NYT: Lawrance Thompson's "Fall Of Frost"
From the New York Times Book Review:
All the Difference
The life of Robert Frost has been autopsied and re-autopsied so many times that, 45 years since his death, the congeries of appraisals can already be measured in layers, like geologic strata. The early biographies — beginning with Gorham B. Munson’s “Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense,” published less than 15 years after Frost’s first book of poems — tended toward hagiography, portraying Frost as Frost carefully portrayed himself: as a homespun Yankee sage, the L. L. Bean of verse, a swinger of birches and picker of apples whose wisdom and prickly wit were like a potbellied woodstove taking the chill (Eliot, Pound) out of Modernist poetry.
Then came Lawrance Thompson, whose authorized three-volume life (1966-76), while magisterial in its detail, was a big fat voodoo doll of a biography, with Thompson (and his co-author on the final volume, R. H. Winnick) puncturing Frost from every angle. The correctives followed, and were met eventually with another Thompsonesque thumping (Jeffrey Meyers’s 1996 “Robert Frost”), which a sympathetic portrait by Jay Parini rebutted three years later. Now comes Brian Hall, who in his previous novel (“I Should Be
Extremely Happy in Your Company,” about Lewis and Clark)
described his role as “rushing in where historians refrain from
treading.” That’s a tall order when applied to Frost’s life, precious few aspects of which historians haven’t already trampled. When it comes to biographical approaches to Frost, the road less traveled doesn’t exist.
Howard Sochurek/Time & Life Pictures – Getty Images (1957)
Well, almost. Hall is a novelist, and “Fall of Frost” arrives as the first fictional rendering of Frost’s life. The book is billed as a novel, but this is only because it is speculative rather than veritable; it is more properly classified a vie romancée, a bio enhanced with the loosey-goosey methods of fiction. Variations on this form have become increasingly fashionable in recent years — so fashionable, in fact, that two fictional portraits of Henry James alone were published in 2004, with another trailing along the next year. Like James, an inert and reputedly celibate Victorian, Frost seems from the outset an unlikely protagonist for fiction. He was no Byron, to understate. Here’s how Joseph Brodsky once summed him up: “Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of 88. One marriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much traveling until late in his life; he mostly resided on the East Coast, in New England. If biography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none.”
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