Volumes upon volumes of literary criticism and biographies have been written about Robert Frost over the years, but none has tackled his intellect. None, that is, until Brian Hall's novel, "Fall of Frost" (2008).
The novel attempts to take on Frost in a completely new way. By giving voice to Frost's inner thoughts and avoiding linear chronology, the book hardly resembles a biography. It is instead a series of vignettes.
Hall spent two and a half years reading Frost's poetry, letters and lectures before he began to write. The extensive research shows throughout the novel without limiting its creative style.
The idea for the book originated when Hall heard about Frost's trip to visit Khrushchev in Russia as an American ambassador on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
"The idea of writing a scene with Frost and Khrushchev trying to talk to each other just right away really appealed to me," said Hall in an interview with The Dartmouth.
From there, the idea blossomed into a full-length novel that deals with not only Frost's oft-overlooked visit to Russia, but also the events in his life that specifically inspired him to create his greatest work.
When asked why he chose to
make his book a novel, Hall explained, "It allows me to get completely away from huge areas of his life that I don't think are that important to what I want to say. It allows me to completely throw out regular chronologies. Instead, I can focus on ideas and how they connect the different parts of his life."
The novel explores these aspects of Frost's life in a quickly shifting style. This, combined with the seemingly random order in which the events of Frost's life are presented, invites the reader to draw his or her own connections between Frost's life and his poetry.
I can focus much more on the most intimate wellsprings of his emotional life, which were very tied up with his marriage to Elinor and his children and then the deaths of several of his children," Hall said.
We see the poet in a whole spectrum of situations: sitting at the dinner table with his children, giving a reading at a university, and discussing world politics with the Russian Premier.
Hall explores each situation, from a different perspective. With each stylistic shift, he shows us a different aspect of Frost.
At times, this can be confusing, and the author fails to weave some threads into the larger narrative tapestry. Despite this, the reader apprehends a poet constantly struggling to balance the madness and simplicity surrounding him.
Hall describes this struggle as Frost's "sense of the precariousness of happiness ... the malignancy, the potential malignancy of fate."
This comes across in Hall's portrayal of the loss and mental illness in Frost's family that would gradually form his world view.
When reading Hall's account, I struggled to overcome the popular conceptions of Frost.
He appears mostly as a literary celebrity and appearing human only when he suffers through the most difficult moments of his life.
When he must commit his younger sister to a mental institution, loses his first-born son to cholera and learns of his son's suicide, Frost seems like a character in a novel -- one with real thoughts and emotions and indecisions. But we as readers yearn for this proximity to Robert Frost more often than Hall allows.
Hall's novel shows us the American icon in a way we have never experienced. We grasp the intimate connection between Frost's mind and work, which is too often neglected in both fiction and biography.
Robert Frost holds a unique place in American poetry as one of the least-understood, best-known poets.