Robert Frost's Hilltop
by
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
with woodcuts by J. J. Lankes
Frost knew Dorothy Canfield Fisher
of Arlington Vt. as a fellow writer and storyteller. She was
a widely published author in her day. It was Fisher who encouraged
the Frosts to come to Vermont and she actually helped them find
the Stone House in Shaftsbury. In 1926, her story appeared in
The Bookman. Lankes' print shows the Stone House as it was when
Frost bought it. The only changes that have taken place are the
open porch was enclosed and the upper dormer was widened to add
plumbing. Otherwise, it is unchanged.
A long time the house had stood there,
about a hundred and thirty years, and nothing unusual had happened
to it. But it is the kind of house which can afford to wait, and
turn all the riper and sweeter for it, built as it is of stone
from out its own home ground. Three such stone buildings there
are in the white-clapboarded, green-shuttered town, all built
of the same stone by the same mason; the old stone mill, the Howard
house, and the house where Robert Frost and his family live.
In spite of the fact that everybody
up and down our valley is silently and intensely proud of the
fact that Robert Frost has chosen a home among us, this house
is seldom, except by younger people, called "the Frost House".
In the leisurely rhythm of our country life, the most exciting
events of which date from before the Revolution, there is no whirlpool
of absorption in the present, to suck down to forgetfulness the
generations past, the instant they physically die. The bridge
near our house is always spoken of as "the Baker bridge",
although it is more than a century since any Baker has lived in
our district. And the old stone house on the hill where the Frosts
live is still often called "the Peleg Cole house" (the
hill on which it stands is officially known as the "Peleg
Cole hill"), although Peleg Cole was the son-in-law of the
man who built it in 1783 or thereabouts.
The three stone houses are built
of the same stone, but they are not quite alike. For the other
two the stone was sawed out by hand, and the smoothed blocks fitted
closely together. For the Peleg Cole house that was to end by
sheltering Robert Frost and his wife and his children and his
grandson, the stone was left beautifully rough, "just as
it flaked off under the quarrymen's hammers", so the town
saying goes about it. Thus in 1783, as it went up out of its native
stone like a natural growth from the long rocky stone ledge that
runs down the valley, the house was already settling itself to
be a home for the man who wrote "The Grindstone" and
said,
- Wasn't there danger of a turn too
much?
- Mightn't we make it worse instead
of better?
- I was for leaving something to
the whetter.
- What if it wasn't all it should
be? I'd
- Be satisfied if he'd be satisfied.
But, although it now seems impossible
for us to think of anybody but the Frosts in that house, there
was a time when its fate was by no means sure, for other houses
were considered. There was the house high on the upper shelf of
farmland overlooking the valley at Sunderland; the tableland where
the last houses of our settlements stand, their orchards ripening
apples safe in the sunny zone between the early frosts of the
heavy valley air and the cold of the mountain slopes. But that
was too far from a railway station for a poet who came and went
frequently into the world.
And there was the house at the end
of the village street, the old well proportioned, early nineteenth
century "mansion" with its fanlights and its pleasantly
designed cornices. It was about this house that my greataunt used
to bring out a joke of the vintage of 1830, telling me laughingly
a time we passed it that it was while it was being built, "the
widow invitation." But that turned out too expensive; the
price paid by a modern world to sacred business making the acquisition
of fanlights and well built old houses on village streets out
of the reach of mere poets.
And the other old house, attached
to the magnificent, manorial hen .. that was considered too. And
then, in the casual, indirect way in which business is treated
up here, news drifted through the air that the Peleg Cole house
was for sale, a family living in it wishing to move to the village
street. And once the stone house on the hill was through, there
could be no doubt that it had been built for no other purpose
than the Frosts to live in. So, from momentary expectations, the
other houses sank back into being just themselves, just the houses
we have always known, with a little faint color added in the fancy
of the people who pass them and think, "That might have been
the house Robert Frost lived in."
To my eye Mr. Lankes admirable woodcut
of the house is like one of those able portraits of people, of
which ordinary inartistic relatives complain to the exasperation
of the artist, "It's all right, I suppose, but it
doesn't somehow really look like him. Something about the expression..."
The woodcut is masterly as a woodcut but there is certainly something
about the expression of the house in it which doesn't look natural
to me. It has a rather grim, sombre, depressed look, hasn't it?
Or am I mistaken? And perhaps even if it has, that may be the
way our north country lives and houses look to people used to
softer and more smiling places.
But they don't look that way to me,
not a bit; any more than Robert Frost's poetry seems (as we are
always astonished to hear it called) "grim and sombre and
depressing". To us his poetry seems the very distillation
of human life as we know it, with its strong aromatic savor of
both bitterness and pungent satisfactions; and to us his house
looks not at all grim or sombre, but homelike and strong and cheerful
and protecting, when we look up at it as we start to climb the
Peleg Cole hill, and see it at the top, standing wide-roofed and
substantial, with its old lilac and syringa bushes, and the lily-of-the-valley
bed, earlier to bloom than in any other of our gardens, because
of the sun's warmth reflected from the grey stone walls against
which it is planted.
As we pass we crane our necks about,
with the humane country interest in other people's lives (called
meddling curiosity by city folks), and comment to each other on
the things we see, important in the round of the seasons; as,
"They've got their corn planted already", or, "My,
how far Lillian's sweet peas are up!" or with the deep approval
Vermonters feel for provident winter preparations, "Oh, just
look at all that nice wood that Carol has split and stacked!"
We do so love firewood in Vermont.
Firewood laid up against the winter,
and early blooming lilies-of-the-valley whitely fragrant against
grey old stone walls ; a barn across the way, a real barn with
hay and stock in it; robustly fruitful old apple trees; vigorous,
newly planted young ones just coming into bearing; and blue remembered
hills rising up around orchard and pasture ...we think the place
needs no label to show that it is Robert Frost's home.
Mrs. Fisher had apparently
sent an early draft of her article to Frost while he was in hay-fever
retreat in New Hampshire. He wrote her the following letter dated
August 30, 1926, with some reservations about her depiction of
the artist Lankes, his son Carol and daughter-in-law, Lillian.
Dear Dorothy,
My children and grandchildren (singular)
will believe it when you tell them it is an interesting old historical
house they live in. If I told them they might put it down to professional
poetry. You go just the right way about fostering their fondness
for the place and perhaps planting the family on it forever. There
is no time like the present, right on top of this to start making
it the ancestral home of the Frosts. Five years isnt much toward
making it so, but five years is more than four.
We can surely stand having our house
praised over our heads, if you think our new neighbors the cast
off countesses can who have been buying in among us. What you
say is balm of compensation to us for having been left out of
the articles in The [Bennington] Banner on the historical houses
they have been recently taking up in the Shaftsburys.
No but seriousness aside you make
the old house and the region live for us with strokes of the pen.
..........
Just two or three slightest suggestions about the article. It
makes me feel a little unhappy to come off too much better than
the artist in it. [Marginal note added by RF: "You do like
the wood-cut I hope. We must further Lankes."] Couldnt you
say: "All very well as a picture. The woodcut is beautiful
admirable masterly. But let the artist take care not to lean for
effect to[o] far over on the side of the sombre. This here R.
Frost is not etc." And it makes me a little sheepish to get
credit for the woodpile and the sweet peas. Wouldnt it be jolly
to say, "his son Carol[']s mountainous woodpile," "his
daughter Lillian's sweet peas." I'm a hardened case. I accept
a lot of praise I dont deserve and then make it right with myself
by sacrificing a tithe of it to the Lord. You must connive a little.
....
With hurried best wishes to you both.
Ever yours Robert Frost
Excerpt from "The
Grindstone" by Robert Frost from THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST
edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, 1969 by Henry
Holt and Co.,
copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Used by arrangement with the Trustee
of the
Estate of Robert Frost and Henry Holt and Co., Publisher.
Letter from Robert Frost
(edited) to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, dated August
30, 1926 from SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST edited by Lawrance
Thompson.,
Henry Holt and Co., 1964. Used by permission of the Trustee of
the Estate of
Robert Frost and Henry Holt and Co.
Original woodblock print
from the collection of The Friends of Robert Frost.
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