118
REUBEN A. BROW ER
people
love
him even in his most outrageous moments. It is not surpris–
ing that Elinor White married Frost in spite of his cruel and jealous
pursuit of her, a courtship that came near to persecution.
In Thompson's narrative the cruelty is convincingly documented, but
the charm, the love, is barely acknowledged, and the marriage seems
almost incredible. It is hard to say why this is so, and why in a narrative
packed with interesting material about Frost- his strategies as poet, his
reading in odd authors, his drifting from job to job, his tragicomic
suicidal flight to the Dismal Swamp- we fail to feel that the life matters
intensely for the biographer. We think by contrast of Johnson's
Life
of
Savage, in which sordid facts are not brushed over, though tenderness is
not forgotten. It is as if the author of
The Early Years,
determined not to
write an official biography and not to be taken in by a "most deceiving"
subject, as Frost said he was, had sacrificed the sense of greatness to
candor. The care with which Thompson disentangles conflicting versions
of an event or a relationship as described by Frost and by others is ad–
mirable, but there is also something missing. Take for example Frost's
treatment of his grandfather, who according to Frost gave him the farm
in Derry, telling him to "go out and die." That Frost was unfair, that he
exaggerated his grandfather's cruelty, is proved well enough by Thomp–
son. But in describing various episodes there is a lack of sympathetic in–
sight or desire to understand why Frost felt as he did. (We might con–
trast Erikson's handling of similar occurrences in Luther's boyhood.) One
example is brief enough to quote:
Robbie soon made the added complaint that his grandfather was
cruel. As evidence, the boy told of watching the old man hide be–
hind a corner of the house, horsewhip in hand, waiting for a bold
youngster who kept slipping into the yard, unasked, to pick a few
flowers. Robbie had indignantly watched his grandfather creep up
on the intruder and lash the child's bare legs with the horsewhip.
According to Robbie, another kind of cruelty occurred a few days
later.
Frost goes on to tell of the look from his grandfather's "ice-cold gray-blue
eyes," a look so frightening that Frost remembered it for years afterward.
The ineptness of the prose-"made the added complaint," "As evidence,"
"kind of cruelty occurred," perhaps intended as humorous, is a sign of
the distance and lack of ease in the narrator's point of view. There is
scarcely a hint that childhood experiences of this kind are frightening and
damaging. Thompson conveys very little of the painfulness of a young
poet's doubts and of his attempts at self-assurance. Frost's deliciously ar–
rogant answer to his grandfather's "generous" offer to give him one year
