Paris Review Interview
With Richard Poirier
1960
FROST: I never write except with a writing board. I’ve never had a table in my life. And I use all sorts of things. Write on the sole of my shoe.
INTERVIEWER: Why have you never liked a desk? Is it because you’ve moved around so much and lived in so many places?
F: Even when I was younger I never had a desk. I’ve never had a writing room.
I: When you were in England from 1912 to 1915, did you ever think you might possibly stay there?
F: No. No, I went over there to be poor for awhile, nothing else…
I: What were the circumstances of your meeting Pound when you were in England?
F: That was through Frank Flint. The early Imagist and translator. He was a friend of Pound and a little group there. He met me in a bookstore, said “American?” And I said, “Yes, how’d you know?” He said, “Shoes.” It was the Poetry Book Shop, Harold Monro’s, just being organized. He said, “Poetry?” And I said, “I accept the omen.” Then he said, “You should know your fellow countryman, Ezra pound.” And I said, “I’ve never heard of him.” And I hadn’t. I’d been skipping literary magazines- I don’t ever read them very much- and the gossip, you know, I never paid much attention to. So he said, “I’m going to tell him you’re here.” And I had a card from Pound afterwards. I didn’t use it for two or three months after that.
I: What did he say on it?
F: Just said, “At home, sometimes.” Just like Pound. So I didn’t feel that it was a very warm invitation. Then one day walking past Church Walk in Kensington, I took his card out and went in to look for him. And I found him there, a little put out that I hadn’t come sooner, in his Poundian way. And then he said, “Flint tells me you have a book.” And I said, “Well, I ought to have.” He said, “You haven’t seen it?” And I said, “No.” He said, “What do you say we go and get a copy?” He was eager about being the first one to talk. That’s one of the best things you could say about Pound: he wanted to be the first to jump. He was all silent with eagerness. We walked over to my publisher; he got the book. Didn’t show it to me- he put it in his pocket. We went back to his room. He said, “You don’t mind our liking this?” in his British accent, slightly. And I said, “Oh, go ahead and like it.” Pretty soon he laughed at something and I said I knew where that was in the book, what Pound would laugh at. And then pretty soon he said, “You better run along home, i’m going to review it.” And I never touched it. I went home without my book and he kept it. I’d barely seen it in his hands.
I: Was there much of a gang feeling among the literary people you knew in London?
F: Yes. Oh, yes. Funny over there. I suppose it’s the same over here. I don’t know. I don’t “belong” here. But they’d say, “Oh he’s that fellow that writes about homely things for that crowd, for those people. Have you anybody like that in America?” As if it were set, you know.
I: Some of the early critics like Garnett and Pound talk a lot about Latin and Greek poetry with reference to yours. You’d read a lot in the classics?
F: Probably more Latin and Greek than Pound ever did.
I: Didn’t you teach Latin at one time?
F: Yes. When I came back to college after running away, i thought I could stand it if I stuck to Greek and Latin and philosophy. That’s all I did those years.
I: What sorts of things did your mother read to you?
F: That I wouldn’t be able to tell you. All sorts of things, not too much, but some. She was a very hard-worked person- she supported us. Born in Scotland, but grew up in Columbus, Ohio. She was a teacher in Columbus for seven years- in mathematics. She taught with my father one year after he left Harvard and before he went to California. You know they began to teach high schools in those days right after coming out of high school themselves. I had teachers like that who didn’t go to college. I had two noted teachers in Latin and Greek who weren’t college women at all.
I: Your mother ran a private school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, didn’t she?
F: Yes, she did, round Lawrence. She had a private school. And I taught in that some, as well as taking some other schools. I’d go out and teach in the district schools whenever I felt like springtime.
I: How old were you then?
F: Oh just after I’d run away from Dartmouth, there in ’93, ’4, twenty years old. Every time I’d get sick of the city I’d go out for the springtime and take school for one term.
I: When you started to write poetry, was there any poet that you admired very much?
F: I was enemy of that theory, that idea of Stevenson’s that you should play the sedulous ape to anybody. That did more harm to American education than ever got out.
I: Well, you once said in my hearing that Robert Lowell had tried to connect you with Faulkner, told you you were a lot like Faulkner?
F: Did I say that?
I: No, you said that Robert Lowell told you you were a lot like Faulkner.
F: Well, you know what Robert Lowell said once? He said, “My uncle’s dialect- the new England dialect, The Biglow Papers- was just the same as Burns’ wasn’t it?” I said, “Robert! Burns’ was not a dialect, Scotch’s not a dialect. It’s a language.” But he’d say anything, Robert, for the hell of it.
I: You’ve never, I take it then, been aware of any particular line of preference in your reading?
F: Oh, I read ‘em all. One of my points of departure is an anthology. I find a poet I admire and I think, well, there must be a lot to that, Some old one- Shirley, for instance, ‘The glories of our blood and state”- that sort of splendid poem. I go looking for more. Nothing. Just a couple like that and that’s all. I remember certain boys took an interest in certain poems with me in old times. I remember Brower one day in somebody else’s class when he was a student at Amherst- Reuben Brower, afterwards the Master of Adams House at Harvard. I remember i said, “Anyone want to read that poem to me?” It was, “In going to my naked bed as one that would have slept,” Edawrds’s old poem. He read it so well i said, “I give you an A for life.” And that’s the wya we joke with each other. I never had him regularly in a class of mine. I visited other classes up at Amherst and noticed him very early. Goodness sake, the way his voice fell into those lines, the natural way he did that very difficult poem with that old quotation- “The falling out of faithful friends is the renewing of love.” I’m very catholic, that’s about all you can say. I’ve hunted. I’m not thorough like the people educated in Germany in the old days. I’ve none of that. I hate the idea that you ought to read the whole of anybody. But I’ve done a lot of looking sometimes, read quite a lot.
I: When you were in England did you find yourself reading the kind of poetry Pound was reading?
F: He was reading the troubadours.
I: Did you talk to one another about any particular poets?
F: He admired at that time, when i first met him, Robinson and de La Mare. He got over admiring de La mare anyway, and I think he threw out Robinson too. We’d just bring up a couple of little poems. I was around with him quite a little for a few weeks. I was charmed with his ways. He cultivated a certain rudeness to people he didn’t like, just like Willy Whistler. I thought he’d come under the influence of Whistler. They cultivated the French style of boxing. They used to kick you in the teeth.
I: With grace.
F: Yes. You know the song, the nasty song: “They fight with their feet-” Among other things, what Pound did was show me Bohemia.
I: Was there much Bohemia to see at the time?
F: More than I had ever seen. I’d never had any. He’d take me to restaurants and things. Showed me jiu jitsu in a restaurant. Threw me over his head.
I: Did he do that?
F: Wasn’t ready for him at all. I was just as strong as he was. He said, “I’ll show you, I’ll show. Stand up. So I stood up, gave him my hand. He grabbed my wrist, tipped over backwards and threw me over his head.
I: Did he do that?
F: Oh, it was all right. Everybody in the restaurant stood up. He used to talk about himself as a tennis player. I never played tennis with him. And then he’d show you all these places with these people that specialized in poets that dropped their aitches and things like that. Not like the “beatniks,” quite. I remember one occasion they had a poet in who had a poem in the English Review on Aphrodite, how he met Aphrodite at Leatherhead. He was coming in and he was a navvy. I don’t remember his name, never heard of him again- may have gone on and had books. But he was a real navvy. Came in with his bicycle clips on. Tea party. Everybody hornified in a delighted way, you know. Horror, social horror. Red-necked, thick, heavy built fellow, strong fellow, you know like John L. Lewis or somebody. But he was a poet. And then I saw poets made out of whole cloth by Ezra. Ezra thought he did that. Take a fellow that had never written anything and he could make a poet out of him. We won’t go into that.
I: Do you ever hear from Pound? Do you correspond with him now?
F: No. He wrote me a couple of letters when I got out of jail last year. Very funny little letters, but they were all right.
I: Whom did you speak to in Washington about that?
F: Just the Attorney General. Just settled it with him. I went twice with Archie and we didn’t get anything done because they were opposite parties, I think. And I don’t belong to any party.
I: Yes, but you weren’t named Robert Lee because your father was a staunch Democrat around the time of the Civil War? That makes you a Democrat of sorts, doesn’t it?
F: Yeah, I’m a Democrat. I was born a Democrat- and unhappy since 1896. Somebody said to me, “What’s the difference between that and being a Republican?” Well, I went down and after we’d failed, and after Archie thought we’d failed, I just went down alone, walked into the Attorney General’s office and said, “I come down ehre to see what your mood is about Ezra Pound.” And two of them spoke up at once. “Our mood’s your mood, let’s get him out.” Just like that, that’s all. And I said, “This week?” They said, “This week if you say so. You go get a lawyer and we’ll raise no objection.” So, since they were Republicans, I went over and made friends with Thurman Arnold, that good leftish person, for my lawyer. I sat up that night and wrote an appeal to the court that i threw away, and, in the morning, just before I left town, i wrote another one, a shorter one. And that’s all there was to it. Ezra thanked me in a very short note that read: “Thanks for what you’re doing. A little conversation would be in order.” Then signed, in large letters. And then he wrote me another one, a nicer one.
I: You once taught psychology didn’t you?
F: That was entirely a joke. I could teach psychology. I’ve been asked to join a firm of psychiatrists, you know, and that’s more serious. But I went up there to disabuse the teacher’s College of the idea that there is any immediate connection between any psychology and their classroom work, disabuse them of the notion that they could mesmerize a class if they knew psychology. That’s what they thought.
I: Weren’t you interested in William James at one point?
F: Yes, that’s partly what drew me back to Harvard. But he was away all the time I was around here. I had Santayana, Royce, and all that philosophy crowd, Munsterberg, George Herbert Palmer, the old poetic one. I had ‘em all. But I was there waiting for James and I lost interest.
I: Did Santayana interest you very much at that time?
F: No, not particularly. Well, yes. I always wondered what he really meant, where he was headed, what it all came down to. Followed that for years. I never knew him personally. I never knew anybody personally in college. I was a kind of- I went my own way. But i admired him. It was a golden utterance- he was something to listen to, just like his written style. But i wondered what he really meant. I found years afterward that all was an illusion, of two kinds, true and false. And I decided false illusion would be the truth: two negatives make an affirmative.
F: …Somebody has said that poetry among other things is the marrow of wit.
I: When you look at a new poem that might be sent to you, what is it usually that makes you want to read it all or not want to read it?
F: This thing of performance and prowess and fears of association- that’s where it all lies. One of my ways of looking at a poem right away it’s sent to me, right off, is to see if it’s rhymed. Then I know just when to look at it. The rhymes come in pairs, don’t they? And nine times out of ten with an ordinary writer, one of two terms is better than the other. One makeshift will do, and then they get another that’s good, and then another makeshift, and then another one that’s good. That is in the realm of performance, that’s the deadly test with me. I want to be unable to tell which he thought of first. If there’s any trick in it, putting the better one first so as to deceive me, I can tell pretty soon. That’s all in the performance realm. They can belong to any school of thought they want to, Spinoza or Schopenhauer, it doesn’t matter to me. A Cartesian I heard Poe called, a Cartesian philosopher, the other day…tsssss…
I: You once saw a manuscript of Dylan Thomas’ where he’d put all the rhymes down first and then backed into them. That’s clearly not what you mean by performance, is it?
F: See, that’s very dreadful. It ought to be that you’re thinking forward, with the feeling of strength that you’re getting them good all the way, carrying out some intention more felt than thought. It begins. And what it is that guides us- what is it? Young people wonder about that- don’t they? But I tell them it’s just the same as when you feel a joke coming. You see somebody coming down the street that you’re accustomed to abuse, and you feel it rising in you, something to say as you pass by each other. Coming over him the same way. And where do these thoughts come from? Where does a thought? Something does it to you. It’s him coming toward you, that gives you the animus, you know. When they want you to know about inspiration, I tell them it’s mostly animus.
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