Old School (5 page)

That was all. He came back down the steps. No recitation of Frost’s honors and awards, no witty, polished reminiscences from the Amherst years. I had never before heard the headmaster speak of himself as someone with a particular past, and never did again; with us it was all books and ideas and what he liked to call, quoting Jane Austen, the compliment of rational opposition. He was married but hard to imagine in his wife’s arms, because he seemed consecrated to a relationship with the world that yielded nothing to the flesh, whose unremitting satisfaction I conceived to be the point of marriage. He was a mystery to us and, like great generals and actresses, he guarded that mystery like the power it was.

He helped Frost up the winding steps and then, instead of returning to his chair, joined us in the pews. This left Frost alone at the front of the church, in the high pulpit. He arranged his books and some loose papers in a certain order, then rearranged them, the papers rustling loudly under the microphone. At this he stopped to inspect the mike as if the device were new to him. He tapped it suspiciously. This produced a resounding knock, and he shied back a little. He picked up a book, rifled through the pages, set it down again, and peered out at us.

Can you hear me? You can hear me, you boys in the back? Well then. Good. That’s good. I suppose I should read you a poem. But I was just thinking about something Shelley said . . . you know Shelley, fellow who wrote “Ozymandias”—it’s in your books. Friend of Byron, friend of Keats. Wife wrote
Frankenstein.
Anyhow, Shelley liked to say that we poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. They used to speak like that in those days—by the pound. Unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Wonder if it’s true. Wonder what it
means.
Does it mean we’re dangerous, like your headmaster says? What does your man Kellogg think? Is Mr. Kellogg here tonight?

Frost waited, gazing out at us until George stood up, a couple of seats to my right. He looked furtive and damp. He looked like a sinner in a Last Judgment painting, about to get his due.

And Frost, Frost looked like Himself up there in the pulpit. He was standing below one of the chandeliers, whose wintry light silvered his hair and made shadows on his weathered face. He didn’t look old; he looked eternal.

He took George in. So, he said. Mr. Kellogg. That was quite a piece of legislation you wrote. Bet you had some fun with it too, holding the old man’s feet to the fire. Good for you, good for you. Old men should have their feet held to the fire—keeps ’em awake.

All right, boys, they’ve brought me down here to sing for my supper, so I’d better do some singing. Here’s one for you. No snow in here, Mr. Kellogg, but maybe we can find you some later on. I wrote this one when I was lonely for home, many years ago, in England. I expect you boys know about homesickness. It’s called “Mending Wall.”

He lowered his eyes to read and George wilted back into the pew.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun . . .

He picked his way slowly through the first line, as if the thought were just occurring to him, and then his dry voice filled like a sail and became good-humored and natural and young. When his farmer said
Spring is the mischief in me
I smiled, because I’d already felt the mischief at work in him as he came alive in the warm day, carrying stones to the wall, watching his neighbor do the same, struck by the pointlessness of their labor and unable to resist teasing his neighbor about it. I had read the poem and thought I understood it: All walls should come down. But in Frost’s voice the scene became newly vivid, and I caught something I’d missed; that for all the narrator’s ironic superiority, the neighbor had his truth too. The image of him moving in the shadows
like an old-stone savage armed
—he himself was a good reason to have a wall, the living proof of his own argument that good fences make good neighbors. Maybe something doesn’t like a wall, but take it down at your peril.

Frost was good at masking his eyes under those hanging brows, but now and then I saw him shift his gaze from the page to us without losing a word. He wasn’t reading; he was reciting. He knew these poems by heart yet continued to make a show of reading them, even to the extent of pretending to lose his place or have trouble with the light.

His awkwardness took nothing from his poems. It removed them from the page and put them back in the voice, a speculative, sometimes cunning, sometimes faltering voice. In print, under his great name, they had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being.

Frost read on, poem after poem, until the underclassmen began to cough and set their pews groaning. Then he raised his head and took us in. You boys are champion sitters, he said. You’ve got
Sitzfleisch,
as our great new friends the Germans would say. That’s enough for one night, eh? Maybe just one more—what do you think—for your man Kellogg. Yes? All right then. I have just the poem here. I believe Mr. Kellogg knows it.

Still looking at us, Frost recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Then he gathered his books and pages while we applauded. The headmaster went up the steps, conferred with Frost, came down again and raised his hand for silence. Mr. Frost, he said, had agreed to take a few questions, if we had any.

I had some. How did he know he was a good writer for all those years when nobody else knew? What did it feel like to write something really great? Why did he choose George’s poem?

Sir, if I may . . .

I looked around. It was Mr. Ramsey. He was standing in his pew. Even in this dimness his chubby cheeks showed their youthful English bloom. Mrs. Ramsey was plucking at something on her sleeve. He had married her four years earlier right out of some southern women’s college where he’d taught after leaving Oxford. She was just a freshman at the time, and Mr. Ramsey lost his job and brought her north to Putney and then to us. Mrs. Ramsey worked in the library and never lacked for boys willing to help. She wore her honey-colored hair in long girlish braids, and smelled good, and her voice was low and pleasantly southern. She had a teasing manner, and looked at us as if she knew what we were thinking.

When they arrived, two years back, she was still in love with Mr. Ramsey. We could all see it. She hung on his voice, quoted his pronouncements. Lately this had changed. Since October I’d been assigned to their dinner table, and seen her look bored while Mr. Ramsey went on about something. On occasion she turned away while he was still talking and chatted with the boy next to her. She was easy to talk to.

Your work, sir, Mr. Ramsey said, follows a certain tradition. Not the tradition of Whitman, that most American of poets, but a more constrained, shall we say
formal
tradition, as in that last poem you read, “Stopping in Woods.” I wonder—

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost said. He put both hands on the pulpit and peered at Mr. Ramsey.

Yes, sir. Now that particular poem is not unusual in your work for being written in stanza form, with iambic lines connected by rhyme.

Good for you, Frost said. They must be teaching you boys something here.

There was a great eruption of laughter, more caustic than jolly. Mr. Ramsey waited it out as Frost looked slyly around the chapel, the lord of misrule. He was not displeased by the havoc his mistake had caused, you could see that, and you had to wonder if it was a mistake at all. Finally he said, You had a question?

Yes, sir. The question is whether such a rigidly formal arrangement of language is adequate to express the modern consciousness. That is, should form give way to more spontaneous modes of expression, even at the cost of a certain disorder?

Modern consciousness, Frost said. What’s that?

Ah! Good question, sir. Well—
very
roughly speaking, I would describe it as the mind’s response to industrialization, the saturation propaganda of governments and advertisers, two world wars, the concentration camps, the dimming of faith by science, and of course the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Surely these things have had an effect on us. Surely they have changed our thinking.

Surely nothing. Frost stared down at Mr. Ramsey.

If this
had
been the Last Judgment, Mr. Ramsey and his modern consciousness would’ve been in for a hot time of it. He couldn’t have looked more alone, standing there.

Don’t tell me about science, Frost said. I’m something of a scientist myself. Bet you didn’t know that. Botany. You boys know what tropism is, it’s what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don’t have to chase down a fly to get rid of it—you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can’t—what was your word?
dim?
—science can’t dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.

Mr. Ramsey began to say something, but Frost kept going.

So don’t tell me about science, and don’t tell me about war. I lost my nearest friend in the one they call the Great War. So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters. There’ve always been wars, and they’ve always been as foul as we could make them. It is very fine and pleasant to think ourselves the most put-upon folk in history—but then everyone has thought that from the beginning. It makes a grand excuse for all manner of laziness. But about my friend. I wrote a poem for him. I still write poems for him. Would you honor your own friend by putting words down anyhow, just as they come to you—with no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of their sound, the sound of their meaning? Would that give a true account of the loss?

Frost had been looking right at Mr. Ramsey as he spoke. Now he broke off and let his eyes roam over the room.

I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can
only
be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry. Does that answer your question?

I’m not sure—but thank you for having a go at it.

You wouldn’t have guessed, seeing Mr. Ramsey settle back with a smile, that he’d just been stepped on by Robert Frost in front of the whole school. He had been my fifth-form English teacher and though I hadn’t liked him I did find him interesting, just as I’d found his question to Frost interesting. But many of his students thought him a pseud for his high diction and his passion for complicated European writers. They had surely enjoyed this little show.

The headmaster led us in a last storm of applause, then we filed out of the chapel into a hard freezing wind. I asked George if he was headed to Blaine Hall, since it was rumored that Frost might drop by there for a cup of mulled cider with the English Club. No, George said—he was going back to his room.

Why? Scared he’ll give you the business? He was just teasing you, George.

He shook his head. Mr. Frost really thinks my poem is some kind of mockery of his work.

He’s the one who chose it. If it bothered him, why would he do that?

I don’t know why Mr. Frost chose my poem, he said. But he seems out of sorts about it.

What the hell. You can clear things up with him at your audience tomorrow.

If I have my audience.

What, you think he’ll blow you off?

I didn’t say that.

George. Hold up. Hold up!

We stopped on the path. The line of boys shuffled past us. A derelict kite flapped frantically in a tree. George looked away from me, back to the wind, tweed hat pulled low on his head. I think I’m coming down with something, he said.

George, you can’t stand Robert Frost up.

It wouldn’t count as standing him up if I was in the infirmary.

You chickenshit. You big baby.

George hunched deeper into his coat, hands jammed in the pockets.

You can’t do this, I said. This is something special. Something to tell your kids about. Your grandkids!

He won’t mind. He’ll be glad.

George. George. This is really dumb. Where are you supposed to meet him, anyway?

Headmaster’s parlor.

When?

After breakfast, George said, then turned and looked at me. Why?

Just wondered. Are you really going to back out?

I don’t know.

What a waste.

We walked along to where the path forked. Come over to Blaine, I told him. We can talk it over.

He shook his head.

It’d be a complete waste if you backed out. I mean, he’s
here,
George. Robert Frost. The chance of a lifetime. He’s, what? Eighty-six? Eighty-seven? It’s now or never.

I understand that.

So are you really backing out? Because if you are, there’s no point in letting a chance like that go to waste.

I saw him begin to understand me. This has nothing to do with you, he said.

I’m just saying, why throw a chance like this away? He’s willing to spend some time with one of us. If
you
won’t meet with him, let somebody else.

Like you?

Sure. Why not.

You’d be willing to take my place?

Yes.

But he didn’t choose your poem. He chose mine.

So? If you won’t meet him, why not me?

Because you didn’t win. I won. That’s why not. Would you actually accept an honor you didn’t earn?

Oh, like you
earned
it with those rhymes of yours? Please—we’re not talking about
Paradise Lost
here.

George looked at me with cold curiosity. It unsettled me, but my blood was up and I couldn’t stop myself. Would I accept a meeting with Robert Frost? I said. An
unearned
meeting, as opposed to an
earned
meeting, like yours? You bet your sweet ass I would.