The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest in a five-volume collection of the poet’s correspondence. Gathering hundreds of Frost’s letters, most of them previously uncollected, Volume 3 follows Frost through a seven-year period in which he achieved new literary heights while also navigating great personal upheaval. In honor of Poetry Month, HUP Editor Emily Silk asked Mark Richardson, Volume 3 coeditor (with Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore) to share a behind-the-scenes look at editing and annotating Frost’s correspondence.
Tell us a bit about what readers can expect to see in Frost’s letters from this period. To whom is he writing? Any new or surprising correspondents, especially for readers familiar with the previous volumes?
This volume differs most from volumes one and two in the number of letters it contains from Frost to members of his family—to his son Carol, his daughters Marjorie and Lesley, his grandson Prescott, and his son-in-law Willard Fraser. In 1931, diagnoses of tuberculosis led Marjorie to move to Boulder, Colorado, for treatment (where she met and got engaged to Willard); and led Carol to take his wife Lillian (who’d also fallen ill), and their young son Prescott, to Monrovia, California (where the Pottenger Sanatorium was located). This family diaspora occasioned numerous letters. Readers will also find a rich series of letters to Frost’s friend and protégé J.J. Lankes, a woodcut artist who “decorated,” as Frost put it, a number of his books. A few things more. Reading this volume again in proof, we were struck by how much Frost has to say about marriage; about the nature and trials of the literary vocation (often in letters to younger, aspiring writers); and about book design and fine printing (he worked with some of the best printers in America).
What does the work of editing and annotating Frost’s letters involve? Did you make any unexpected discoveries as you annotated the letters in Volume 3?
I’ve been reading Frost’s mail for twenty years. Making the letters fully “available” to readers involves considerable annotation. What we learn while annotating often surprises me. Consider, for example, a casual remark in an October 1932 letter Frost wrote from Massachusetts to his son Carol. Frost had just completed a cross-country trip by rail—New England to Los Angeles and back, with stops along the way in Colorado, Michigan, and elsewhere. “One thing in favor of all this travelling back and forth,” Frost writes: “it has got the country pretty well shrunk, so that we needn’t feel very far away from each other.…If it weren’t for the coal dust in trains which catches me colds, I shouldn’t mind being on the go between places half the time. I wish the locomotives would use oil or electricity.” That “wish” sent us into the history of twentieth-century rail travel. As we discovered, and as we indicate in a note, passenger trains in the US were coal-powered all the way into the 1930s. General Motors ameliorated Frost’s train-specific colds, when, in 1934, it debuted its Winton 201A diesel engine—the first in America suitable for powering passenger trains. I’d lived for decades in perfect ignorance of the fact that passenger trains in the US remained coal-powered all the way into the 1930s. Annotating another letter to Carol answered a second question it had never occurred to me to ask: Exactly when and where was the first attempt made to view the Leonid meteor shower from a high-altitude plane? In November 1931, on a triple-engine Fokker aircraft staffed by astronomers from Mount Wilson—which was visible from Carol’s residence—and flying above 10,000 feet. I wonder which I’ll forget first—that Winton 201A engine or that triple-engine Fokker.
Any favorite stories from the archive, as you conducted the research to prepare this volume?
Certainly—one associated, as it happens, with that October 1932 letter to Carol. To sort it all out we had to consult US Census and immigration records, old maps, Amherst town directories, and an archivist at the Hampshire County (Massachusetts) Registry of Deeds. In closing that letter, Frost relays a bit of gossip then circulating in Amherst: “You remember Toggles Thompson the [Amherst College] chemistry professor people used to make fun of gently? He’s just been in to interrupt me with an interesting story of the depression. He has a Polish tenant of a small place he owns down at Hockanum by the Connecticut River. The man is twenty-eight and has a wife and two children. He hasn’t had work for more than a year and is more than a year behind on his rent. Something put it into Thompsons [sic] head to propose going into the wood business with him. Thompson got him an old truck and bought a wood lot on this side of the Holyoke range—twelve acres. Then Thompson did the soliciting. The Pole is not only out of trouble, but making money and so is Toggles Thompson.…Toggles is a funny sentimental fellow and the whole thing makes him talkatively happy. He came to try to take me over onto the wood lot. It is of course a good story. The Pole was desperate and had no good out of this country since he came to it seven or eight years ago.”
Frost mistakes the age of Thompson’s beneficiary, but essentially gets the story right. It’s corroborated by a quitclaim deed dated July 30, 1934, held now in the Hampshire Registry of Deeds, and kindly made available to us by archivist Beth Callahan. The document, signed in one of the worst years of the Depression, records the sale of a twelve-acre woodlot, located along the Holyoke Range near a place called Hockanum Flat. The seller is Edward ‘Eddie’ Berestka (1913–1993), the eldest son, as census records tell us, of a Polish immigrant named Ignacy Beretska (1886–1956); the buyer is Joseph Osgood ‘Toggles’ Thompson. The purchase price was the nominal sum of one dollar, indicating that Thompson loaned the Beretskas the money to buy the land from one Carrie Marsh in 1929. City directories dating to the 1950s show that Eddie Beretska, with his family, went on to run a construction business on Lawrence Plain Road (now Massachusetts Route 47)—having got his start through the generosity of Toggles Thompson. I keep a copy of that quitclaim deed pinned to my office wall, as a token of gratitude to Ms. Callahan and the many archivists who’ve helped us.
You mentioned that you have been reading Frost’s mail for twenty years. How would you characterize Frost as a letter writer?
Frost’s letters are not simply a record of a remarkable literary life. They are themselves a remarkable contribution to American literature. He has as distinctive and lively a prose style as any American writer of the twentieth century—by turns gnomic, allusive, playful, mercurial, moving, and startling. Had Emerson forsaken Plato, and grown a sense of humor instead of sideburns, he might have written prose like Robert Frost. I offer here, in parting, some of the most astonishing sentences in the book. They occur in a 1935 open letter Frost addressed to undergraduates at Amherst College, where he taught English: “There is at least so much good in the world that it admits of form and the making of form. And not only admits of it, but calls for it. We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches its height of form and through us exceeds itself. When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way. The artist, the poet might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance. But it is really everybody’s sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing, gratifying, comforting, staying than those lesser ones we throw off, like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody’s cooperation; a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem.…The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so?” Nothing at all, Professor Frost, nothing at all—and thanks for writing.