Old School (4 page)

FROST

The day after John F. Kennedy won the presidency, George Kellogg won the audience with Robert Frost. Our paper printed his poem in a box on the front page, a dramatic monologue in which an old farmer feels the bite of mortality on the first cold day of autumn. George had used an odd mixture of tones. At one moment the farmer is lyrically drooling over the sight of the hired girl milking a cow:

Old rooster struts the rafters while the barncat begs
Mewing at her feet in the stall where Flossie stands,
As with swift hard strokes of her soft white hands
She pulls the foaming cream into the pail between her legs.

Then a few stanzas down he’s a terse fatalist:

Corn’s high in the silo, hay’s stacked in the loft,
Cordwood’s halfway to the roof, doorcracks plugged with clay.
So let come what will, hard ground, short day,
I’ve done all I am able—and after all, the snow is soft.

The poem was entitled, shamelessly, “First Frost.”

In his telephone interview about the poem he’d chosen over all the others, Robert Frost told our reporter:
Young Kellogg has had some fun at this old man’s expense, and I guess this old man can stand some fun, if it isn’t too expensive.
He said he liked the joke of the milkmaid having soft hands.
All the milkmaids I ever had to do with could’ve gone bare-knuckle with Jim Corbett and made him bleed for his purse.
Frost suggested that a few winters on a farm wouldn’t hurt any young poet,
to learn that snow is no metaphor, if nothing else. But I guess I’ve dipped my bucket there a time or two, and your fellow Kellogg has caught me fair and square.

I was astonished that Frost could’ve read the poem as anything but an act of fawning servility. But no, he seemed to think that George had written some sort of burlesque, that he was using the poet’s manner and material—perhaps his very
name
—to give him the needle. Frost sounded like a man who’d been stung by a taunt, showing he could take it and come back with some chaff of his own. Still, he’d paid George the ultimate compliment of choosing the poem. How hurt could he be?

I read the poem several times, and began to imagine that maybe it
was
satiric, and thus better than I’d first thought. But George set me straight when I went to his room that afternoon to congratulate him.

What did you think of the poem, he asked me.

I like it, way to go! George, you’re going to meet Robert Frost!

Did you think I was . . . how did Mr. Frost put it—having fun at his expense?

Well, I guess you could read it that way.

You could?

It’s possible.

Oh, jeez. He slumped like a puppet, taking no care to hide his distress. He still had his tie on, a knitted tie with a flat bottom. It looked crocheted; it looked like a doily. Our biology master wore ties like that but George was the only boy you’d catch dead in one. He was both the oldest and the youngest of us, the most fuddy-duddy and innocent, and I could see that his innocence extended to this question of sardonic intent. His poem, alas, was perfectly serious.

But you don’t have to read it as parody, I said. You can also read it as tribute. You know, the farm, the folksy tone, the snow. It’s like you’re paying your respects to him—tipping your hat, so to speak.

Exactly! George sat across from me on his roommate’s bed. That’s exactly how I meant it, as an
homage.
He looked at me with such gratitude that I couldn’t help throwing another log on the fire.

And of course the title, I said.

You like the title?

All those layers of meaning. “First Frost” as in, literally, the first frost of the year. Then there’s the symbolic sense of here comes winter, i.e., death, but also
rest,
right? The snow is soft,
after all,
after all the hard work he’s spent his whole life doing—soft and white like the girl’s hands.
After all,
he’s gonna get what he wants—unless I’m just reading this stuff into it.

No! No, it’s all there.

Then, I said, the crowning touch. “First Frost” as in
first,
Frost—as in Frost is tops, Frost is the best, Frost is number one.

Exactly! Exactly. But it’s not
just
an
homage.

Of course not. You’d never find that business with the girl in one of his poems. Foaming cream. The pail between her legs. That doesn’t sound like Frost. Doesn’t really sound like you, either, to tell the truth.

It is something of a new direction for me. He looked down, controlling a smile. I have to admit, the female character got away from me somewhat. Has that ever happened to you—someone you’re writing about suddenly becomes real?

Now and then.

She became very real to me. This will sound strange, but I knew her. And I’m not talking about just metaphysically. It was physical too. In fact, when I was working on her part of the poem I found myself in a state of, you know . . . arousal. Has that ever happened to you?

Nope. I got up to leave. Look, you should probably keep that to yourself, George. You know how immature some of these guys can be.

Once a week the sixth-form Honors English Seminar was invited to eat dinner at the headmaster’s table. He’d once been an English master himself and enjoyed our company, enough to be liable to the charge of favoritism; you’d never find him playing host to Honors Chemistry. He required literary conversation. If a couple of us talked up a book he hadn’t read, he wrote down the title and read it himself, then put us through our paces. Dinner at his table often ran late, the headmaster forcing some booster to explain an enthusiasm he found baffling, while the rest of us, elbows planted in a waste of cups and napkins and half-eaten rolls, chimed in with our own judgments and dissents. The headmaster took the gloves off and let us do the same—a liberty we preserved by putting the gloves back on when we stood up to leave. I loved the passion, the self-forgetfulness of those nights, though more than once my swelling heart clenched at the sight of the dining-hall staff, all other tables stripped and set for breakfast, wearily waiting for us to shut up so they could finish their work and go home.

It was our headmaster who had persuaded Frost to visit. He always called his old teacher
Mr. Frost,
and a few of us tried that ourselves a time or two, until we saw the headmaster wince. Then we all understood that
Frost
or
Robert Frost
was fine for us, but that despite its apparently greater formality,
Mr. Frost
was reserved for those who could claim acquaintance.

All of us understood, that is, but George Kellogg. Once George sank his teeth into
Mr. Frost
he wasn’t about to let go, and seized any chance to say it. He was completely blind to the headmaster’s discomfort, his helpless hunch and shudder at every repetition of the blunder. None of us had the heart to straighten him out, and of course the headmaster couldn’t do it without sounding ridiculous:
I get to say Mr. Frost, but you don’t!
It was a nuance of etiquette as inexplicable as a joke, and George wasn’t snob enough to get it. But now, by a quirk of fate, he was going to meet Robert Frost on his own, and afterward what had been presumptuous would become impeccable—without George ever knowing it!

Purcell fell in with me outside the dining hall and declared his astonishment that George’s poem had been selected. His respect for Frost’s intelligence, he said, had suffered irreversible damage.

George’s poem isn’t that bad, I said, if you read it a certain way.

As a take-off, you mean.

Right, as a take-off.

But it isn’t a take-off.

It could be. That’s how Frost read it.

But it isn’t. And you know that.

It doesn’t matter what I know.

Bullshit.

It doesn’t. Let’s say you find it in a bottle. You’re walking on the beach and you find George’s poem in a bottle. You don’t know anything about the person who wrote it, you just have the poem. You’d probably read it as a take-off.

Frost.
I don’t know why I even bothered submitting anything, given how he writes. I mean, he’s still using
rhyme.

Yeah, so?

Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I’m being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It’s true—rhyme’s a completely bankrupt device. It’s just wishful thinking. Nostalgia.

I’m not laughing at you, I said, and I wasn’t. What I was laughing at was the thought of George Kellogg getting aroused over his own poem. But Purcell was offended and turned away. Good thing, too. To prove I wasn’t laughing at him I would’ve told him about George. He’d have told everyone else, and George would have gotten endless grief, and I would have despised myself.

If, as Talleyrand said, loyalty is a matter of dates, virtue itself is often a matter of seconds.

Robert Frost arrived during dinner. When he appeared in the dining hall, slowly crossing from the side door with the headmaster, gingerly mounting the two steps to the high table, the ordinary din died almost to silence. We kept eating and tried not to stare, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

Frost let himself down into the chair at the headmaster’s right, facing out over the room. He bent his big white head as he arranged his napkin, taking his time. He seemed deeply absorbed in the problem of the napkin. He looked up, nodded at something the headmaster said, and gravely surveyed the hall. The door to the kitchen swung open: a clatter of pans, someone shouting; the door swung to and the silence resumed. Then Dean Makepeace rose at the head of his table and turned toward Frost and began to clap, each report of his hands sharp as a shot, but measured, decorous, and the rest of us jumped to our feet in a great scrape of chairs and made the hall thunderous with applause and the rhythmic drumming of our feet on the oaken floor. Frost gave a little bow with his head but we kept up the racket and finally his reserve broke. He smiled boyishly and rose partway in his chair and waved his napkin at us like a flag of surrender.

I was conscious of him throughout the meal and held myself as though he were conscious of me. Some of the other boys at my table also suffered fits of dignity. The atmosphere in the hall had become theatrical. This had everything to do with Frost himself. The element of performance in his bearing—even the business with the napkin, awkward as it seemed, had a calculated quality—charged the room and put us on edge, not at all unpleasantly, as if a glamorous woman had entered the hall.

Frost read to us in the chapel that night. This was unique in my time at the school; the other visitors all spoke in the auditorium. Maybe it was a sign of the headmaster’s special regard, or maybe Frost himself had asked to read there. Certainly it was the most beautiful building in the school, famous, we were often told, for its stained glass windows, plundered from France by some sharp alum. Even at night, weakly lit, the red panes glowed like rubies. The pews creaked as we settled in. We sat somberly in place, staring straight ahead or gawking up into the heights where the arched ceiling vanished in darkness. The iron chandeliers shed just enough light to cast long, medieval shadows and burnish the bronze memorial plaques, the rich woodwork, the plain gold cross on the altar.

Frost sat with the headmaster in front of the altar, hands on the carved armrests of his chair, his head bowed as if in meditation or prayer, but I was sitting near the front and I caught the gleam of his eye under the heavy white brows. He was watching us watch him. When the headmaster finally stood to make his introduction, Frost gave a start and looked around as if he’d been worlds away, and that finding himself here was a puzzle indeed.

The headmaster climbed the steps to the pulpit. He was a lanky, long-faced man with a big wen over his right eyebrow. It was a blistery-looking thing and when you first met him you could see nothing else, but he soon distracted you by holding your eyes with his keen, attentive gaze, and by the arresting beauty of his voice. He had a profound bass full of gravel, which he used to good effect and to his own satisfaction. When we made fun of him behind his back we forgot the bump and mimicked his rumbling drawl.
Purcell, you’re not altogether a dull boy, perhaps you can explain what is meant by
peyote solidities,
or
sexless hydrogen . . .
I am trying to understand these words and I am failing, Purcell, I am failing.

I expected the headmaster to use this moment for a swipe at the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti crime family, which had a few soldiers among us, though not as many as he feared. He had read their work and affected to see no difference between “Howl” and “A Coney Island of the Mind.” He did, of course. Ferlinghetti didn’t really matter to him, but Ginsberg he hated. Though he disparaged him in aesthetic terms as sloppy and incoherent, what he really detested was his vision of America as a butcher of souls. The headmaster was a democrat and a meliorist. He’d been steadily adding to the number of scholarship boys, and we heard persistent rumors that he was badgering the trustees to lift the ban on black students. Perhaps he sensed in Ginsberg the herald of those descending furies that meliorism made only more rabid, that nothing could satisfy but the death of the imperfect republic whose promises he cherished, and tried to keep. He hid his detestation of Ginsberg in ridicule, quoting him with such simpering, deadly scorn—
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels!
—that it took me many years to figure out that “Howl” was a great poem.

Whatever his reasons, he feared Ginsberg’s influence on us to a degree that was almost respectful. Frost would serve as the perfect bludgeon. I caught Bill White’s eye—we both knew what was coming.

But no. Instead the headmaster told a story of how, as a farm boy completely ignorant of poetry, he had idly picked up a teacher’s copy of
North of Boston
and read a poem entitled “After Apple-Picking.” He approached it, he said, in a surly humor. He’d done more than a bit of apple-picking himself and was sure this poem would make it fancy and romantic and get it all wrong. Yet what struck him first was how physically true the poem was, even down to that ache you get in the arch of your foot after standing on a ladder all day—and not only the ache but the lingering pressure of the rung. Then, once he’d assented to the details, he was drawn to the poem’s more mysterious musings. What was that pane of ice about? Which part of the poem was dream, and which part memory? When he borrowed the book he’d had no idea where this act would lead him. Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.