Ever Yours, Robert

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST TO LOUIS UNTERMEYER. 388 pages. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $7.

Poet Robert Frost possessed a true genius' insatiable appetite for praise. Critic and Poetaster Louis Untermeyer had a true believer's admiration for Frost's poetry. It was not surprising, therefore, that the two hit it off from the start--or that Frost's side of their long correspondence, now published by Untermeyer less than a year after his famous friend's death, should run to a fine, fat, square volume.

Inevitably, much of it turns out to be chaff; Frost, for instance, was a tireless and occasionally tiresome punster. But from the mass of letters stretching back to 1915, a perceptive reader can piece together a startling self-portrait of the artist. Some of it will go against the grain of Frost's more sentimental adulators. People thought of him, Untermeyer explains, "as benevolent, sweet and serene. Instead he was proud, trou bled and jealous. Robert did not converse, he spoke."

"By Return Boastage." When the two friends first met in 1915, Frost was 40 and almost unknown in the U.S.; his first volume of verse had just been brought out in England, where he was "discovered" in 1913. Untermeyer, 29 and full of enterprise, was trying to escape from his father's jewelry business in Newark by establishing a beachhead as poet and critic. The early letters are full of chesty exchanged praises for each other's work--"please send by return boastage," Frost punned to Untermeyer in 1921--as well as attacks on both the free-versers and traditional poets who still did not understand that poetry once and for all must turn away from overblown rhetoric to the language of common speech.

"Hit 'em with me," Frost exhorted Untermeyer, who obligingly struck out at old poetic practice by using Frost as an example of how things should be done. "There are times," Frost was generous to admit, "when I think I am merely the figment of Louis' imagination." But these early letters are notable mainly for Frost's continual cross references to his fellow writers--all of whom he took for enemies and deadly rivals.

Ezra Pound's cantos showed "scraps of minor classics in Greek and Latin, but not a single idea of his own." Archibald MacLeish was "a college-educated and practiced publicist trying hard to think." Frost's principal eete noire was Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology made him a literary lion in the '20s. "His new book," Frost wrote waspishly, "proves my original suspicion, not that Masters is just dead but that he was never very much alive." H. L. Mencken he dismissed as "that non-fur-bearing skunk."

One versifier (and editor of an early rhyming dictionary) greeted Frost as a professional colleague and earned his ire. "Would he claim equality with me?" fumed Frost to Untermeyer, "more claimant than clement." With T. S. Eliot, Frost could not resist a further pun. "We both like to play," he wrote, "but I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist."

"Sunsuvbijches." Perennial letter topic for Frost was his running lover's quarrel with the world of education. It began when Frost withdrew in succession from Dartmouth and Harvard, and it tormented him through his later years of sporadic teaching in half a dozen schools and colleges, including Dartmouth and Harvard. "I could never forgive the sunsuvbijches' belief," he explained with pique to Untermeyer, "that they were leaving anybody behind who was not getting toward their degrees."

Later, as a visiting faculty member at Amherst, Frost was not deceived by the president's belief that there, at least, young men were being trained "to think" and not merely "to learn." "I soon discovered," he confides, "that by 'thinking' they meant stocking up on radical ideas." When one class admitted it did not care whether Frost returned the papers he had assigned so long as he gave them marks, the outraged poet tore the papers up and tossed them in a wastebasket.

Messing with the Masses. As friends should, Frost and Untermeyer came to have few illusions about each other. Both were aware of Frost's monomania and his overwhelming intolerance of anyone who dared to disagree with him. "Sometimes I can think of no blissfuller state," Frost wrote, "than being treated as if I was always right." A constant target of his letters was Untermeyer's leftish reformism. "When you can write poetry like 'Jerusalem Revisited'," Frost railed in 1930, "why will you continue to mess with the masses (or is it mass with the messes)?" Frost was no friend of the welfare state. "I loathe togetherness," he wrote. "The best things and best people rise out of their separateness. I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise."

Frost's distrust of liberalism, which in his poems and letters occasionally made him sound like an outrageous parody of crackerbarrel conservatism, was based on a profound belief in smallness and a conviction that life must be lived on a level deeper than anything within the ken of group action. "Beyond the participation of the politicians and beyond the relief of senates," he wrote eloquently to Untermeyer, "lie our sorrows." But Frost also was aware of how much he had staked on sticking to the caricature personality he had partly invented and partly evolved for himself--the curmudgeonly egocentric country poet who always thinks for himself and is always right.

If this Frost seems comic most of the time, the book offers one brief, chilling hint that Frost's relentless self-preoccupation lay at the heart of the tragedies that beset most of the people close to him. His sister and one of his children went insane; another daughter died from tuberculosis. After failing at farming and writing, Frost's only son Carol shot himself. Frost had spent the previous night assuring the boy that he was not a failure. Duly reported to Louis Untermeyer, Carol's last words to his father have a ring of true horror. "You always get the last word, don't you?"

Wrote Frost to Untermeyer: "Cast your eye back over my family's luck and perhaps you'll wonder if I haven't had pretty near enough?" But he stoically refused to make literary capital of his losses. "You shouldn't wax literary about what you've been through," he wrote in 1933. "It must be kept way down under the surface where the great griefs belong."

Last Talk. "Poets die in different ways," Frost told Untermeyer in 1947, when he was 73. "Most of them do not die into the grave but into business as you almost did, or into criticism as so many of them are doing nowadays." Frost refused to do either. He had just brought out a book of poems, his 22nd, when he died of combined pulmonary embolism and pneumonia at 89. He had not changed his character, either.

Untermeyer journeyed to Boston to see him in the hospital the day before he died. "We talked for over an hour," he writes in a final affectionate note. "Robert did most of the talking."

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