Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  Their time, their era, too, left them alone. The whole beginning of the twentieth century was in a somewhat similar muddle to themselves, a sort of soft interregnum. It was old and young, and it didn’t have long to go. Historians don’t know quite what to do with it; often, they simply add those fourteen years to the nineteenth century, as if that was where they really belonged. The great reputations—James, Hardy, Yeats—had all been founded in the Victorian age. When Frost’s favorite living poet died in 1909, it was George Meredith. The reputations of the 1900s and 1910s, of the Edwardians and Georgians (those characters listed in the “Biographical Table” at the back—I would almost call it a glossary!) have disappeared more thoroughly than those of any other decade. No one now reads those poets Edward Thomas spent a great part of his lifetime sifting in the Daily Chronicle. And against that, the Modern had pushed its foot in the door. “On or about December 1910,” as Virginia Woolf would have us believe, “human character changed.” Lawrence is a dangerous presence, Pound is at home in London—“sometimes,” as he wrote on his visiting card to a predictably nettled and crestfallen Frost—and the soon-to-be Imagists Flint and Hulme are there to be met, and always our knowledge of the impending war. It is a confused and unimpressive waiting, the situation of Saul Bellow’s first book, Dangling Man, George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, or Julian Maclaren-Ross’s Of Love and Hunger.

  In this brief abeyance, the friendship took hold and grew. They met twice in 1913; 1914 was “their year”; in February 1915, the Frosts sailed (taking with them—as a kind of wonderful pledge or earnest—Thomas’s oldest child, Mervyn or Merfyn); Thomas started to write poems and enlisted, Elinor Frost suffered ill health and a miscarriage, Frost embarked on his prodigious career as a professional bard and performer (“Dear Edward: First I want to give you an accounting”). Everything is changed, changed utterly. This was, for all involved (even, one suspects, the onlookers), a transformative relationship. The plot has the bold X shape of a perfect short story (say, Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog”) and, indeed, the friendship has absolutely the intensity of an affair.

  This “story”—a kind of natural, unprocessed narration, with beginning, middle, and end—is most exquisitely set off, or inverted, by the epistolary form. Because there can be no doubt that its deepest moments were when the two men were together at Ledington, improvising walks and conversations. It was not in its essence a written (or even primarily a literary, except inasmuch as both men were literary) relationship at all—not Fernliebe, heady and disinhibited—but one founded on time eagerly and intensely spent together, and it is of precisely this that we are necessarily ignorant. First names—the tu or Du form that registers electrically upon a European ear—are only used once the Atlantic has come between the writers. Intimacy, perhaps, to redress distance. Strikingly, and sadly, there seems not to be a single photograph—what one might jokingly call prima facie evidence—of the two men together. A handful of poems (one by the awful Gibson), a few paragraphs of recollection from the principals, and by Helen Thomas and Eleanor Farjeon. What is proposed to us is the form of an arch, but all we see of it are the beginnings or foundations. We see the men building toward each other. The middle, their meeting, eludes our inquisitiveness. Letters are predicated upon absence; in an extreme instance of this, one single letter from Frost to Thomas seems to have survived from the time before his departure. They have a natural, aleatory tact, very much in keeping with the characters of both men. In her wonderful memoir, As It Was, Helen Thomas wrote of Edward: “for though he needed and loved my impulsive and demonstrative nature, these qualities were foreign to him.” Frost, meanwhile, wrote to Edward Thomas: “I have passionately regretted exposing myself”—though not to Thomas.

  Precisely because of what one might call its refusal of distance, though, the collection displays a characteristic and very appealing exaggeration, blandishment, almost flirtatiousness. Again, this is supplied almost as much by what isn’t there—the “silence” from Frost, which of course isn’t a real silence—as by what is: Thomas’s tireless charm, solicitude, address, seductiveness. There is just no way for him to be without his friend, and Frost’s absence or unavailability leads him—almost from the beginning, “Dear Frost (if you don’t mind)”—to the brink of excess, impropriety, fantasy, whatever one wants to call it. The early notes from Thomas seem to live always toward their next meeting, to sigh, almost romantically, for more favorable conditions, where cake can be had and eaten: “There must be a world where that is done. I hope you & I will meet in it.” He is like a man pressing his suit upon some chilly fair, or even—such is the force of so much charm, desire, wistfulness—a woman. In 1910, Thomas had published a book called Feminine Influence on the Poets; “till I got to his signature,” he writes of Richard Burton, “I thought he was a she”; his concluding presentations of himself are regularly “feminine”: “but you know already how much I waver & on what wavering things I depend,” the odalisquelike “It is purely disinclination to sprawl about before your eyes as I feel I should do, more than usual, just now,” or the frankly eye rolling “If you were there I might even break away from the Duke for 3 days, but it would be hard.” (I’m sure I overstate Thomas’s femininity. It’s just my somewhat coarse approximation for the combination of youth, pliancy, respect, teasing that he offers Frost. And of course, with his “strength and silence,” Frost plays his male part.)

  All this, of course, is not to suggest there was any homoerotic component in the relationship, but rather to propose that something of what one thinks of as merely or exclusively sexual—the gallantry or flirtatiousness of seduction—inheres in many, if not most great friendships. (The magnificent thing about Montaigne’s sentence is that it is as applicable, or rather more obviously applicable, to love as to friendship.) In fact, I would say there is something a little strange where it’s not there. There is something, in Robert Lowell’s words, “too little nonsensical” even in the twinkle of Brecht’s invitation to Walter Benjamin to share his Danish exile with him: “How’s your health? How about a trip to the northland? The chess board lies orphaned; every half hour a tremor of remembrance runs through it; that was when you made your moves.” There is something deliberate and deflected and third-person neuter about this; too much depends on the cartoon-animated chessboard; it is not torrid but cool, witty-whimsical rather than charming, and seems already to accept the possibility of defeat. Thomas, by contrast, like the heroine of a bodice ripper, seems always ready to hurl himself quixotically against any let or hindrance: to walk anywhere, cycle any distance, use any pretext, accept any lodging. It’s as though he always has their coordinates plotted on a map, and has in his pocket a compass with Frost his true North. And in this he is even occasionally—happily!—outdone by a still more exorbitant Frost, who makes the amazing suggestion that he take a little three-week leave of absence from the army so that Thomas can cross the Atlantic to talk to him. After all, he says, reasonably (because reason also is part of the process), “They ought to consider that you were literary before you were military.” The assertion of primacy, like the—naked or exaggerated or (to the writer) surely irresistible—expression of need, seems to me a term from love’s lexicon.

  The romance of friendship is to me a beguiling trait in these letters. And while Thomas, who wrote most of the letters that have come down to us—and most of the longer letters at that—seems to make most of the running, this is an accidental impression (although it is one of the minor pleasures of reading this collection deliberately to entertain it). Frost’s letters may be less engagingly volatile—less frisky, almost, than Thomas’s—but rarely can he have come over as so attractively involved as he does here: one cannot say with any degree of confidence that “the more loving one”—Auden—is Thomas. Rather, dangling before his friend such heavenly and Kafka-ishly impossible notions as the “lecture-camp” in New Hampshire, Frost entered fully into the solicitous optimism of the relationship.

  At the same time, m
ost movingly, Thomas quit it. It’s as though the torch of hope and ambition (and illusion) had passed from him to Frost. In his last two years of soldiering and poetry, he seems to move, consciously, into an unreachable final solitude. At the end of a tightening spiral—shorter, more “mannish” sentences, less self-reflection and self-censure, renunciation (of his Gloucestershire village of Steep, of reading, of friendship, of the idea of a future), the affirmation of more and more negatively couched perspectives—there is only death. “All the anchors are up,” he writes. He sees himself in a sort of continual masquerade, in strange, tight clothes, an artilleryman’s mustache, rising through spectral ranks, a dirty somnambulist, and yet—absurdly—a schoolmasterly figure among much younger men, quite unrecognized (“I wonder would you recognise me with hair cropped close & carrying a thin little swagger cane”; “Nobody recognises me now”; “my disguises increase, what with spurs on my heels & hair on my upper lip”) to the point where he simultaneously becomes himself and doesn’t know himself (“Niemand, der mich kennt”—no one knows who I am—are Rilke’s dying words). Thomas seems to rebalance himself in negation. Frost, meanwhile, is a tender irrelevance, not quite knowing whether to cheer from the sidelines of American neutrality—very much as at a sports event—to praise the personality of Lloyd George, to recall old memories of their times together, to envy Thomas’s uncomfortable mastery of “black talk,” or to give him an anxious shaking: “Don’t be run away with by your nonsense.” Many of these pages are at the extremity of friendship.

  I haven’t talked much about poetry. Poetry seems to come naturally and variously out of the relationship. It is Frost telling his friend that of course he can imagine him “taking to verse.” It is in both Thomas’s sublimely candid and intelligent reviews of North of Boston—and his bantering references to “North of Bostonism” in his own work. (“Influence” seems to me such a ridiculously, barbarously heavy notion here: I don’t think Thomas set himself to write Frost poems any more than Frost set himself to write Thomas poems. Thomas may be vastly less known than Frost—especially in the United States—but I don’t think he has anything to fear from the comparison. Rather, I should say that their poems, as I should take it their wives and their children, were on friendly terms with one another.) It is Frost sending Thomas “The Road Not Taken”—and I don’t suppose anyone who reads it in such a context will ever view Frost or the poem in the same way again. It is Thomas taking exception to the closing line of a poem, and his discreetest reservations about plays, about plainness, and—less discreetly—about things being “made up” or “thought out” or “done too much on purpose.” It is in innumerable felicities of expression one finds on the wayside, as it were, in these letters, such as Thomas’s feeling “thinned out by all this reading & smoking”; or his writing about “little trees & some great pears,” and wishing Frost, in an utterly Keatsish way, “I hope you have some as good, so that you eat them till your teeth are sad with them”; his comparing “a foxhunting major” to “a mandrill” (though what else is an officer, if not someone who drills men?); it is Frost’s astonishing, unpunctuated, inverted, unquestioning question: “For what has a man locomotion if it isnt to take him into things he is between barely and not quite understanding.” It is Thomas saying, “I could read Frost, I think,” and later, in his last letter, revising this—you see, these really aren’t bookish letters—assuring his friend: “yet you are no more like an American in a book than you were 2½ years ago.”

  WELDON KEES

  There is a short story by Weldon Kees called “Farewell to Frognall,” one of the last he wrote before giving up prose at the age of thirty, where there is the following memorable little exchange:

  “What have you been doing?” said Frognall. He was a tall man, no longer so very young, with bushy carrot-colored hair and bad teeth. He did not look straight at one when speaking.

  St. Clair said, “Translating the poems of Gröbman-Pauli.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Few have. He is quite unknown here. His poems are virtually untranslatable and depend for their effectiveness on an almost unbearably tedious repetition of guttural sounds. It is very difficult to reproduce their flavor in a translation. He wrote exclusively in septenaries. Little is known of his life. He abandoned poetry in his twenty-fourth year and seems to have allowed himself to be supported by women of a low sort from that point on until his death, a peculiarly revolting one at the age of forty.”

  The humor of the description is a strange and uncomfortable blend of the drolly academic—the silly poet no one has ever heard of, for very good reasons—and the savagely self-mocking: because surely, whether it was by accident, intention, or merely prophecy, Gröbman-Pauli has a lot of Kees in him.

  Weldon Kees (1914–1955?) is the nearly man of twentieth-century American poetry, and not just poetry but—as above—fiction; art, music, and poetry criticism; Abstract Expressionist painting; traditional jazz (both pianism and composition); avant-garde theatricals; and documentary filmmaking. Until I read James Reidel’s biography, I hadn’t realized how “nearly” Kees was, and how far he came, in how many fields of artistic endeavor. Here was someone who ate hamburgers with Mary McCarthy, dined with William Carlos Williams, took over as Time magazine’s cinema editor from James Agee, and as the Nation’s art reviewer from Clement Greenberg; who wrote a splendid piece for Time on Fats Waller, and had poems in The New Yorker, on one occasion two in three weeks; who helped edit Paramount’s historic newsreel footage of To the Shores of Iwo Jima; was friends with John Cheever, Malcolm Cowley, Conrad Aiken, Theodore Roethke, Mark Rothko; had his paintings hung next to those of Jackson Pollock, and had several one-man shows in New York; talked about films on the radio with the youthful Pauline Kael; who published his first story as an undergraduate aged twenty, and as late as 1955, his (so far as we know) last year, was awarding a poetry prize to Robert Fitzgerald. Nor would it be right to think that these luminaries condescended to Kees, or that he was in any way, in any of these fields, an also-ran, a water carrier, someone to help fill the room: he was met, always, as an equal.

  As impressive, in all his many fields, is Kees’s discrimination. He was an intuitive cosmopolitan—born in a small town in Nebraska, never once went abroad—of a kind that I wonder whether the universities and the “fly-over states” of America can still produce. At twenty-one, he was lugging the two-volume translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz with him to read on the train. He adored the Modernists—Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Crane, Wolfe. “Back to the Twenties!” was a battle-cry of Kees’s, “Or even further!” Of Denver, where he spent some time as a librarian, he wrote: “The intellectual life here is very saddening.” He proposed an edition of the extremely little-read Victorian poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes to James Laughlin at New Directions. He admired Arthur Waley, Rilke, Cavafy decades before everyone else did. He read and reread Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece Under the Volcano, which appeared from the same publisher, in the same season, and with the same editor, Albert Erskine, as Kees’s own one and only trade book of poems, The Fall of the Magicians. He tried to invite Robert Lowell to a series of events he put on in Provincetown in the late 1940s. He championed the cause of the Abstract Expressionist painters and was one of their best early spokesmen. He wrote about Jelly Roll Morton’s Kansas City Stomp: “made in the summer of 1928, with”—wonderful phrase!—“an exceptionally knowing group of men.” In San Francisco, he ran into and recorded with Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller, who, many years later, opened for, as James Reidel says, “his fans the Rolling Stones.” Where, you wonder, as you read all this, given always that Kees’s own accomplishments are of a piece with these others—as indeed they are—is the wrong in any of it? Where did the magician fall down?

  There are probably four answers. He was, first, in a way the ancient Greeks would have understood, too gifted. He spread himself over his different fields, serially and simultaneously, too thin. To do anything else would have bore
d him; but to others it made him seem uncommitted and even a little implausible. Not only is it not really “done” for American poets to paint and play the piano and make films; most of them don’t even write prose. Even Frank O’Hara, ten years after Kees, as bubbly and as diversely interested, didn’t paint his own pictures.

  Second—it seems banal to say so—he was quite genuinely unlucky. If a lot of things had fallen out even a little differently, it would have made a huge difference: if the United States hadn’t joined the war, then his Midwest campus novel, Fall Quarter, might have been published at the time, rather than posthumously, in 1990, and he might have had a career in fiction; as it was, it was rejected two days after Pearl Harbor. If his poetry publisher, Reynal and Hitchcock, hadn’t been bought up by Harcourt, Brace, and World (whose editor, Robert Giroux, published Lowell and twice rejected Kees), then he might have had more of a showing in the poetry world. If Clement Greenberg had written the piece it seemed he was going to write on Kees’s paintings, that might have been the making of him as a painter. If the San Francisco theater building where he was working hadn’t been shut down by the fire department as unsafe, he might have stayed longer in the area of performance and “happening.” And so on, and so on, and so on. Much more than with other artists and writers one might think of.

  Third, there is an important element in Kees that much preferred, in John Ashbery’s phrase, “the mooring of starting out.” It is easy to sentimentalize his failure and probable suicide (on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge); to some extent Robert Knoll is guilty of this in his otherwise excellent book Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation with his formulation “ten minutes too soon.” The fact is that, probably, Kees’s career was going nowhere, probably he didn’t want it to go “anywhere,” and the idea of a “career” as anything other than a plunge into a combination of death and deathless obscurity didn’t have much appeal to him. Reidel has a nice phrase about “the subtlety with which he operated his own career.” It is interesting to note, in this context, the description of Kees’s longtime friend, Norris Getty, of Kees’s “unearthly cleanliness,” and of his much-remarked upon “aloofness.” At any rate, the repeated pattern with Kees is that of a sudden, spectacular beginning and a failure to grub and grind it out thereafter. A revealing instance of this is when, newly arrived in San Francisco from New York (another sideways, if not backward move), Kees started circulating ideas for cartoons to New Yorker cartoonists like Charles Addams, with whom he had, in some cases, acquaintance, the sort of humble and speculative behavior one would hardly expect from—after all—a New Yorker poet and multidisciplinarian at the height of his prowess. Not the sort of thing Elizabeth Bishop would have done.