GLENWAY WESCOTT
395
him away, and finally succeeded.
It
was one of those encounters
of incompatibles that occur every so often in Dante's
Inferno.
Oddly enough, I wasn't afraid of Bodenheim; I understood him.
He too came from Chi<:ago, did he not? I too was (so to speak) a
bohemian, though an immature and innocent one. I felt a slight
fear of Robinson.
If
someone hadn't stopped that proto-beatnik
from circling around, blearily peering and sneering, Robinson (I
fancied) might finally have sprung up and strangled him.
I didn't, at that time, )<.now anything about Robinson's mel–
ancholy life, dedicated to drink much of the time. But I saw
shadows of it in his face: a play of expressions signifying that he
was accustomed to hopeless, lethal embarrassments like this; he
had resigned himself to the prospect of them; far too much of life
was Bodenheim, Bodenheim, in one way and another. Robinson
was a man of bad luck in many respects , famous but unsuccessful,
which is often the fate of poets. Ultimately, one of his clever, aus–
tere verse narratives,
Tristram,
caught the public fancy; no great
comfort to him, as by that time he was dying of cancer.
Bodenheim was of more rugged substance and lived on for
decades in Greenwich Village, a familiar figure and a scandal.
One night in a bar he and a young female companion struck up
an acquaintance with an insane man, who murdered them. I
wonder whether the vicious poet did not goad the homicidallu–
natic, as I saw him goad Robinson that evening in Peterborough,
weaving and winding his competitiveness and his pseudohumor
like a spell.
I never saw either Robinson or Bodenheim again, or
wanted to. But I made friends with Frost in his old age, in one
way and another, without much frequentation. Although he
never softened, he admitted his hardness, which made him easier
to
like, easier to be liked by. (This happens to have been a poig–
nant formula of relationships in my life: I didn't like my
father
when I was a child, and was suddenly enabled to forgive him,
upon my first return from Europe as a young man, when he con–
fessed that in my childhood
he
~adn ' t
liked
me.)
In 1961 I went to Washington to hear Frost read his poems
in the auditorium of the State Department. Afterward there was a
parLy for him, to which I wa not invited . Instead he asked me to
have breakfast with him th e next morning, and that was the best
talk we ever had, alone in his hotel bedroom, sitting side by side,
