her whole body to a board and put
her through without the cloroform.
I wish you had been there to help
me judge. It was a bad thing.But Frost could not, as hard as he
tried, keep the focus on sweet peas
and dogs and other things Carol could
confidently do. His son’s poems kept
arriving:I forgot to say I wish I had in one
holder the whole set of your poems
to look over when inclined. Would
it be too much trouble to make
a loose- leaf note book of them
sometime this winter? The depth
of feeling in them is what I keep
thinking of. I’ve taken great satis-
faction in your having found such
an expression of your life. I hope
as you go on with them, they’ll
help you have a good winter in the
midst of your family.“Depth of feeling” would have upset
Carol, since it obviously skirts the
matter of the poems’ aesthetic accom-
plishment. It is also hard to imagine his
being pleased at his father’s insistencethat the poems remain a private com-
fort, a source of patience in, and with,
his family. Then, in the second para-
graph, this reprimand:One thing I noticed in your hand
written letter I never noticed be-
fore. You don’t use a capital I in
speaking of yourself. You write i
which is awfully wrong. You begin
a sentence with a small i too. You
mustn’t.Richardson rightly finds in Frost’s
harsh correction an anxiety about his
son’s having “minusculed” himself,
though the more pertinent concern
was likely Carol’s grandiosity, which
perhaps reminded Frost of his own but
without the benefit of his great gift or
his stoical temperament. Speaking of
his friend, the English poet Edward
Thomas, Frost once described some-
thing “melancholy about him” as dif-
ferent from his own ability to “mop just
about anything out of my system.” The
letters to Carol counsel a quiet, steady
life, lived close to the mean. His son’s
poems were symptomatic of an inner
storm that the writing itself seemed
only to exacerbate.The letters to Carol represent Frost’s
greatest sustained attempt to write
without metaphor, nearly without style,
to meet his interlocutor in a zone free
of trope, figure, “form.” But those were
Frost’s safe havens. As he wrote in
“Education by Poetry,” a talk he gave
at Amherst in 1930, “What I am point-
ing out is that unless you are at home
in the metaphor, unless you have had
your proper poetical education in the
metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.”
It was what he’d written to Untermeyer
after Marjorie’s death: “Here we are...
not yet placed safely in changed forms.”
And yet “Cadmus and Harmonia,” the
Arnold poem, was already a “changed
form,” its comfort apparently real, its
transformative power as tangible to
Frost as Frost’s own poems have been
to so many—have been to me.
The exquisite thinking about meta-
phor (literally “a carrying across,” as
from one shore, or one mental state, to
another) that we find in Frost’s work
was worthless in managing his son’s
impulses toward self- destruction. We
are lucky to have this beautifully ed-
ited volume of Frost’s letters, the third
of five, from a time when everything in
his life broke. “I feel as though I was
getting better able to make my slumps
and blues shorter than they used to
be,” Carol wrote, proud of mastering
his “mistakes.” Eight years later, after
Carol’s suicide, writing again to Unter-
meyer, Frost put it this way:I took the wrong way with him. I
tried many ways and every sin-
gle one of them was wrong. Some
thing in me is still asking for the
chance to try one more.... He
thought too much. I doubt if he
rested from thinking day or night
in the last few years.And then either one of the cruelest
or most compassionate things—it de-
pends on how one hears the “sentence
sound”—Frost ever wrote: “He was
splendid with animals and little chil-
dren. If only the emphasis could have
been put on those. He should have
lived with horses.” QChiasson 30 35 .indd 34 11 / 17 / 21 4 : 50 PM