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"Sunsuvbijches." Perennial letter topic for Frost was his running lover's quarrel with the world of education. It began when Frost withdrew in succession from Dartmouth and Harvard, and it tormented him through his later years of sporadic teaching in half a dozen schools and colleges, including Dartmouth and Harvard. "I could never forgive the sunsuvbijches' belief," he explained with pique to Untermeyer, "that they were leaving anybody behind who was not getting toward their degrees."
Later, as a visiting faculty member at Amherst, Frost was not deceived by the president's belief that there, at least, young men were being trained "to think" and not merely "to learn." "I soon discovered," he confides, "that by 'thinking' they meant stocking up on radical ideas." When one class admitted it did not care whether Frost returned the papers he had assigned so long as he gave them marks, the outraged poet tore the papers up and tossed them in a wastebasket.
Messing with the Masses. As friends should, Frost and Untermeyer came to have few illusions about each other. Both were aware of Frost's monomania and his overwhelming intolerance of anyone who dared to disagree with him. "Sometimes I can think of no blissfuller state," Frost wrote, "than being treated as if I was always right." A constant target of his letters was Untermeyer's leftish reformism. "When you can write poetry like 'Jerusalem Revisited'," Frost railed in 1930, "why will you continue to mess with the masses (or is it mass with the messes)?" Frost was no friend of the welfare state. "I loathe togetherness," he wrote. "The best things and best people rise out of their separateness. I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise."
Frost's distrust of liberalism, which in his poems and letters occasionally made him sound like an outrageous parody of crackerbarrel conservatism, was based on a profound belief in smallness and a conviction that life must be lived on a level deeper than anything within the ken of group action. "Beyond the participation of the politicians and beyond the relief of senates," he wrote eloquently to Untermeyer, "lie our sorrows." But Frost also was aware of how much he had staked on sticking to the caricature personality he had partly invented and partly evolved for himself—the curmudgeonly egocentric country poet who always thinks for himself and is always right.
If this Frost seems comic most of the time, the book offers one brief, chilling hint that Frost's relentless self-preoccupation lay at the heart of the tragedies that beset most of the people close to him. His sister and one of his children went insane; another daughter died from tuberculosis. After failing at farming and writing, Frost's only son Carol shot himself. Frost had spent the previous night assuring the boy that he was not a failure. Duly reported to Louis Untermeyer, Carol's last words to his father have a ring of true horror. "You always get the last word, don't you?"