I sat beside my father, sucking in the memories and memorizing them, drinking his deepest goodness. Next to him was Mom, and if this scene were to show her at her happiest, she would have a passel of kids surrounding her, all jiggling and being shushed and being smiled at and being tickled and then being shushed all over again.
It is the wisdom of the heart that I was absorbing there in that consecrated seaside chapel, there in that home of our greatest Father.
From the instant we are conceived, our parents are teaching us. They are our most intimate guides regarding the fundamentals of life. Some of their teaching goes awry, yes. Some of their actions are painful, yes. But for most of us, during most of the time, our parents fill our hearts with good.
They fill our hearts—that’s the point. We cannot gain wisdom purely from the head, although secularists think we can. We cannot gain morality purely from the head, although atheists think we can. No, we absorb wisdom and morality into our hearts first, from those who embody them for us from our beginnings.
As a teenage son, I looked to my father for clues regarding manliness, but also regarding male responsibility. Some of the clues I received were easy to admire. My father was physically robust in his forties, fifties, and sixties, when I was watching him most closely, and he had the muscle-memory gift that former athletes have. Having not skied, let’s say, for a winter, it took him a mere ten minutes to remember how to do it and how to appear graceful while doing it (however oddly he dressed while doing it—with trousers, white shirt, tie, overcoat, and pipe!).
Speaking of physical robustness, Sydney Lea, now the poet laureate of Vermont, tells the following tale. When Dad was in his late seventies and was the poet laureate of New Hampshire, he was invited to come down from New Hampshire to read somewhere in Connecticut. It was winter, and Mom did not want Dad to drive down alone, so she asked Syd if he would accompany Dad. Syd and Dad were friends, and Syd—in his late forties—said sure. It snowed during the drive. Somewhere in Connecticut, Syd pulled off the highway into a rest stop. As their car came to a stop, it skidded, and its right front wheel bumped up, over, and down on the other side of a parking curb, so the car was immobilized, its one wheel useless.
Syd was astonished when Dad said, “Let me see what I can do.” Dad exited the car, walked around to its front, examined the situation, squatted down, positioned his hands under the front bumper, and lifted up the front of the car and scuttled it sideways so the tire could drop down onto the road once again.
“Dick! You just lifted up the front of my car!”
Dad stood a bit taller, twitched his shoulders, jiggled his arms, and grinned. “Yes. I guess I did, didn’t I?”
As I am sure is already apparent, I judged Dad superbly powerful in the muse department also. He dominated the environment when it came to the singing of great praises.
If Dad could make perfect literary moments, then so could I. Here’s an event that occurred more times than once. If we were aboard Reve and were weaving blindly through a heavy fog, it was my job to stand in the forepeak and to call directions back to Dad at the helm, so that he could steer around the lobster pot buoys.
When I called directions in the fog, I liked to use my nautical vocabulary.
“Buoy ahead fifty yards. Come to port a quarter point.”
“What?” Dad yelled forward to me.
I raised my voice higher. “I said buoy ahead fifty yards. Come to port a quarter point.”
“What’s that?” (This from a naval officer and able seaman.)
“Go left!”
But if we were unlucky, this exchange would have taken too long, and we’d ride over the float line of the lobster pot, Dad would not throw the gear into neutral in time, and the line would catch on the propeller and in two seconds become an impacted mess as big as a soccer ball, thus bringing Reve to a halt, rolling and helpless on the sea.
So I would need to strip and, holding a knife in my teeth, drop overboard and swim beneath the transom into the green frigidity of the Gulf of Maine. And Dad’s knives were never sharp. In the end, I began to carry my own knife for just this service. But I was frustrated: surely my father must know that I couldn’t with fewer than four hands—one hand to keep me from being battered by the stern as she pounded, one hand to steady me on the rudder, and one hand to hack away at the pot buoy line. Then, when the tangle began to loosen, another hand to grab the ends, so they would not unravel too fast and slip away, thus robbing the lobsterman not only of his potential catch but of a valuable trap, too.
But of course, my father had been right: I could manage the task—with only two hands. Gasping and frozen, and clutching the two cut ends of the pot line, I’d haul myself back aboard, firmly knot the two ends together again, toss the thing over the side, and receive the congratulations of whatever delighted poets were with us on that particular ride.
This was fine manly stuff, but it would not have been needed if Dad had turned a quarter point to port.
Annoyed with Dad as I toweled off, I’d finally come to the real core of my emotion: it was chagrin. A characteristic of my father’s poetic yearning that I deplored was his inflation of what was not truly worthy of poetical glory as though it were. Part of Dad believed he had the capacity to make things poetical that weren’t—an occupational hazard of the rhapsodizer.
Yet I had done just exactly the same thing. I had been more concerned to make our meander in the fog a scene from some Horatio Hornblower novel than to decently and frankly communicate with my father. And more to this: I had tried to blame him for the consequences.
Today my most enduring, baseline image of my father is of him standing at Reve’s helm, gazing forward through her open port light, guiding her to the next bell buoy. He is not looking at me. I am staring at him, endlessly, with fascination, compelled to absorb his every act and, if possible, his every thought.
Some of the things I see I dislike, yet at the same time I adore them, for they are just Dad. I dislike his shabbiness of dress; the poetical happenstance and joie de vivre of his inexact navigation; his incompetence with machinery; the way he drones on about the “dangers of the sea” to try to convince us that it would be prudent to cut short the cruise—when in fact he is just bored; the conditions are perfectly safe, the actual danger from his wobbling pipe as he leans casually over the open fuel tanks when gassing up at the Bucks Harbor fuel dock.
One of Dad’s qualities that I absorbed was his attitude toward money. Of course, money is a practical thing, but Dad was not a practical man. For him—and he educated me on this, too—money was emotional. Remember how the apple does not fall far from the tree?
Once at Undercliff, Mom and Cal Lowell and I were sitting out front in the Adirondack chairs while Dad was down on the beach securing our launch to its outhaul. We had been out on the bay watching the sailboat races. Cal had a grand way about him, sitting in the sunshine, for he gestured widely with his arms and tossed his head of unruly hair. I knew Cal well, and so I’d understood what was behind the occasional glances between Dad and Mom earlier that afternoon while Cal waxed increasingly loudly. They were concerned that he might be entering another manic phase. Cal suffered from bipolar disorder, and his friends were ever vigilant to monitor his ups and his downs.
Now ashore, we were watching Dad do his nautical tidying up on the beach through a scrim of Mom’s roses. Dad finished with the launch and walked toward us across the stones, lugging the empty lunch basket. Carrying on the conversation, Mom opined, “There’s too much worrying about money.”
“Oh, Betty, there’s nothing to worry about with money,” Cal replied.
Mom smiled. “That’s okay for you to say. You’re a Lowell.”
“Still true.”
“But how do you do it?”
“We always have someone else to look after the stuff, that’s all.”
Dad arrived and put the basket down on the front stoop. He looked a question at Mom, to catch up with the conversation. Mom said,
“We’re discussing freedom from money worries for artists.”
Dad smiled. “Money is the devil.”
My fellow students at prep school and I had been required to read the Bible, so I interjected, “No, Dad. I don’t think that’s it. I think what the Bible says is that it’s the love of money that is the root of evil, not money itself. That’s where the evil comes from—from the love of it.”
Dad included Mom and Cal in his smile. “We have an expert!”
I laughed. “Well, that’s what I think it says anyway.”
“But how do you get some?” Dad, who had married some, tossed me this challenge. “That’s the eternal question.”
“You could make a lot of it.”
I sensed this came out as a challenge to Dad, so I tried to soften it by adding, “That is, if you want a lot of it.” Then I pressed forward with my case. “Even poets can make a lot of it. Jim must be raking it in.” I was referring to James Dickey, whose novel and movie Deliverance were hot right then.
“Oh, Jim!” Dad tossed his hand.
Mom pushed in too. “Or think of Ted. Just because he was one year ahead of you at Dartmouth doesn’t mean he’s any better than you. Think of how he’s doing.” She meant Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. “You could do that, too, you know. Why don’t you write something that everyone wants to read?”
“It’s doggerel.”
“Of course it is. But it sells.”
“But Betty, you went to Smith. How can you say such a thing?”
“My brother would tell you: sell more of what sells.”
“Don’t let’s talk about your brother!”
“But you know what I mean.”
“Cal, help me here. Shall we write doggerel?”
“Of course not! Write as obscurely as possible. That’s what we’ll do. Make them come to us.”
“Yes, Cal. That was one of my lessons long ago. You remembered! It’s good when the student surpasses the teacher. It’s true: the reader must come to the poet.”
That conviction—that the other person must come to the poet—was exemplified to me during an event from our DC days.
The big news in Washington when we were there was that Kennedy had won! Kennedy was breathtaking to the artistic crowd—his youth, his energy, his vocal ability, his beautiful wife, his sophistication, his small children in the White House, his sympathy with the arts, his request that the nation’s most prominent elder statesman poet deliver a poem at the inaugural.
Everyone my family knew among the artists was agog.
As Number 482 (as I recall it, possibly incorrectly) on the official government protocol list, my father was automatically invited to all official government events with at least that many guests. Consequently, Dad and Mom attended the Kennedy inaugural ball, our family had close seats at the inauguration ceremony itself, and afterward we were transported quickly from the inauguration so that we sat across from the White House in the official reviewing stand during the subsequent parade.
It snowed in Washington the day before the inaugural. Nothing by New Hampshire standards—only about five inches—but enough absolutely to paralyze the poor city that was about to throw a big party. It took me six hours to get home from school that day on the bus, a trip that usually occupied about forty minutes.
Scores of artistic types were in the city, parading in and out of our house in Georgetown. My parents, as always, were loving it. Many artists had been invited to the various balls, but the snow had threatened their finery. I remember my mother hovering very much around baseball maven Marianne Moore, whose 1951 Collected Poems had won a hat trick—the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, all for the same book—but who was distraught at the inadequacy of her little gold pumps.
But the real news was that Frost had spent several hours that afternoon with Kennedy himself! Closeted together. Just the two of them.
It was ecstasy to realize that very shortly Frost would arrive at our house, and we would be able to quiz him about the new celebrity. What might Kennedy have said? How had Kennedy looked? Had Robert met Jackie? What—oh, what—was Kennedy really like?
In due course, Robert did arrive. We had a red armchair in the living room, and Robert settled himself there.
Imagine, just an hour before this he had actually been sitting in private audience with Kennedy! Why, you could practically feel the aura still quivering around him!
We were in a circle around the old poet, eyes wide, avid, lustful of news.
“What did he say? Oh, please tell us, Robert, what did he say?”
Pause. Twinkle. Lift of the eyebrow, slight cock of the head.
“Well . . .”
“Oh, please! Robert, don’t tease! You must tell us: What did he say?”
Pause.
And then, Robert being Robert, in sonorous voice—“Of course, I did all of the talking.”
Even the new president must come to the poet!
And, speaking of Frost, so must I.
In seventh grade, we studied “The Road Not Taken.” It’s the poem about two paths diverging in a yellow wood, where the speaker, the poet, must select which path he should take. The last couplet is what everyone remembers—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
My teacher told us that the couplet extols Frost’s prescience in selecting his own way—the way less traveled—over the ordinary, the more heavily worn path. But I was struck with another idea.
Three times earlier in the poem, Frost makes it clear that the roads were not different in wear or attraction. Poets don’t waste words. I knew this from Dad. So here is what I figured. If Frost tells us three times in so short a poem that the paths are similar in wear, but then, at the end, he refers to one of them as being the path less traveled by, he must want us to notice his reversal. He must mean something poetical about his reversal, and he must want us to focus on the reversal.
Here’s how Frost tells us the paths are the same—
Then took the other, as just as fair
and
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same
and
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
I was delighted! Frost was being subtler than my teacher imagined. Frost was saying two things, not one, and the saying of both of them in so short and seemingly simple a poem made the final couplet more interesting than my teacher supposed.
As I sat in class and listened to my teacher, it came to me suddenly what Frost might actually mean by his rhetorical and poetic reversal. I was only fourteen years old, but I could imagine a time when, later as a man, I might reflect backwards upon a moment when I had made a life’s pathway choice. Reflecting back, then, I would need to acknowledge that the choice I had made precluded my choosing the other pathway instead. Then I might congratulate myself on the wisdom of my choice. That was as far as my teacher’s interpretation of the poem went, for after all, Frost had become a prominent man by following his poetical choice.
But instead, here is what flashed into my mind: Frost is teasing our imaginations to discover something more profound. Here’s Frost’s setup. Each pathway is equally used. Once we choose, there is no going back to take the other. Once we choose, we make further choices (“way leads on to way”). Finally, the pathway we choose is the one less traveled by, and it is also the pathway that makes all the difference.
How to solve Frost’s riddle?
Here’s what I realized. The poem is not about Frost’s poetical choice, as my teacher supposed. The poem is about everyone’s choice. Everyone’s chosen pathway is the road less traveled by. Every one of us inevitably takes the road less traveled by because no one else except ourselves could have chosen that particular road. And therefore each of our pathways, individually chosen by each of us, upon which we now muse philosophically, makes all t
he difference.
The poem is about us, not about him!
I was almost breathless with excitement about my idea. Our homework that evening was to prepare ourselves for discussion of the poem on the next day. So when I went home, I asked Mr. Frost—who had stopped by for dinner—what he thought of my idea. I had always liked Frost, who had that granite face and unruly shock of white hair. Particularly I liked him because he played his part as the gruff New England versifier very well, but with a Yankier and Yankier twinkle in his eye.
And there were times when his eye would catch mine, and he would shoot me a dart that delighted me because his dart told me how much fun he thought all of this was.
Gratifyingly, in his Robert-like way, he responded to my interpretation by saying, “Good, Dikkon.” Then he smiled. “You’ve said it almost as well as I did.”
Thus armed, I went to school with every expectation of heroism. English class came; we took out our books; my teacher asked if anyone had ideas; I raised my hand; I was called upon.
“Well, as a matter of fact I was having dinner with Robert Frost last night, and he said . . .”
It was a disaster.
My teacher could not have been less interested to hear something that came from so dubious a source as the author. I was soundly snubbed. I was made to sit down and was not called upon through the rest of the day.
Ah! How fickle is fame . . .
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When I was young teenager, I lied. Among the others of my sins at that time, lying was the most comfortable for me. It challenged my vanity the least.
I lied about 10 percent of things and was outraged when my father and my mother mistrusted me about the 90 percent that remained. Lying had dogged me hard for perhaps three or four years, until one particular time when, at fourteen, I lied one final time to Dad.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 8
