Adam Plunkett – Love and Need

Adam Plunkett

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry

I didn’t do many interviews for the book, maybe six people, because so many people who knew Frost in any substantial way had passed away by the time I started working on the project. But when you’re interviewing people, if you think that there might be something there, you find a way to ask the same question in as many different ways as you can until you get something interesting. And it’s not my nature. I kind of like to live and let live a little bit, but I was talking to this woman’s partner. I was like, “Are you sure there’s nothing else in the house? There are no materials?” She was like, “Well, there’s that one filing cabinet in the bedroom.” The filing cabinet in the bedroom had all of Frost’s manager’s letters going back to her childhood, her time at Oxford, throughout her life. It’s this extraordinary archive.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Hello, I’m Gabriella Kelly-Davies. Welcome to Season 5 of Biographers in Conversation.

In each episode, biographers chat about the multiplicity of choices they face while crafting life stories. I’d like to acknowledge Australia’s first storytellers, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The Gadigal people are the traditional owners of the land from which I’m coming to you today.

You’ll find us wherever you listen to your podcasts and on our website, biographersinconversation.com. Let’s start the show.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, the literary critic and editor Adam Plunkett chats with me about his debut biography, Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry.

By the middle of the 20th century, Robert Frost was celebrated as America’s best-loved poet. After his death, however, this image gave way to a far darker portrait. Lawrence Thompson’s scathing portrayal of him in his three-volume biography led one critic to deem the poet a monster. Adam Plunkett seeks a truth between these two extremes. Through close readings of Frost’s poems and an exploration of his closest relationships, he reveals a far more nuanced Frost.

Adam, welcome to Biographers in Conversation.

Adam Plunkett

Thank you so much for having me.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Please introduce us to Robert Frost and your biography of him.

Adam Plunkett

Frost is someone that everyone knows, and I think few of us, if any of us, understand. I’m not sure Frost really understood himself. He’s an absolutely fascinating artist, an absolutely fascinating person.

I had the sense about, well, who’s counting, but some years ago, that there was this astonishing gap in the literature on Frost: here was somebody who was so well known, but there was so much that still had to be said, and so much that people thought they knew that turned out not to be right. And so I set down this path, and here we are.

Gabriella

How long did it take you to research and write the book?

Adam Plunkett

Oh, goodness. You know, it’s hard to measure, but I’d say at least the better part of a decade.

Gabriella

Oh, goodness. That’s the story of most biographies. And at least it’s not 25 years, like Kai Bird and Martin Chu.

Adam Plunkett

Yeah. Kai was a mentor to me on part of the project. He took over as the head of the Leon Levy Centre for Biography when I was a fellow there some years ago, and he was a great comfort to all of us who were working on our first or second biographies: he had been through that journey and, you know, we could see that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Gabriella

One of a biographer’s goals is to uncover the truth of their biographical subject. Thompson’s biography of Frost has been referred to as a character assassination of the poet. To what extent are you aiming to discover whether Thompson’s betrayal of Frost represented the truth, or at least a plausible version of the truth?

Adam Plunkett

So, Lawrence Thompson’s relationship with Frost is absolutely fascinating. My biography is partly a story of his relationship with Frost, as you know, and partly a biography of his biographies, because he really was Boswell to Frost’s Johnson. He spent so much of his life following Frost that their stories became inextricably linked. And, in a way, a whole lot of the mythos that wound up surrounding Frost was not only generated by Thompson, but also surrounds the relationship between Frost and Thompson.

A lot of what people think they know about Frost comes from this. So I thought that, in order to try to get at the truth of Frost’s life and work, I had to understand their relationship and their interactions as best as I possibly could, to figure out what we could tell about where Thompson was off and where he might have been onto something that’s actually quite uncomfortable.

It’s a very long and very complicated and, I think, just profoundly interesting story. In my book, it winds up being both a bit of reception history and something like a frame tale: their relationship both begins my book; then Thompson recedes from view; then he comes back at the end. The goal is really both to understand that relationship on its own terms and to understand how, in ways that people are largely unconscious of, it has come to structure—and, in some cases, dominate—the received understanding of Frost.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

What inspired you to blend Frost’s life story with literary criticism?

Adam Plunkett

I was working as a literary critic before writing the biography, and it’s hard to tease apart the different motives and aspirations, especially because it was some time ago. I think these things are always something of a mystery, even to ourselves, and that’s one of the great themes, I think, of both criticism and biography: trying to tease those things apart.

But, as best as I understand it and as I remember it, I was young at the time, and I had always really wanted to write books—plural, or at least book, singular. I was kind of fishing for something to do and not just stay in magazines. It was kind of a sad time to be writing for magazines, and I was writing book reviews of the past.

Harvard released the first edition of its letters of Frost that will eventually be, I think, five volumes—though these things often add a volume at the end when you have too much material to fit into it. It’s an extraordinary scholarly edition. I had known Frost’s work pretty well, I think about as well as one knows it without having really devoted years of study to it. Then I started reading the letters and, pretty quickly, I realised that there was something in the way his mind worked that was so much stranger than I could really account for.

It was very hard not only to account for how his mind worked on its own terms in the letters, but for the relationship between the mind that was writing these letters and the mind that was writing the poems I knew so well. I thought, “This is totally fascinating.” Then I dug into the literature on Frost and realised that there was this live mystery that people had written terrific things about, but people hadn’t really, I thought, gotten to the heart of it.

So I kind of fell into it. I thought it was falling into a pit I’d crawl out of, but it turned out to be an abyss—a bright abyss, I suppose.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

The title Love and Need reflects a line in one of Frost’s poems. What does love and need signify to you in the context of Frost’s life and poetic legacy?

Adam Plunkett

As you say, the title comes from the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

Only where love and need are one
And the work is play for mortal stakes
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

It’s a kind of ars poetica: he wrote an explanation of his own work that I think, in all sorts of ways, gets at the heart of his creativity and really what he lived for. His whole philosophy, his whole spirituality, is all kind of rolled up into the creative act, where there’s a kind of union between love and higher motive, higher impulses and aspirations, and need: a sense of motive that he’s not able to control.

As I develop through the book, there is a kind of constant play of ambiguity in his poetry, in a very high level of generalisation, between aspiration and motive. There’s also a kind of ambiguity in how you can make sense of the poetry that is also a figure for how he is making sense of his own life, and how we as readers can make sense of our own lives by means of the poems.

There’s this kind of thread that he leaves out for you: in all these different things, he’s able to find an aspect where there is not perfect clarity. He’s able to find the aspect of any action, situation or scene that calls on people to engage in a kind of crisis—not quite the right word; struggle is not quite the right word—but something like a crisis or a struggle, or a feat, I suppose, of making sense of a potential ambiguity in order to try to resolve those things.

I think it’s a gorgeous and stunning figure for how to see human life and human possibility. It’s also, I think, a great figure for making sense of various apparent contradictions in his own life and personality. He’s somebody who can be astonishingly generous and astonishingly cruel, very giving and profoundly self-centred.

He winds up being, for a lot of people, a kind of image of great sanity, but himself, I think, really struggled with what we might call mental illness. I wouldn’t medicalise it too much, because I think that gives a falsification to it—to try to apply a diagnosis for something that was much more diffuse. But he’s able to take all of these conflicts and put them together, and find various forms for them that are just astonishingly beautiful and compelling. They also concatenate various aspects of literary and theological tradition in ways that I think are astonishing and that hadn’t been plunged nearly as much as I thought they would have been. So that also wound up being a big part of the book: figuring out where in the tradition he’s pulling these things together.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

The second part of your book’s title suggests it could be considered an object biography, in which the author imbues an object with life, character and personality. To what extent do you think of Love and Need this way?

Adam Plunkett

I really love that question. I think I do think of it that way. My editor, Jonathan Galassi, came up with the subtitle and, as soon as I heard it, I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly what it is.” It’s a brilliant piece of active criticism. Beforehand, it was called A Biographical Essay, which is far too academic for what the book is trying to be.

But I think what it implies quite well—and I’m able to compliment it because I have some distance from it, because I didn’t come up with it—is the sense that the poetry not only has a life of its own, but that it is a kind of figure for Frost’s life, and that it is not just his life, but he’s really living for it in a way as well. So I think it’s able to signify in this kind of bi- or trivalent way.

People who haven’t read the book yet might be surprised at how much time it spends going through, say, the influence of Tennyson on one book and the way that these influences kind of work their way through him. I think that the sense that these traditions that he borrowed from are really things that he’s imagining and living out, and that find their own life in his poetry—I suppose, whether it’s text or subtext, I’m not sure exactly what to call it—that sense of life and vitality and continued life of these abstract things, these kind of verbal ghosts, is one of the great things I mean to get at in the book.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Love and Need reminds me of Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce in the way it includes Thompson’s approach to crafting Frost’s official biography. To what extent do you view your book as a biography of a biography?

Adam Plunkett

I think it absolutely is, among other things. I really appreciate that comparison. I find that flattering.

In addition to what I spoke to earlier—as I did, trying to get at the truth of Frost through Thompson—I would say a couple of other things. One is that there’s a fascinating asymmetry of perspective between the biographer who gets to play Boswell and the biographer who doesn’t. There are things that you can see when you are close to somebody in life, and things that you cannot see by virtue of that intimacy. I think that’s a figure for all human intimacy. You get close to somebody and it becomes impossible to see them from a distance. It’s a metaphor, but we all understand it.

In this case, it was dramatic and, in some cases, complicated, tawdry, and full of secrets that went to the grave. But there’s also a sense in which Frost’s ego is something that one can have a distance from when it’s posthumous, in a way that one can’t if he’s in some kind of psychic competition with you. So, to that extent, absolutely.

Also, I think it was a choice early on in the writing that I did not want my book to supplant Thompson’s book. I wanted it to be a kind of complement. I think there are parts of that book that are really irreplaceable. There’s another version of the book that would be 2,000 pages long, with the equivalent of 2,000 pages of small endnotes, that tries to get everything in that book, correct the record and be the new authoritative version. I didn’t want to do that, in part because I thought it doesn’t really do justice to the shape of Frost’s career and the shape of Frost’s insight.

Frost is somebody who, when he burns brightly, burns extraordinarily brightly. Then he wrote a lot of stuff that’s kind of boring, and I don’t think that’s so interesting. I think it’s very hard to do a compendious biography when someone’s life doesn’t lend itself to the story in the same way. I think it’s easier for political figures, or a book like Red Comet, where the artist’s life is itself just an extraordinarily dramatic story. That lends itself, I think, to epic.

But Frost really lends himself to a much more lyrical formulation, because there are parts of it that are, I think, much less interesting and fascinating than others. Then also, partly, I view it as a gesture of respect for Thompson’s legacy as well, not to try to see myself in a Bloomian competition with it.

People might be a little surprised to hear me say that, because certainly there’s no shortage of words that are critical of certain things he did in here. But I think the book winds up being quite respectful towards him and quite respectful toward the task he had set out for himself, the enormity of it, and the ways in which there were difficulties arrayed against him.

So, to that extent, much in the same way that Ellmann’s Joyce is not going to get in the way of the actual James Joyce by Richard Ellmann, I see this book as fitting next to that in the canon. I really do think that there are all sorts of things one can get from the Thompson books, especially in the granularity of the places and various observations that, I say so modestly, I think one sees through the right aspect from having read mine as well. So I absolutely do think it is analogous in that sense.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Actually, interestingly, I’ve just finished reading Hester Kaplan’s book Two Lives.

Adam Plunkett

Oh, I haven’t read it yet.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Her biography of her father, Justin Kaplan. I really felt that was a biography of a biography because it really followed his process from the very, very beginning and all the way through. It was like a masterclass in biography. There seem to be quite a few of these biographies appearing now.

Adam Plunkett

Yeah, absolutely. I think the field is at a very healthy place of self-consciousness, where I think some of the greatest practitioners, especially on the literary side—Richard Holmes, Hermione Lee—their work at its best balances a great self-awareness of the craft without turning into navel-gazing or abandoning the basic points of the craft for the sake of self-awareness.

Lee especially is, I think, extraordinarily eloquent and insightful on the core philosophical issues—the nature of life writing. It’s no coincidence that those two, at least on the literary side, have really been the leading lights. I think they’ve been a great model for the rest of us.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

So you opened Love and Need by introducing us to Frost and his poetry. I’d love you to read a few passages from this chapter, which is titled “The Freedom of the Moon.”

Adam Plunkett

I would love to.

What Frost seemed to perform, his poetry seemed to embody: simultaneous apotheoses of ease and of depth, like points on an axis along which his world rotated. His was not a special world of his own, either, but a world his poems could draw you into: a world in which the thoughts and emotions of common experience have, by some grace of insight, been brought to wisdom for the space of a poem.

If the wisdom didn’t translate exactly into plain English, that was because the poems were written to be experienced, just as they were. If the experience seemed not to lead to a little lightning of revelation, perhaps that was him, and perhaps that was you.

Frost introduced his collected work with a poem that serves as an invitation into the world of his poetry: “The Pasture.”

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

You can hear the invitation in at least four ways at once. “You come too” is a suggestion, an insistence, a command, a plain statement. It has the levity of an offhand suggestion: “I shan’t be gone long. Why don’t you just come too?” The anxiety of insistence: “I shan’t be gone long. Why can’t you just come too?” The declarative firmness of a command, and the disarming literalness of plain statement, as you, the reader, have already heard what he’s going to do before he says, “You come too,” having gone with him in his imagination, as one does in reading the poems.

These intimations add up to a startling intimacy, as if we hear not only the phrase, but a mind in its nakedness weighing how it means to use the phrase, why it means to use it, what it wants and needs of you. In listening to the invitation, we find ourselves already off on our way with him. It’s an invitation we can’t help but take. Frost called “The Pasture” a love poem unlike any other he knew.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Thank you. I just love that so much. So, what’s the significance of these passages?

Adam Plunkett

Well, in the context of the book, the first chapter starts off by telling the story of how Frost and Thompson came to meet each other, which then unrolls into the story of how Thompson came to be Frost’s biographer. The chapter is primarily this narrative, and it’s an extraordinary set of circumstances. Thompson didn’t realise it, but he wound up assuming this role when he was still quite young and very smitten with Frost. He had this kind of almost clinically Oedipal relationship, at least to start, although it winds up getting very complicated shortly thereafter.

The context of these passages is a kind of aside to give the setting and give a sense of what Frost’s presence was, what his aura was, in addition to what his stature and reputation were at the time, which is, I believe, roughly 1936, 1938 or so.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

During your research, which new documents did you discover that previous Frost biographers might have missed or overlooked?

Adam Plunkett

Oh my goodness. There’s a real trove. I’m working on Emily Dickinson now, and it’s a really interesting contrast to work on someone like Dickinson, whose stature is so much higher than Frost’s and for whom there’s so much more of a critical industry. There are still things one finds, one can discover. But for Frost, there are all sorts of papers that it seems a handful of people had seen before but people hadn’t really made sense of. It’s an extraordinarily vast archive. I mean, there are tens of thousands of papers throughout.

I think I’d struggle to pinpoint one or two, so I’ll just list the first ones that come to my head. One is hiding in plain sight. It got published along with the notebooks that Harvard did. I’m sorry to say it’s not original to me, but it’s not a very accurate transcription. They really should reissue it. The transcription is very poorly done. The annotations range from being somewhat off-base to just extraordinarily brilliant. It’s a great editor at the heart of it.

But there’s this whole section that, in the annotations, doesn’t really compute. You can’t really make sense of it. When you look at the papers, you realise that this is the beginning of a draft of a play that Frost had written, which is a romantic play about Ezra Pound and Frost’s frustrated, somewhat impotent rage against Pound, at least at that point. Ezra Pound presides over his factory of art as Amos Poise. So it’s the same letters, four and five, and the same biblical prophet, and then the five-letter surname projecting confidence and power and threat. He presides as what Frost calls a “poetical boss”.

So there are things like that, and then all sorts of things of the poet that people hadn’t really gotten into. Plenty of notebooks. There’s one poem that I think a few other researchers had seen but that hadn’t made it into the biographies before that I get into. It’s rather tawdry, but in Frost’s minor genre of sexual braggadocio, and it winds up being relevant for certain parts of his later life. That was a fun one and revealing in all sorts of ways. But yeah, there’s all sorts of stuff throughout.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

To what extent did you follow Robert Caro’s advice to turn every page when you had thousands and thousands of documents to read?

Adam Plunkett

I think I did my best. I’m not sure there are pages I didn’t turn.

One great archive that I had access to was an audio archive that some of the archivists at Dartmouth and Amherst provided me about halfway through my research. This was about 500 different tapes of Frost readings, performances and some private interviews. I made transcriptions of all of them, and I at least followed the transcriptions of all of them, but I don’t think I listened fully to all 500 or so. My editor at one point told me, “Come on—if you can’t, you know, don’t torture yourself with this.” I’d already been going a bit too long.

But I’m glad you asked that because it’s probably the best answer to your previous question about what things I had access to that other previous biographers didn’t have. There are so many astonishing moments and so many things you can hear when he’s saying it. Culture was so much less mediated by audio and visual recordings than our culture is now, so he’s very revealing in some of these moments.

There’s just an incredible range of things. One thing that you learn listening to these things is that the way he affected so much intimacy with his audience is that he would say these things. He was a great gossip, loved to gossip, and he kind of brought you into his own world by treating the stage like his own personal gossip. The way that Bob Dylan is with performing his music—he never does things the same way twice; it kind of bores him—Frost had these great turns of phrase.

When he’d start performances, he called the first half of it his “free verse poem” of sorts. That itself is a kind of deprecation of free verse by him: it’s just someone rambling, so it doesn’t have form. But there is a kind of artistry to it. You get a sense of how his mind works. There are all sorts of ideas that he would turn over that I didn’t really understand from his notebooks, writings, letters or poetry, but I did understand as I saw him take an idea from different aspects.

But also, the insults. They’re just incredible. There were a few recorded insults he had about different political persuasions and about T. S. Eliot, who was probably the greatest punching bag he had. There are a few that are the polished versions of this to get into the writing, but he had a few dozen B-sides of the well-worn insults against T. S. Eliot. The one that people remember is, you know, Frost said, “I play euchre; he plays Eucharist.” But he has a handful of other variants on that, and you come to understand it differently when you realise the kind of core of what it is he’s trying to imagine.

Another archive that I had access to that was extraordinary was Frost’s secretary, manager, love interest—whatever she was. Her daughter has an archive of her parents’ papers and, very late in my research, I realised that this archive existed. It’s quite a story. I got close to her and then close to her partner after she passed away, unfortunately.

I was over at her place one night, and one thing I started to do—I didn’t do many interviews for the book, maybe six people, because so many people who knew Frost in any substantial way had passed away by the time I started working on the project—but the one piece of advice I heard from listening to a podcast of Michael Lewis was that, when you’re interviewing people, if you think there might be something there, you find a way to ask the same question in as many different ways as you can until you get something interesting. It’s not my nature; I kind of like to live and let live a little bit. But I was talking to this woman’s partner, Billy. We had pizza, and I was like, “Are you sure there’s nothing else in the house, no materials?” She was like, “Well, there’s that one filing cabinet in the bedroom.”

The filing cabinet in the bedroom had all of Frost’s manager’s letters going back to her childhood, her time at Oxford, throughout her life. It’s this extraordinary archive. She had preserved it, I think, knowing that it would be of value to some extent. At some point, I really hope that they wind up selling it to one of the great Frost collections at Dartmouth or something like that. But that was amazing: one of those rare moments where you count your luck as a biographer.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

That’s right. I believe in serendipity in biography, but I think that biographers make their own serendipity by searching and searching and searching, going into nooks and crannies and down rabbit holes. A lot of biographers talk about the fact that they were lucky to find whatever they found, and about serendipity, but I think it’s because we’re relentless detectives.

Adam Plunkett

Absolutely. I think had I merely asked her for that six times, I think I never would have seen that cabinet.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

To what extent did you reinterpret Frost’s poetry and also his life through all those archives that you’ve just mentioned?

Adam Plunkett

Profoundly. I kind of see that as really the heart of the project, and partly why it felt so important for the book to be very grounded in the biographical. Part of it is who Frost was, and part of it is that, as a critic, one thing I think I’m comfortable doing—I feel like I really understand the work—is ascribing not only influence, but a kind of intention to it.

As a reader of criticism, when I see people try to make that kind of argument, it’s really important to me that there’s a kind of iceberg principle in play, where I really believe the critic understands the universe of possibilities and is not making the point arbitrarily, but is really able to ground it in very careful examination of the materials.

For example, when I make an argument about the importance of certain ideas about Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s sonnets to some of Frost’s early writings in his sonnet period, having access to Frost’s copy of books that had Shakespeare’s sonnets in them, seeing where they were relative to other ones, seeing where Frost published his sonnets relative to other ones, seeing that I could point to patterns that aligned with each other, and seeing underlinings in Frost’s copy of Emerson that I know was active around the same time that Frost was writing this work because his son, who died tragically early, had marks in it from that time and would have passed away after 1899—being able to point to that lends, I think, the kind of credibility that I really need as a reader and I want to offer as a critic.

The book goes from being very grounded in the granularity of life and moves very vertically to arguments about the nature of influence and the nature of poetry. I don’t think the criticism would be able to feel plausible to people if it didn’t have that kind of grounding throughout the main sections of the book and also in the endnotes.

In the reception of the book, I think most of the reviews at this point—I’ve been very, very pleased with the reception—but when it has been criticised, people have kind of said, “Okay, Adam says these things and we can grant this, but they kind of feel like, oh, he’s going on too much. It’s a little bit tedious when we kind of know this.” It’s extraordinary to me, and I feel a sense of success from that, because I thought I’d be saying these completely outlandish things and no one would believe me. And people were like, “Oh yeah, that seems right.”

I thought, “Are you kidding? That’s amazing.” If I’m able to make these things feel so plausible that people have a sense of, “Oh yeah, that seems right. We probably knew that already,” it’s a whole new idea. I’m saying it here. The reason I spend the section saying it is that I don’t think anyone has said it before. But that’s been a really nice thing: people have not offered major criticisms on grounds of implausibility. So, to that extent, I feel pleased with how much that kind of grounding in the text and in the source materials is able to come across.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Marcel Proust’s biographer George Painter declared that a literary biographer’s task is to discover beneath the mask of an artist’s everyday life the secret life from which they extracted their creative works. In Love and Need, you suggest that Frost’s personal relationships are key to understanding his poems. How did these relationships shape your interpretation of his poetry?

Adam Plunkett

I love that figure. I’ll do my best to give an answer that is the least non-succinct possible, because I think it’s really everything.

One of his friends called it “contact genius”, like Abraham Lincoln: Frost really kind of turns on his mind, turns on an aspect of his mind, in relationship with other people. And in relationship with others, I would say more broadly than people, because I think a great thread is Frost’s relationship with the divine throughout the book.

The initial form of the book, which wound up being discarded because it was baggy and about twice as long as it wound up being published, structured the chapters really in terms of different relationships because I thought they were so important to understanding Frost. I thought that you really saw a very different aspect of his character come out in these different types of relationships that he had, and different intimacies.

I think Frost is, if not the great poet of intimacy, at least as great a poet of intimacy in various aspects of the concept that we really have in the language. A poem such as “The Road Not Taken”—one thing I discovered that I’m very pleased about—is itself, I think, indebted to a poem of Emerson that is itself about human intimacy. It owes itself to Étienne de La Boétie, who was Montaigne’s great intimate, and the great figure of Montaigne’s on friendship, which itself goes back to Cicero on intimacy, et cetera. It’s really everywhere in the poetry and everywhere in the tension of love and need.

That really is the heart of any question of any kind of human relationship: how much it’s the sort of thing that can be about aspiration and something approaching or approximating ideals, and how much of it is about a kind of exchange or a kind of more cynical take on what people can be to each other. Of course, both are operative at all times.

Frost wrote exquisitely about those tensions, not only in the great poetry of people and relationships, the great narrative poems, but also in the great lyric poems, primarily about inner consciousness and personal experience. In addition to the relationship with Thompson, the two really great relationships in his adult life are with his wife, who passed away in 1938, and then the woman, also aforementioned, who was his manager for the next quarter-century and the remainder of his life. She winds up in a fascinating psychological triangle with Frost and Thompson. That triangle, and the intimacies and distances within it, wind up really being the nucleus of the legacy that Frost would leave.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

How did Frost’s character drive the plot of Love and Need?

Adam Plunkett

I guess I’d break that down into two separate parts. There is a question of character closer to the sense that the Girl Scouts in America use it: virtue and value. I think that winds up being something like an overwhelming question raised by Frost’s legacy, and how much we’re able to rescue him as a creature of character that we can really understand in terms of coherent and laudable aspirations, and the extent to which his character is something that is actually deceptively darker, or more disturbing and disturbed.

That ambiguity and thread is something I mean to be a kind of tension in play throughout the work, that I get to and I think arrive at something of a conclusion about toward the end of the book. But I mean for it to be something that the reader is experiencing, and experiencing the tensions around, as they read.

Then, character in another sense, something closer to personality, I suppose: there’s a kind of transformation in Frost’s personality that he undergoes in late adolescence, early manhood, that has to do with a certain kind of breaking of the ideal. It’s a story common to all sorts of cultural and religious traditions, but the breaking of the myth for Frost, and how he comes to recreate a sense of what he had once idealised in his own life, in his sense of himself as an artist, in his sense of himself as a person.

If you can follow that thread and see that through as a kind of coherent and consistent aspiration, something laudable, then I think that gets at the lion’s share of where I at least arrive. I think the book offers evidence to arrive at an assessment of Frost’s character in the sense of monstrosity or the lack thereof.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

To what extent do you believe you uncovered the truth of Frost’s inner life and character in his poetry?

Adam Plunkett

There’s a woman whom Frost was quite close to, Roberta Chalmers, an extraordinary figure who was married to a younger man, a great admirer of Frost. I think she is overshadowed in a lot of the stories, in part because he was the more public figure. She was a pretty amazing person.

I think, for my money, she understood Frost better, or at least was more articulate about it. She could idealise him in parts, but was able to see the heart of Frost’s own interiority better than people who I think were actually closer to him in practice and spent more time with him. In part, this was because of the strangeness of it being a platonic relationship across the lines of gender, which was much rarer at that time and certainly rare for Frost.

She has this series of truly incredible letters that she writes to Thompson as his biographies are coming out. She says, I think, that the great figure for Frost is not just Job—the man of sorrows—which is relatively straightforward. Frost writes a whole great masque which is, for those who haven’t read the book, like a play, an older variant of a play that Milton is the great exemplar of, from the vantage of Job. But Proteus, really: the shapeshifter, impossible to get a hold of. For Frost, this was a kind of mask for his sensitivity and for a kind of untimely but quite consistent religious aspiration—not met in practice, but a sense of reaching for something in the divine that is itself somewhat hard to see.

Frost’s time and Frost’s peers were such that conceptions of the good and conceptions of motivation tended to crowd out religious aspiration for deeper psychological explanations for behaviour. One thing that’s so amazing about it is that she’s writing these letters that are effusive, but also critical of Thompson’s biographies, at a time when he has this profoundly conflicted relationship with Frost. He’s playing a very complex operation to try to unseat the romantic myths of Frost, but also not look like he’s trying to do it. Then he writes her, “Bless you for writing the best letter I’ve ever read about this man that you and I both love.”

It’s an astonishing thing to me that, across this pretty profound critical divide, Thompson and I agree that these are the best letters ever written about Frost. It would feel like hubris for me to claim any understanding of the truth, but I can point to this, and I agree with that. So I certainly do my best.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

What do you believe are the distinguishing features of literary biography versus other forms of the genre?

Adam Plunkett

I think that, to the extent that biography is properly literary and not just cultural, where literature plays a role in the plot, it has both the capacity and the obligation to shed light on works that otherwise have the capacity to move without the context of the literature.

I would expand this to other artistic biographies: you can have great artistic biographies that are primarily cultural, in the sense that art is the moving pieces of the plot, the granular, and you can learn a lot about that. But their capacity to frame criticism and also tell a story in a way that really winds up providing critical understanding, I think, really distinguishes the form.

I think about this relative to political biography all the time, because the sense of consequence in political biography often comes from external events and from the world of action and the broader theatre that’s in play. You can’t really write a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt without the grand sense of striding the earth and all the broader theatre.

For the life of an artist, it’s a very different natural shape almost all the time. For poets especially, I think novelists, when they’re lucky, are able to have interesting work typically over a much longer and more varied time span. I think most poets—Frost said this too, and I tend to agree—have a relatively short period where they do their best, most interesting work. It’s a very special and very extraordinary thing, and something of a mystery why that should be.

But I think writing poetry that genuinely sustains interest across generations is a very hard and very rare thing. It lends itself to a very different treatment when the criterion of relevance is very different. If you’re talking about the passage of the Civil Rights Act, then there are millions and millions of documents that are relevant to how society comes together to do something like this. But for writing a great lyric poem, there might be two pieces of evidence and one note in a journal that has an interesting rhyme with it. It’s spare, but no less powerful for that. These things are not necessary to the genres, but I would say they are characteristic features of their differences.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

And just in closing, what do you believe is the role of a biographer?

Adam Plunkett

I think the role is to do everything in your power to get at the truth of the life and at the meaning of the life—and meaning in a sense that encompasses what is consequential and of lasting value about it.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

I like that. Adam, I could talk to you all day. Thank you so much for chatting with us about Love and Need. Your biography transcends traditional biographical portrayals of Robert Frost. It offers a much more nuanced account of his character, personality and behaviour, and also his poetry.

By braiding together biography and literary criticism, you’ve crafted a work that presents Frost in all his contradictory complexity. What emerges from our conversation is your masterful understanding that Frost was simultaneously America’s most accessible poet, but also one of its most elusive. Your book’s title perfectly captures this duality. Love and Need reveals Frost as the poet of mystery and tenderness who maintained an intimate yet guarded relationship with his readers.

Through careful attention to his relationships, you illuminate the fundamental themes of withholding and disclosure that animate both his poetry and life. So thank you so much. I’ve loved our conversation.

Adam Plunkett

I have too. What an extraordinary way to end on. I’m so grateful. Thank you so much for having me.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies

Thank you for listening to Biographers in Conversation. Special thanks to my producer, Andy Marr, web manager Dylan Hamilton-Foster, and Sonny Nardadale for the music.

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I’m looking forward to our next conversation about the choices every biographer faces. I hope you are too.