AT last I know why writers get so enthused when they're invited to seminars and suchlike. "Illicit sex," Jeffrey Meyers reveals, is "an outstanding feature of most writers' conferences." Gosh, and I thought all they ever did was talk about money.
In the same paragraph he describes Frost's friend, the poet and critic Louis Untermeyer, as "a great fornicator". I'm not sure whether this means that Untermeyer fornicated a lot or whether he was just very good at it, but you certainly learn something about Mr Meyers from the remark - and, indeed, from his choice of noun.
A one man industry who has already written biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrance, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allen Poe, he is operating at the posh end of the biographical market, but his choice of subjects shouldn't obscure the fact that, at heart, he is an old fashioned hack who seizes on sex wherever he can find it and who noses it out it whenever he can't.
This approach has its relevance with some writers, but not with Frost: sex is far from the first thing you think of when considering either his life or his work. Nonetheless, Mr Meyers argues its importance, notably in the chapter from which the above quotations are taken, a chapter that examines the elderly Frost's affair with Kay Morrison in the late Thirties and early Forties.
Mr Meyers makes a big deal out of this liaison, though for the life of me I can't see why: after all, Frost's wife, Elinor, to whom he was faithful for the forty two years of their marriage, was dead, and Kay was a close friend. Perhaps one should tut tut at Frost for cuckolding Ted Morrison, but as Kay was having a variety of affairs at the same time (with Untermeyer, among others) it hardly seems worth getting high minded about the poet's fling.
Among the others with whom Kay sexually consorted was Frost's most famous biographer, Lawrence Thompson, whose three volume account of the poet's life and personality caused consternation among those who wished to embalm Frost as a loveable national institution. Thompson's unforgiveable sin was that the man he presented was far less nice than the genial dispenser of homespun poetic wisdom imagined by his admirers.
In fact, Thompson was a classic example of the biographer who allows himself get too close to his subject: permitted into the inner circle of Frost's life, he gradually discovered that the man whom he had initially worshipped was prone to the same kind of unendearing traits we all have, and so a biography that had begun as an act of homage turned into something approaching hatred.
Mr Meyers doesn't like Thompson one little bit and seizes every possible opportunity to rubbish his biography - including its coyness about Frost's late sexual adventure. But Mr Meyers goes to the other extreme, which leads him into dart readings of some of the poems.
"The Most of It", we are told, "describes Frost's longing for and response to Kay" and is full of explicit sexual imagery related to their affair. Well, it is if you want it to be, but most of us perceive and feel it quite differently and more interestingly. And though I have a distinct fondness for sexual puns, in my hundreds of readings of "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same", I have never thought that the last line ("And to do that to birds was why she came") featured a "bold sexual pun on the final word". Furthermore, I'll have to take Mr Meyers's word for it when he declares that "Kay's sexual passion inspired the words that made this poem".
This kind of stuff reduces rather than illuminates poems that exist on a level intuitively understood by the reader, if beyond the grasp of some biographers. Having said that, I should be fair to this biographer: Mr Meyers may be a hack, but a good hack can tell a story - clearly and well, and for much of the book he tell Frost's story very well indeed.
He is especially good on the early life; the premature death of the father; the ten year stay on a New Hampshire farm, source of the first, great poems; the formative years in England where his poetry found favour and where he nurtured and nudged his friend Edward Thomas towards immortality; the tragic deaths of his children. If he is less good on the eighty year old smiling, public man, feted by the Kennedy Camelot, that's largely because the creativity had long stopped and the earnest mythologising (by himself as well as others) had begun.
Helpful on some of the life, Mr Meyers, as I have said, is of no help whatsoever when it comes to the poetry. That, though, isn't too important, as the poetry is well able to make its own case without explication from critics or biographers. Or it would if it were being read. Sadly, it seems quite out of fashion these days.
Frost, though, will last. The famous poems ("Birches", "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", "The Road Not Taken". "The Most of It", "Tree at My Window") have remained famous for the best of reasons, and there are many other poems imbued with the same unforced lyricism, narrative strength and essential truthfulness. It's no accident that Seamus Heaney has long been one of Frost's greatest admirers.