Reacquainted with the Night
By Douglas C. Wilson '62
Nor must you dream of opening any door until you have foreseen what lies beyond it. Regardless of its seeming size, or what may first impress you as its style or function, the abrupt structure which involves you now will improvise like vapor.
—Richard Wilbur '42, "walking to sleep"
 |
A shade half drawn; pale sunlight on an unswept floor; no stirring in the trees outside. The 140-year-old Commager house has stood vacant at 405 South Pleasant Street since 1995, the year Prof. Henry Steele Commager, frail and sweet-tempered, moved out of faculty housing and into a condominium.
Without asking questions, Pete Joy, the campus police officer, took me to the abandoned house, unlocked a back door and let me in.
What would be in the dusky space? Vapors of memory? Specters? I wasn't sure.
No feelings awoke at first when I looked at my innocent student journal entry for the night of October 14, 1959, then went to to the house to look at the pale, empty room, and tried to quicken the past. Not only had all the partygoers dispersed long ago: every one that I remembered had died. Robert Frost. Commager—and his wife, Evan, the hostess, long before him. Steele Commager, the son. Harriet Whicher. Rolfe Humphries. John Moore. Merrill Van De Graaff, too. Leaving me to recompose the lustrous evening alone.
Mrs. Whicher, who in her widowed 60s attended the party, once quoted Frost, the guest of honor, as having said that composition ends up "saying as you go more than you hoped you were going to be able to say, and coming with surprise to an end that you fore-knew only with some sort of emotion."
Would I meet with surprise? Ultimately the exercise of reading the journal and revisiting the room, of looking back, back again to a magical evening, "improvised" like vapor indeed. Things turned out to be not what they seemed.
Other Amherst people remember similar evenings, have stories of spellbinding hours with Robert Frost, of Commager hospitality, or of both together. It was only one evening of many, in a faraway time. But how could I forget it.
No doubt Mrs. Commager reached me on the pay telephone in South dormitory with the invitation. Frost was in Amherst on his annual fall visit and they were having him over Wednesday night with some other people; come to the house at 8:30, and bring a friend if you'd like.
The Commagers knew my family in Indiana and were good about entertaining homesick students with faculty. I decided to bring a fellow sophomore and Phi Psi fraternity brother, Merrill Van De Graaff—a quiet, talented friend from Utah who wrote poetry for the campus literary magazine. Merrill had a big toothy smile and a perpetual air of credulity. He was thrilled.
The evening came and we walked half a mile to the boxy, white clapboard house and knocked at the door. The windows were aglow; cars were parked in the drive. Evan Commager welcomed us cheerily and put us at ease with her soft southern voice. She wore a long gown and was tall and maternal. Her hair was drawn up in a pompadour; she belonged—the house belonged—in a Victorian time.
We were led into the back living room crowded with people and voices, upholstery, overloaded bookshelves, after-dinner drinks and laughter. A fire burned on the hearth. John Moore, beloved professor of classics, was there, speaking shyly in a voice softer than Mrs. Commager's. Merrill and I were delighted to see, too, one of our favorite teachers, the poet Rolfe Humphries—tall, hollow-cheeked, bald and furrowed, his impassive face betrayed by a gleam in the eye. Then who could miss the effusive host, the historian Commager, bobbing out of his chair to pitch logs on the fire or snatch books from the wall. Pugnacious and merry, he rasped away in a sing-song tumble of words—"Why, how clever!"—and—"Surely you remember Santayana's observation—!"
 |
But we focused most of all on The Guest of Honor. There he was: the old god Kronos himself, in a great chair. The leonine white head, craggy brows, and gruff melodious voice were unmistakable. Were we introduced? Did we get to shake the hand? Here memory fades; we were young and entranced.
The older guests had come in from the dining room and were buzzing in small conversations, an audience before curtain time. The 85-year-old Frost soon removed his glasses, which were equipped with a built-in hearing aid. This meant that he was about to do more talking and less listening. He quipped later that he liked to know what was being said, and that if he did all the talking it wasn't a problem.
The individual conversations died out and Frost became the center of attention. In the mesmerizing near-monologue that followed, he changed topics quickly. He and Commager had been arguing about Bertrand Russell. The poet dismissed the philosopher, saying he did not have much regard for agnostics, while Commager admired Russell for rejecting things "unevidenced." Other appraisals followed. The poet brought up Emerson—saying that his only lack was storytelling—and then came to Poe, who fared poorly. He amused us with the question: was Poe's Annabel Lee a maiden "whom you may know" for the purposes of the poem?—"Or perhaps you've met her?" Homer's Odyssey, he told us, was "the greatest novel ever written." He added that he himself could never write an epic because he would not be able to concentrate on a single theme throughout.
At another point Frost recited his adage that "poetry is that which gets lost in translation." Another wonderful coin, still in mint condition. I stashed it, too, in my journal.
Had I been a brighter lad, a different aspect of that moment would have struck me. There sat Rolfe Humphries, after all, best known for his major translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Juvenal's Satires, and Virgil's Aeneid.
But the circumstance struck me now, more than 40 years later. Frost said education is learning there's "a book-side to everything," and I knew of a certain book, Poets, Poetics, and Politics: America's Literary Community Viewed from the Letters of Rolfe Humphries, 1910-1969, edited 10 years ago by Richard Gillman and Michael Paul Novak. Would the book reveal more?
Yes, there it was in the Introduction: a reference Humphries once made to "that tired old traduttore-traditore cliché, or the maybe-malice-made mot of Frost's that Poetry is that which gets lost in translation. . . . So [Humphries wrote] here I am now, look you, a poet translating
a poet, not some frayed but polite border functionary wearily exchanging the scrip of one republic for that of another."
Translator-traitor? Maybe-malice-made mot? Border functionary? Things had occurred that evening I hadn't seen. (And was it Rolfe Humphries who joked later, in one of our classes, about the writer who had his works translated into a foreign language because they "lost something in the original"?)
Frost's monologue that evening went on. Some fraternity boys, the night before, had asked him to name the four greatest Americans, and he said he had done so: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Emerson. Diversity was not the mantra. Martin Luther King, Jr. was still relatively unknown, nor did anyone at the Commagers' throw the names of Albert Einstein, say, or Susan B. Anthony, into the contest.
"What about Mark Twain?"
The sudden interruption came from Humphries—maybe (I now wonder) stirred up about the translation jibe. If there were going to be parlor games, he was willing to play. (With a characteristic baseball metaphor Humphries once advised a young poet: "move the ball around, change up on 'em every once in a while.")
Frost would have none of it.
Twain? "Not that stuff," he said gruffly.
Ball one—maybe even ball four, because their match-up had begun years before. In 1939, in what he called his "leftish" days, Humphries had written for New Masses a review of Frost's volume A Further Range, saying brutally that "when you call him a reactionary ———-, or a counter-revolutionary —- — - ——-, you have, in essence, said it all." Frost swung back the same year, calling Humphries a "bargain-counter revolutionary."
They had gotten their danders up early, and kept them there.
The book of letters revealed more. Humphries, a 1915 Amherst graduate, joined the faculty in 1957. Frost by then was returning to campus twice a year as the Simpson Lecturer. When Humphries began teaching that fall he found (he wrote Theodore Roethke) "R. Frost here, and putting on his act, which is fascinating in spots, also embarrassing. I don't think it is good for people (never mind him) to sit around the feet of greatness this way and think even the most troglodytian politicoreactionary remark is the profound and simple wisdom of the bard of the folk."
Well, there Merrill and I were, two years later, spellbound by the bard of the folk.
The spell wavered at last, not long before midnight, when guests stirred to leave. Coats were claimed. Mrs. Commager thanked us for coming; it was nearing the end. Suddenly Frost asked if anyone was walking back toward the Lord Jeffery Inn, where he stayed. A pause, then Merrill blurted that we'd come on foot. So—miracle of miracles—we were chosen.
The night must have been fair, perhaps even one of Amherst's brilliant autumn nights with its pinprick legion of stars. But under the trees it was dark. The old poet moved slowly and could not see the path. We walked at each side of him, steering the way.
Our luck emboldened us to speak. I had heard a story, and asked Frost if it was true, that he had once given a talk at Columbia University where Lionel Trilling introduced him in an endless, pedantic fashion, analyzing Frost's work and concluding, finally, with speculation about the meaning of the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
"And tonight," Trilling's said to have said, "perhaps Mr. Frost will tell us exactly what he really meant when he wrote 'But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.'"
Was it true that Frost went to the microphone then and declared: "Why, I suppose I was tired, and wanted to go home"?
He did not confirm it. But I remember a smile in the dark. Then he stopped in the leaves, beyond the golf course. "You remember how it goes," he said, and recited the poem from beginning to end.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I still hear the gruff melodious voice dropping to granite on "woods," then rising to a bell tone on "promises."
"Now, for instance," he concluded, "this evening is pleasant and peaceful, but in the morning we'll have other things to do."
So much for the deeper readings. His conclusion was the one we fore-knew.
When Frost died three years later, even Humphries felt the loss. He wrote to Richard Gillman: "His cantankerous sides are not going to be readily forgotten, and I think this is all to the good, so that when we think of his best it will really shine . . . . My own private service consisted of reading a poem as far back as North of Boston—the one called 'After Apple-Picking,' and thinking of his wry tone...."