He only made it look easy
Robert Frost’s notebooks were the poet’s private laboratory.

By Meghan O’Rourke

The Notebooks of Robert FrostEdited by Robert Faggen
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press: 848 pp.,$39.95

Robert Frost liked to compose his poems in an overstuffed blue chair that had no arms because, he told the Paris Review in 1960, it left him “the room he needed.” This sentiment may seem curious to those who know Frost best as an uptight alternative to the radical modern experimentations of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. While they were introducing the world to the innovations of free verse, the Yankee farmer-poet was composing rhyming, iambic poems about boys climbing trees; of free verse, he sniffed that he would “as soon play tennis with the net down.” Frost was a man whose work relied largely on what one critic called “self-restriction” and whose poems could appear, at first glance, to deliver up predigested bits of folksy wisdom, as in “The Road Not Taken”: “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

But the need for “room” hints at what was always lurking behind the popular Frost  a more complex artist with a darker view than his presence on high school syllabi might lead you to expect. This Frost, whose early champion was the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, writes tragic philosophical poems (like “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep” and “Out, Out  “). His best work relies on reticence and canny evasions: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The two Frosts  the wholesome sage and the recalcitrant skeptic  are usually discussed as if they were different people, or as if the latter Frost were the real Frost and the first merely the crude misreading of a sentimental American public. But the reality is more complicated, as “The Notebooks of Robert Frost,” expertly edited by Robert Faggen, drives home.

Featuring some 800 pages of musings, drafts, detritus, epigrams and ruminations, “The Notebooks of Robert Frost” underscores how entwined the two Frosts truly were. The author was a set of inconsistencies: a Romantic bent on critiquing Romanticism; a pragmatist and quasi-Social Darwinist who wasn’t quite convinced of his own views. As Faggen points out in an insightful introduction, Frost returns again and again to the feeling that life “can consist of the inconsistent.” Like Thomas Hardy before him, he was skeptical of the tidy categories and labels society tended to supply. He describes the public as “hasty judges.” He spoke of wishing to be viewed as “the exception I like to think I am in everything.”

This resistance to categorization may derive in part from his biography. It wasn’t until he was 38 that he published his first book of poems. Before then, he lived in obscurity with his high school sweetheart, Elinor, raising chickens and teaching in schools outside of Boston. He had seen his father die young from drink; two of his own children died when they were young. (Another son later killed himself, and a daughter was institutionalized.) His rural life was far from bucolic, in part because he persisted in writing poems rather than taking farming seriously.

What, then, can be gleaned from Frost’s notebooks? Will the “real” man be found, as he cannot be in his poems? The notebooks were written over more than six decades, and Faggen has published them essentially unchanged. As a result, the book can be hard going, since it includes what amount to grocery lists (“Milk … Butter … Potatoes”) and private jottings (“Rubbering in Oaxaca”). But patient readers will discover plenty of the pith of which Frost was capable. Cumulatively, the fragments are alost poignant; they underscore the privacy of the human mind and remind us of the labor that goes into the apparent transparency of Frost’s poetry. And while we don’t learn much about his actual mode of composition  there are few drafts here  the notebooks do supply a great deal of what Faggen calls “insight into the … ideas that became poems.” Two preoccupations stand out. First, there is the poet’s obsession with epigram and aphorism, which at its most condensed brings to mind Pascal’s “Pensées.” “Politics is an honest effort to misunderstand one another,” Frost writes. “Progress is like walking on a rolling barrel.” And: “To be quite free one must be free to refuse.”

Second is Frost’s extensively developed theory about what he called “sentence-sounds.” In his view, poetry was less the craft of images  of vision  than the craft of sentences. We know this from his letters and essays, but it’s explored in fascinating fits and starts here. Although poets certainly talk a great deal about aural effects, Frost meant something more complicated: the quality of intonation in song. In one notebook, he writes, “The sentence … almost seems the soul of a certain set of words.” In another, he elaborates: “The essential sentence” is a “tone of voice” that “belongs” to man as songs belong to a bird. What Frost is trying to get at has to do with the way people talk. As he explains to an imaginary listener, you can say “no” in a variety of tones; how, then, does a poem convey the specific tone it means? Frost’s answer has to do with the relation between syntax and phrasing and the poem’s meter (which is a way of encouraging the ear to hear certain stresses).

This preoccupation with sentence-sounds reflects Frost’s distaste for adornment and poetical language. Unlike many of the poets writing in popular magazines at the time, he eschewed pretty thoughts of transcendence for their own sake. He was trying to capture the American language as it was actually used  “words that have been mouthed like a common tin cup”  rather than lose himself in a romanticized vision of “aeries” and “widening gyres.” Faggen calls Frost’s notebooks a “laboratory” and so they seem. What they capture is a figure bent on examining above all how to say things he considers true. “I have made a life study of what I can say,” Frost writes. For “all we have learned is clouded with a doubt.” If his lodestars are pragmatism and reticence, his notebooks reveal how hard-won these qualities were  how Frost struggled to combat his vanity and the scorn he sometimes felt for others. “Every human being must learn to carry his own craziness [and] confusion and not bother his friends about it. He will have clarifications but they will be momentary {flashes} like this  little shapes like poems vortex smoke rings.” In Frost’s poems, there is an overwhelming sense of emotions and events held in check  this is a poet who admires forms shaped by constraint. (Reading “The Notebooks,” it is tempting to see this as Frost’s clever way of restraining his own ego.) In his small poem “Pertinax,” he writes, “Let chaos storm! / Let cloud shapes swarm! / I wait for form.” Complicating this outlook is that he also hated prescriptive interpretations; he felt that need for “room.” His most beloved poems rest on ambiguities that only look like conclusions, as in the end to “The Road Not Taken” or “For Once, Then, Something,” about a man looking into a well:

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

“Something” is perceived  but what? What is its nature What is the outlook of the speaker? It is impossible to know, and it’s in this rejection of the grand gesture that Frost’s homely appeal lies. It is a distinctly American point of view, inherited from William James (and even from Emerson). And we detect in these notebooks how Frost wrestled profoundly with his pragmatism, holding ongoing conversations with himself.

The reader turning to “The Notebooks of Robert Frost” for clarifications and conclusiveness will not find them. In the end, Frost was never a systematic thinker. Even his epigrams and aphorisms are parts standing for a whole, not a whole built out of parts. One intuits the same fragmentary isolation in the poems, the unwillingness to reveal the poet’s own stance. In this sense, he was always in search of “the room he needed.” But perhaps he never knew, or wanted us to know, exactly what he needed it for.

Meghan O’Rourke is the literary editor of Slate and a poetry editor at the Paris Review. Her first book of poems, “Halflife,” will be published this spring.

She’s No FundamentalistWhat people get wrong about
Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

By Christopher Hitchens

A Day with Saigon’s Last Public Letter Writer

By Fiona Ehlers

A polyglot public letter writer in Ho Chi Minh City bridges different worlds — connecting people across the planet with his fountain pen. His profession may be dying, but in his 60 years on the job, he has created many marriages.

Fiona Ehlers / DER SPIEGEL

Letter writer Duong Van Ngo: “Love usually wanes between the continents.”

The main post office in Ho Chi Minh City is close to the Saigon River in the quieter part of town, where skyscrapers don’t yet jut into the clouds and where no mopeds buzz over the streets like swarms of hornets.

It lies across from Notre Dame cathredral and is housed in an old colonial building from 1886. It looks like the old market halls of Paris, painted apricot, with electrical fans humming between ornamental pillars and spots of sunlight falling through a window in the roof. It’s a timeless place — the most beautiful post office in all of Asia.

Duong Van Ngo, a wiry 77-year-old man, parks his bicycle in the shadow of the sycamore trees, whose trunks are painted white as if they were wearing gaiters. He greets the post card vendors and shuffles through the archway with the station clock. It’s eight o’clock on a muggy February morning, the start of his workday.

Ngo sits down at the end of a long wooden table underneath a mural of Ho Chi Minh. He produces two dictionaries and a directory of French postal codes from his briefcase. Then he slips a red armband over his left sleeve to make sure he’s recognized immediately. He sets up his sign: “Information and Writing Assistance.”

The first person to come to his stand is a man from the Mekong Delta. He’s got a letter with him, addressed to a businessman from Europe. He’s his chauffeur, and he’s been driving him to business meals and meetings for a year. He asks in writing if the man can get him health insurance and asks for a $200 advance. Ngo translates the letter into English. “Dear Sir,” he writes with his fountain pen, “might I politely request, sincerely yours.” Or would it better to say “affectionately”? No, that’s too intimate. The man hands him a bill. Ngo slips it between the pages of his dictionary without ever looking at it.

Ngo is a mediator between worlds — a professional letter writer of the sort that used to exist in the old days. He chooses each word carefully, formulates cautiously, polishes the style of the letter. He knows how important words are and what harm they can do. Ngo doesn’t just translate. He bridges the distance between people, advises and comforts them, discreetly and with perfect attention to form.

Ngo has worked at the post office since he was 17. He says he never missed a day of work, not even during the wars. He speaks the languages of the former occupiers fluently to this day. He learned French in school and English from American soldiers.

The second person to come to his stand is a young woman with red lipstick, long gloves and a little hat to shield her from the sun. She hands Ngo her Nokia mobile phone and shows him some text messages. They’re written in French and sound romantic. Ngo translates spontaneously: “When I come and visit you, you’ll show me Vietnam and teach me your language, I can hardly wait.” The woman smiles with embarrassment. She met the Frenchman via a contact Web site on the Internet. Tomorrow she’ll come back and compose an answer with help from Ngo.

The women at the service counters call him the man who writes love letters. He’s set up many a marriage, they say, and he’s a poet. Well, says Ngo, “maybe two or three marriages. Love usually wanes between the continents, what with two languages, two cultures — you know. It’s not so easy.”

Ngo has heard thousands of such stories, some beautiful and others tragic. He searched for the children of US soldiers and relatives of Vietnamese citizens who escaped as boat people after the war. He’s witnessed much suffering. He’s not giving any details. His customers pay him for his silence.

Sometimes Ngo receives mail himself. The thank you letters arrive from all over the world and they are addressed to “Letter Writer, Main Post Office, Saigon.” Ngo never receives e-mails. He hates computers and mobile phones, too. “Words that come from a machine have no soul,” he says, adding that people who use such machines have lost all politeness and sense of proper style. During his lunch break, Ngo walks along the street where Vietnamese who live abroad sit in cafes wearing large sun glasses. They’ve arrived for the New Year’s celebrations. They order latte macchiatos as sprinkler systems spray cool water vapor on their faces. Ngo orders noodle soup at a food stall.

Japanese tourists arrive in the afternoon and photograph him as if he were a fossil in a museum. The ladies at the post office counters staple the pages of faxes together and chat. In the middle of it all, new customers wait to be helped at Ngo’s desk. They hand him their address books, as well as parcels for their relatives overseas. “Vitogo,” says a woman who works in the market and wears a rice straw hat. “The street is called Victor Hugo,” he says and rolls his eyes briefly, “like the famous writer.” He writes the address on the shipping ticket.

Would Ho Chi Minh up there on the mural have liked what he does — “connecting people” via his fountain pen? Ngo smiles. Politics, he says, is outside his province. He says he used to be observed by the police because he was suspected of betraying secrets to enemies of the state. Thankfully, that’s over, he says. Today, Ngo adds, Vietnam has gone global and the world has become a complex and unpredictable place. This also means that there is greater demand for his work these days than there used to be.

Ngo is now the last letter writer in the city formerly known as Saigon. The penultimate one, his colleaue Lieng, died 10 months ago and was not replaced. Ngo thinks the world could use more people like Lieng and himself.

Alas, he says, “It just doesn’t want to pay the money for us any longer.”

A Chinese Scholar Reckons With His Past

By SARAH CARR

Shanghai

January 27, 1971: “If we dedicate all our lives to the socialist revolution, letting the Communist Party and the People decide how we can make the most of our time, our futures are sure to be affluent. Thinking of this, how can I possibly feel blue?”

Jingbei Hu winces now when he reads that, recognizing how that “socialist revolution” led to the murder of countless scholars and the shuttering of many schools. Still, he is determined to share the words he wrote in his diary with anyone willing to read them. Now an economics professor at Tongji University here, his goal is to show how the Communist government bent his will during the Cultural Revolution, more than 35 years ago.

“If we don’t work on this problem, on understanding how this brainwashing occurred, we will have another Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Hu says while eating dinner in a student restaurant at Tongji. He is a wiry man who finishes every scrap of the oversized portions then eats the leftover pizza on others’ plates.

Through a fellowship, Mr. Hu spent January and February at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution doing research for a Chinese-language book that will examine the impact of Communist ideology on Chinese children. In the long term, he hopes, his research will help pave the way for greater tolerance and freedom in China.

But in the meantime, Mr. Hu has put online the diaries he kept as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution  diaries that he now compares to those kept by Hitler Youth members in Nazi Germany. And he is on a personal mission to understand how, as a young man of 18, he was so absolutely convinced that Mao Zedong was a hero worth putting all his faith into.

January 28, 1971: “Our great leader Chairman Mao is the greatest contemporary Marxist Leninist, the greatest mentor of the Proletariat, the greatest leader of people in the world, the greatest general of the Union Army of Peasants and Workers, the greatest captain of the revolutionary ship, the reddest sun in our hearts.”

During the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from about 1966 to 1976, Mao organized the youth of the country into squads of Red Guards and urged them to attack intellectuals and “bourgeois things.”

The Chinese education system fell into chaos during the latter years of Mao’s rule. In 1968, Mr. Hu, like millions of other young Chinese of the era, was sent to a commune in the countryside of Jiangsu, a province in central China, where he worked and lived as a peasant. He was 15 and had finished only half a year of middle school. Now he spent his time lugging manure, fertilizing cabbage, and writing in his diary about the benefits of such physical labor, both to himself and to the country.

February 2, 1972: “My brother, my sister, and I were sent to the pasturing areas, farms and villages, separately in 1968 as part of the ‘Urban Youth Going to the Countryside’ movement. My father was sent down to a village in Pudong, Shanghai. We split for the Revolution. Even though we miss each other much, and our parents miss the three of us very much, … we need to guide them through this, making them realize that the welfare of the Revolution outweighs personal benefits … .”

Mr. Hu lived in the rural area for nearly 10 years. But writing in his diaries kept his intellect alive. Sometimes he would structure the entries like short, analytical essays. H sought out copies of old textbooks to teach himself math, physics, and chemistry.

Many Chinese teenagers during the Cultural Revolution were similarly motivated, notes Merle Goldman, an associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. “A lot of people from that era were, literally, self-taught,” she says. “It has a lot to do with Confucian values of hard work and education.”

By 1978 the Cultural Revolution had ended and Mao had died. Mr. Hu, 25, was given the chance to take university entrance exams. Despite not having been inside a classroom for more than a decade, he passed easily.

He went to Nanjing University and studied economics. He traveled, even living in Germany for several years. There he found the people to be much more open about discussing the Nazi era than the Chinese were about discussing the Cultural Revolution. Gradually Mr. Hu became an intellectual who had little in common with the boy who had so earnestly labored and kept diaries extolling the benefits of the Revolution. He never repudiated that boy and his diaries  he simply grew up and moved on.

Last summer, though, Mr. Hu was traveling through a mountainous area of Hunan province when, in a dim room of a peasant household made darker by smoke, a small girl told him that she used the kitchen table to study and write.

Memories of his own years living in the countryside and writing at a table in a hovel rushed back to him. He reread his diaries and tried to get them published, but failed because of official restrictions on what can be published about the Cultural Revolution. He has put part of the diaries online and hopes to post the remainder soon.

At Stanford he had access to books and materials about the Cultural Revolution that are not available in China. His plan is to write his book for the young people of China. They are the ones who have time to change if they learn to ask questions, he says: “In Chinese schools, the conventional wisdom is that people shouldn’t ask, they should simply take. Many, many students can’t think for themselves. That’s a huge problem.”

February 7, 1972: “The article ‘Study Hard, Try to Change Your Perspectives’ in the Red Flag magazine … inspired me a lot and helped me sort out some confusion. From now on, I will try to bring my studies to another level, and will pay extra attention to the five philosophical works of Chairman Mao.”

At Stanford this winter, Mr. Hu spent most of his time reading and thinking. He is compiling lists of ways the Communist government has been able to inculcate its young people  from his own youth, during the Cultural Revolution, to the present day. No. 1: Propaganda. No. 2: Media. No. 3: Education.

“From the first day of school,” he says, “we were taught that we should be students for the Communist Party.”

The children of China today have more opportunity than the young people of his own era, Mr. Hu says. The schools are open and a booming economy provides college graduates with more career possibilities. The Shanghai of skyscrapers, international visitors, and luxury restaurants and shops is like no place in the China he grew up in.

But while the buildings expand, the space for discussing politically sensitive topics is, if anything, contracting.

“It’s very hard to get a public discussion going about the Cultural Revolution and what happened,” says Boston’s Ms. Goldman. “It will change when they get a leadership that will face up to what happened, but the present leadership has no desire to face up to that.”