Where Have You Been? Read Online Free Page A

are Lowell’s, incidentally—tells its own story.) She is afraid to read him while writing; it influences her too much. While her praise and minute criticism, droppered out over years (“‘ganging’ is just right”), would have made him think she was responding on an insignificant, immedicable scale, and beyond anything he could do. “I’m mailing you a copy and wish you’d point [out] any correctable flaws. Correctable —the big ones alas I’m stuck with,” Lowell wrote to accompany a typescript of Life Studies . But of course he was stuck with the little ones too, in the end not so little. With his swaggering inexactitude Lowell was absolutely wrong—a red rag for Bishop. In one dangerous letter, she wonders: “If I read it [“The Old Flame”] in Encounter under someone else’s name I wonder what I’d think?” He, too, had cause to wonder from time to time: “I see in a blurb you’ve written you object to confession and irony”—it doesn’t leave much of him, and he sounds accordingly bemused and hurt. They were contraries. Each enshrined the other. Short of enmity, it was all they could do.

 
    ROBERT FROST AND EDWARD THOMAS
    I thought all the mails had gone down in the Laconic , but evidently not.
    â€”Helen Thomas to Robert Frost
    Parnassian friendships—in particular friendships between poets—are rarer than one might imagine. A friendship late in life is unlikely, poets are so botanically specialized and overdetermined, each one stuck at the extremity of his or her personal development, craning and twisting apotropaically toward his or her personal light. Early friendships are subject to volatility, the vicissitudes of life, competitiveness, and the torque—or torc—of the Muse. When one has further taken away such things as alliances (Pound and Eliot), dalliances (Lowell and Bishop), rivalries (Goethe and Schiller), dependencies (Spender and Auden), romantic entanglements (Verlaine and Rimbaud), and mentor-pupil relationships (Akhmatova and Brodsky), one is left with really not very many.
    Montaigne’s marvelously, irreducibly simple formulation for friendship, “ Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi ”—because it was him, because it was me—can have few juster claimants among poets than Robert Frost (1874–1963) and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). Friendship is such a mystery (and therefore such a provocation, a diaphanous rag to a bull) that it’s no surprise scholars have queued up to explain this instance of it, but it doesn’t come down to such things as more or less one-sided influencings, or the critic Linda Hart’s impressively foolish list of congruencies. For Frost, who outlived by the best part of half a century the friend he saw for one year, and wrote to for another two, the relationship was unrepeatable and irreplaceable. For Thomas, it was both an enabling agency—but for it, we might never have read him, or even heard of him—and an object of intensest focus. One could do worse, as one reads through the letters, poems, and reviews assembled in Elected Friends than murmur Montaigne’s words to oneself from time to time.
    A starting point better than the second-guessing and computer-matchmaking of some of the critics, is to understand that the friendship between Frost and Thomas came about, in a strange way, out of time and out of place. This creates the space for some of its electiveness. Frost, evidently, was not in his own country but in the England he had bravely and arbitrarily plumped for a year earlier; nor did Thomas have home advantage either. Often, he was guesting in his hated London, touting for work (“I hate meeting people I want to get something out of, perhaps”), or else, in the Edwardian fashion, passing himself around like the port among various addresses (Eleanor Farjeon he met in the course