396
PARTISAN REVIEW
so that it wasn't a strain for him to hear me. His deafness, and
trying not to seem deaf, sometimes caused a vagueness and aliena–
tion in his friendly relations.
He questioned me a little about the night before. "Did you
see an old fellow who came up and talked
to
me after the reading
last night? He was in awful shape; he must have had some
strokes. "
As it happened I had noticed him: a tall raw-boned aged
creature, with a friend helping him up the aisle; mind over matter,
crawling in Frost's direction, with flailing motions of his arms
and legs.
"He kind of poked me," Frost went on, rather complain–
ingly, "and he said
to
me, 'Frost,' he said, poking me, 'We're the
same age.' I don't know what he had
to
say that for.
It
gave me an
uneasy feeling."
I changed the subject, but Frost came back
to
it. "It's a
strange thing how one man, like that one last night, will get in
such awful shape, while another keeps strong and well, like me.
I wonder about it; it isn't reasonable; what does it mean?"
"One thing it must mean, Robert," 1 answered, "is that all
this barding around that you do, traveling here and there, reading
poems and giving interviews, is healthy for you."
He agreed. "Yes. And I'll tell you one of the secrets of it: I
never do any sightseeing. 1 went to Greece, you know, and 1 was
a good classical scholar when I was young, better than Ezra
Pound. The Acropolis, the Parthenon, meant more to me than
any place on earth. But 1 just stayed sitting in the hotel; 1 never
went up there. 1 knew that 1 could make it out better in my mind's
eye than I could have seen it climbing around, squinting in the
sun.
"It
was the same in Jerusalem," he added. "I carried the holy
pl~lCes
all in my head."
That was his character and grandeur: a concern about being
true to himself, but more than that. All the time, all his life–
though active, productive, instructive, challenging-he stayed
inside his own ego, his own concept of what he was and intended
to be. There might have been some psychopathology in this if he
had been a man of the world, let us say, a millionaire, or a politi–
cian, or even an educator. But it cannot have been disadvantage–
ous
to
him as a writer. The entire world was a unity in his pon-
