—Larry Fried, Pix

# ROBERT FROST: AMERICAN BARD

By JOHN CIARDI

ON MARCH 26 Robert Frost will be eighty-eight years old. His birthday will be doubly marked this year. It will be publication day for his first new book in fifteen years, "In the Clearing." And it will be the occasion for a banquet to be given in Washington, the invitations for which have been jointly issued by Secretary of the Interior and Mrs. Udall and by Mr. Frost's publishers, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Unless he is prevented by affairs of state, President Kennedy is expected to lead the list of distinguished guests.

For many years now, Mr. Frost's birthdays have been almost national

observances. But though each new birthday has brought fresh honors, it is probably the eighty-fifth that will remain most memorable to literary historians.

For that occasion, at a banquet given at the Waldorf by Mr. Frost's publishers, Lionel Trilling read a paper in homage to Mr. Frost and thereby set off a hot if meaningless controversy, while at the same time illustrating an attitude of our more sophisticated critics that, though it passed without comment, remains far more ponderable than the bone that was worried in print during the following weeks.

Trilling saluted Mr. Frost as "a poet of terror." All angry voices to the con-

trary, I could find nothing wrong with Trilling's choice of words. That he meant nothing but praise is obvious. In fact he compared Mr. Frost to Sophocles in this sense. What man could fail to feel honored at being so paired? On this point I find Trilling's assessment both just and central to the Frostian genius.

Let the School System make a whiteed saint of Mr. Frost if it must; and as, alas, it will. The man himself remains an *hombre*. If he is half radiance he is also half brimstone, and praise be. His best poems will endure precisely because they are terrible—and holy. All primal fire is terrible and holy. Mr. Frost could climb to heaven and hear

the angels call him brother—frater, they would probably say—but he could as well climb Vesuvius and equally hear every rumble under his feet call out to him. The darkness in his poems is as profound as the light in them is long. They are terrible because they are from life at a depth into which we cannot look unshaken. What else is the power of such poems as—to name only a few—“To Earthward,” “Reluctance,” “Home Burial,” “Death of the Hired Man,” and “Fire and Ice”?

IT was some such homage, I am sure, that Trilling meant to pay, and to worry the word “terror” as if it contained a slur is nonsense. What reader will not prefer the terror of Frost to the sweetness of many of his contemporaries?

What appalled me that night at the Waldorf was Trilling's confession that it had only been within the preceding few years that he had grown aware of the depth and power of Mr. Frost's poetry. And then, as if to toss the whole tribute into the abyss, Trilling added something to the effect that he had been unable to grasp the poems until he came to them through a reading of D. H. Lawrence!

What I think I heard Trilling describe was a failure sufficiently common to the New or Academic Critics to serve as a reproach to all of them. There stood Professor Trilling, one of our leading men of letters, a master of literary subtlety and complexity, paying homage to America's foremost poet by confessing years of professional neglect, and then capping the insult by suggesting that the key to Mr. Frost's poetry lay in D. H. Lawrence, a writer I am bound to believe Mr. Frost would incline to think of as half madman and half charlatan (a guess, let me add, that certainly does not bind Mr. Frost, and that is not at all my personal assessment of Lawrence).

What is there to conclude except that our best critics have suffered too long from a fear of simplicity, and that, misled by the surface simplicity of Mr. Frost's poems, they have dismissed them as being simple—all the way down? It is a rueful irony that brought together America's first truly national poet and a representative of America's first truly-formed school of literary criticism, only to show that it took the critic something like thirty years to recognize the real thing when it happened.

By now the New Criticism has pretty much adjusted to Mr. Frost, at least to the earlier Frost. As I mean to discuss in a minute, I find two main stages of the earlier Frost: the poet of passion and the poet of wit and whimsy. The adjustment of the New Critics, as nearly

as I have been able to sense it, has been to praise the poet of passion and to dismiss the poet of wit. I wonder what the New Critical verdict will be on this new Frost. For it is a new Frost one finds in these poems; a Frost not unprecedented in his own past, but a new Frost all the same. What Mr. Frost called “editorials” in “Steeplebush” (published in 1947) were already long on the way toward his new way of writing—or perhaps one should say, rather, toward his new way of taking himself. And the fact that most of these new poems have long been familiar to close followers of Mr. Frost, through his readings and Christmas cards, does take the full burst of surprise from them. Yet put together as they are now in a new book, the poems make bold the announcement that this Frost is impressively different from the more familiar one of the public image.

TRYING to parse anything as complex as Robert Frost into categories is a bit like trying to put spirit into a box, but granting the inadequacies of all such boxes, let one be called, as noted, passion, and the other, wit and whimsy. It was basically as a poet of impassioned light-and-dark that Mr. Frost made his appearance on the scene and many of his first reviewers were moved to speak of a background sense of terror that haunts his New England landscape. This Frost burns with the appetites of life. The essence of tragic characters is that they ask of life more than ordinary men are moved to ask. They are terrifying and exalted because they are seared by passion:

> I craved strong sweets but those Seemed strong when I was young; The petal of the rose It was that stung.

> Now no joy but lacks salt That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain

> Of tears, the aftermath Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.

> When stiff and sore and scarred I take away my hand From leaning on it hard In grass and sand,

> The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength To feel the earth as rough To all my length.

Call it terror in the Sophoclean sense, or call it the impassioned life force, this is lyricism at a kindling point of the soul. This poet is not only the lover but the demon lover.

His passion, moreover, was always

toward the privacy of the self, toward the rescue of the self from the world's demands. So in “Love and a Question,” one of his earliest published poems, he dramatizes the world's intrusion upon the privacy of love, choosing for his symbol of the world's demand a needy wanderer who seeks shelter in the bridal house. At this point of his development, the poet frames the question without answering it. The poem ends:

> The bridegroom thought it little to give
> A mole of bread, a purse, A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God, Or for the rich a curse; But whether or not a man was asked To mar the love of two
> By harboring woe in the bridal house, The bridegroom wished he knew.

The same impassioned sense of two-against-the-world cries out in “Not to Keep.” And the converse of that theme may be found in “Two Look at Two,” a poem in which the lovers, in joy, recognize the exaltation of what is their most private ground.

THAT theme is everywhere in the early Frost. In “Two Tramps in Mud Time” the question is given a new and terrifying setting, this time to be firmly answered. The speaker of the poem, a farmer, fiercely in love with the muscle and sweat of his labor of chopping wood, feels the world’s demand in the presence of two lumberjack tramps who want to take his work from him for pay, because they need the pay:

> The time when most I loved my task
> These two must make me love it more
> By coming with what they had to ask.

And this time the demand is rejected:

> Nothing on either side was said.
> They knew they had but to stay their stay

> And all their logic would fill my head: As that I had no right to play

> With what was another man's work for gain.

> My right might be love but theirs was need.

> And where the two exist in twain
> Theirs was the better right-agreed.

> But yield who will to their separation,
> My object in living is to unite
> My avocation and my vocation
> As my two eyes make one in sight.
> 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.

By whatever force of the rational mind this poet frames his reasons, the life force in him cries out “Keep off my acre!”

Perhaps with a touch of whimsy but,

16

SR/March 24, 1962

if so, with the anger unabated, that cry
rings out again in "The Egg and the
Machine." There the poet meets the
intrusion of a locomotive upon his priv-
ate haunts by digging up a clutch of
turtle eggs. Armed with them as his
grenades, he issues his challenge:

'You'd better not disturb me anymore,'
He told the distance, 'I am armed for
war.
The next machine that has the power
to pass
Will get this plasm in its goggle glass.'

That dark, impassioned, and reclu-
sive Frost has not entirely disappeared
from these new poems. Whether "A
Draft Horse," for example, is entirely
a new poem or one newly brought out
of older workbooks, it moves as darkly
and yet as resiliently as any of Frost's
early ventures into shadow. Here it is
entire, a poem of terror enough for any
darkness:

With a lantern that wouldn't burn
In too frail a buggy we drove
Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

And a man came out of the trees
And took our horse by the head
And reaching back to his ribs
Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down
With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees
In one long invidious draft.

The most unquestioning pair
That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe
Any more than we had to to hate,

We assumed that the man himself
Or someone he had to obey
Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way.

With "A Draft Horse" may be grouped
"Ends," "A Peril of Hope," and "Ques-
tioning Faces" (the last of which first
appeared in SR) as poems more nearly
in Mr. Frost's first voice, the voice of
impassioned love, of dark and of radi-
ance, and above all of a fierce commit-
ment to the private acre of the individ-
ual—the essential ground that must be
protected from the world's intrusion.

If I am right in taking whimsy to be
the second voice in Mr. Frost's devel-
oping range, I do not mean to imply
that there were not touches of whimsy
in the poems from the beginning. There
is a happily whimsical touch in "The
Pasture," the first poem in the first book
("A Boy's Will"). And more than a
touch in as early and as deeply felt a
poem as "Mending Wall." There the
speaker, thinking to draw out his neigh-
bor says:

Spring is the mischief in me and I
wonder
If I could put a notion in his head.

and later:

I could say 'Elves' to him
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.

The difference between Frost as the
poet of passion and Frost as the poet
of wit is one of degree and the mixture
of the two tones in many of the poems
may require a considerable adjustment
of one's standard "poetic" expectations.
As Mr. Frost himself notes in a typical
touch of whimsy:

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor
schooling
To get adjusted to my kind of fooling.

Nevertheless the difference is real.
The poet of passion is a singing man
and deeply committed. The poet of
whimsy is a speaking man and coolly
detached, concerned, yes, but evasive,
his eye forever on the relation of the
individual and society, but warily. "A
Drumlin Woodchuck," for example,
once more explores the theme of the
individual's self-rescue from society, but
with a world's difference in the tone.
For this poem the poet takes on the

(Continued on page 52)

Robert Frost on his farm in Vermont—above, with his daughter and grandchildren; below, visiting his pet calves.

—Lofman, *Pix*

SR/March 24, 1962

17

Robert Frost

*Continued from page 17*

persona of a wily and complacent wood-
chuck:

My own strategic retreat
Is where two rocks almost meet,
And still more secure and snug,
A two-door burrow I dug.

With those in mind at my back
I can sit forth exposed to attack
As one who shrewdly pretends
That he and the world are friends.

Thus protected by the forethought to
be devious, all goes well with the wood-
chuck, and thus:

If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear.

It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.

If the power of poetry lies in its
ability to penetrate our feelings to
great depth, thereby arousing and re-
vealing our deepest sense of ourselves,
it must follow that whimsy, being the
shallowest mode of poetry, is the most
difficult to make memorable. It may
well be the most dangerous mode a
poet can undertake. I must confess
I am not deeply moved by all of Mr.
Frost's whimsical poems. I can smile
at his woodchuck, but my smile is
partly involved in a shrug. I can
admire but I am not moved. For
whimsy is not so much a poetic pen-
tration as it is a role, and the role, if
charming, is generally slight.

There is always the danger, too, that
whimsy may falter into a kind of mere-
ly artful performance. Mr. Frost is no
stranger to the public platform. He is,
in fact, a king of the old pros: he knows
how to tickle an audience and he
knows how to knock it for a loop. He
has developed one of the most assured
stage-presences of our times. I have
sat to hear him through at least sev-
enty-five or eighty, perhaps even more,
public performances, and I have never
failed to find delight in his manner.
The danger to my mind was that the
whimsical poems might degenerate
into platform jokes, that the persona
of the poet would forever be "on-
stage." Mr. Frost himself, being no-
body's fool and no self-deceiver, will
have thought about that danger of con-
fusing his magnificent platform whim-
sy with his essential poetic voice.

Perhaps the most central evidence
of these new poems is in the way they

demonstrate that he has known how
to keep his balance. The voice of that
sometimes magnificent whimsy, the
voice of seriousness lightly (and large-
ly) taken, as in, say, "Departmental,"
has been raised to a new resonance
here. Neither of the two earlier voices
is entirely missing from the present
poems. There are sufficient traces still
of the impassioned singer. There is a
substantial presence of the whimsical
and detached sayer. But the new voice
is bardic—a speaking voice, philosophi-
cal rather than intensely lyrical, but
d deeply committed. Mr. Frost emerges
now as the poet of his people, the poet
who speaks America to time.

Mr. Frost has long been proud of
what he calls "the position America
has given me." Nor did he assume that
position by self-appointment. On
March 24, 1950, in honor of what was
thought to be his approaching seventy-
fifth birthday (there had been some
confusion about the year of birth,
which was long given as 1875) the
United States Senate passed a resolu-
tion citing his poems for having
"helped to guide American thought
with humor, and wisdom, setting forth
to our minds a reliable representation
of ourselves and of all men." Mr.
Frost has accepted that role, that posi-
tion. His lines in the present volume,
"On Being Chosen Poet of Vermont,"
indicate his readiness to accept what
might almost be called public office:

Breathe there a bard who isn't moved
When he finds his verse is understood
And not entirely disapproved
By his country and his neighborhood?

The lines themselves, lightly taken and
lightly said, constitute one more "edii-
torial," a half-playful comment. There
can be no doubt, however, that Mr.
Frost has accepted his bardic burden
with whole seriousness. His bardic
range, like the range of his whimsical
editorials, is America and, in fact, the
Western world. But the bardic voice is
clearer, firmer, and deeply committed.
There are no back doors now through
which the wily woodchuck can disap-
pear at will. The bard must stand to
his conviction.

That the burden of the bardic role
is a dangerous one, much of the history
of American poetry will attest. Whit-
man wrote most of his worst poems
in seeking to be the bard of America.
Where would he be in present memory
had he not had "Myself" to sing about?
Sandburg has tried out for the role and
blown it to pieces in blasts of windy
rhetoric. MacLeish, in my view, let a
sublime lyric talent lie in abeyance for
more than twenty years while trying
to achieve a public speaking voice for

America, and missing it. The list of
other candidates who have blown or
are blowing away in the bardic venture
could fill a "Who Was Who" of past
acclaim and present neglect.

Perhaps the bardic voice is the one
for which contemporary readers are
least attuned. How is an audience that
was swept to frenzies by the glandular
roil and intensity of, say, a Dylan
Thomas, to cotton readily to this open,
rational, philosophical, wry, yet deep-
ly committed kind of saying? It will
take time for Frost's achievement to
register, yet, unless I misread, these
poems are an achievement to stand tall
beside any passage of the earlier Frost.

Mr. Frost opens his book boldly with
a motto compounded from lines of his
"Kitty Hawk" and separately set as a
frontispiece:

But God's own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
Spirit enters flesh
And for all its worth
Charges into earth
In birth after birth
Ever fresh and fresh.
We may take the view
That its derring-do
Thought of in the large
Is one mighty charge
On our human part
Of the soul's etherial
Into the material.

"Kitty Hawk" is a poem of almost
500 lines begun in homage to the
Wright brothers as the inventors of an
age, as the two who finally gave wings
to man and who, it may be said, pointed
man's way to the spaces beyond the
earth. The Wright brothers gave man
a new age and with it, both a new pos-
sibility and a new grief. But Mr. Frost's
position is that the risk must be taken.
The essence of Western man has always
been that he dared risk his venture
into the material. And what other
course, the poet asks, is there for man?
We must risk ourselves, we must risk
the material. The East refused to risk
that substantiation of the spirit, it re-
fused the descent into the material, and
it thereby stagnated into griefs of its
own.

Westerners inherit
A design for living
Deeper into matter . . .

Dangerously perhaps, but

If it was not wise,
Tell me why the East
Seemingly has ceased
From its long stagnation
In mere meditation.

52

SR/March 24, 1962

What is all the fuss
To catch up with us?

That is hardly the sort of poetry love-sick boys will read to their panting girls, but it is certainly poetry of an order of mind-wise, intense, and elevated.

The poem ends with a salute to science that certainly goes about as far as seems possible toward reversing the position taken in "The Egg and the Machine."

God of the machine.
Peregrine machine,
Some still think is Satan,
Unto you the thanks
For this token flight,
Thanks to you and thanks
To the brothers Wright
Once considered cranks
Like Darius Green
In their home town, Dayton.

Once the history-of-ideas boys get their hands on that passage, I suspect it will become one of the most widely quoted in all academe as evidence of how far American poetry has come since Poe's hatred of all science, and from Frost's own early distrust of the machine. Let me hope the history-of-ideas boys will not overlook the reason for Mr. Frost's praise. The Wrights become figures for his homage because they added a new range to the human condition.

It is for the same reason that Mr. Frost praises Columbus in that remarkable poem, "America Is Hard to See."

Columbus may have worked the wind
A new and better way to Ind
And also proved the world a ball,
But how about the wherewithal?
Not just for scientific news
Had the Queen backed him to a
cruise.

This is the tone of the whimsical Frost as especially characterized by the witty, down-played use of the word "cruise" to describe Columbus's voyage. Mr. Frost maintains that tone throughout the poem, describing ironically how da Gama came back with the gold the Queen had invested in, while Columbus found himself in dungeon chains. Yet from that whimsical and ironic surface rise some island peaks of plain statement that come as close to defining America as any man's poetry has done:

Had but Columbus known enough
He might have boldly made the bluff
That better than Da Gama's gold
He had been given to behold
The race's future trial place,
A fresh start for the human race.

He might have fooled Valladolid.
I was deceived by what he did.
If I had had my chance when young

I should have had Columbus sung
As a god who had given us
A more than Moses' exodus.

There then follow the simply stated lines:

But all he did was spread the room
Of our enacting out the doom
Of being in each other's way,
And so put off the weary day
When we would have to put our
mind
On how to crowd but still be kind.

It is perhaps such lines as these that best testify to the quality of Frost's vision of America. Long before, he had written "Mowing," in which he said "Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak." Even as a bard Mr. Frost will not inflate his devotion beyond reality. There is a darkness of doubt as well as a radiance of hope in his vision of America, and he will speak both truths to his people.

Perhaps Americans have never truly found their America. Certainly that America that was a golden legend to the Elizabethans has never been found. In "The Gift Outright," the poem Mr. Frost and President Kennedy jointly chose for the last inauguration, America is still that dream to be lived into. "The land was ours before we were the land's." The hope is that Americans will someday become truly identified with their "land of living," and certainly the poem itself is the noblest utterance yet to be spoken of the American continent. But in it, Mr. Frost carefully refrained from saying that the identification of Americans and America has actually taken place:

Such as we were we gave ourselves
outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds
of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would
become.

"Would become," Mr. Frost says, not "has become." In fact, that difference was President Kennedy's joke. Would Mr. Frost read it now as "has become"? Mr. Frost read it as he wrote it.

In the present volume he continues the same theme in a remarkable poem so central to his intent that he has taken his title from it. "The Cabin in the Clearing" is a dialogue somewhat in the manner of the earlier "The Lovely Shall be Choosers." Here the speakers

are Mist and Smoke, the Mist arising from the land, the Smoke from the man's chimney. Mist begins by saying:

I don't believe the sleepers in this house
Know where they are.

Smoke replies:

They've been here long enough
To push the woods back from around
the house
And part them in the middle with
a path.

It is a mysterious and compelling poem that follows. The two vapors that accompany the human spirit see the clearing the man and woman have made, but is the clearing there only to maintain a path that joins them to their equally bewildered neighbors? "Nearer in plight their neighbors are than distance." Their plight is that they are not sure either of who they are or of where they are. They have not reached assuredly to either themselves or their land. "They are too sudden to be credible," says Smoke and joins with Mist to eavesdrop on their uneasy sleep, "A mist and smoke eavesdropping on a haze," an uncertainty perhaps already as dim as the Indians whose land it once was in total identification. The poem closes with what I take to be a joint statement by Mist and Smoke (or is it, perhaps, a comment by the poet)?

Than smoke and mist who better
could appraise
The kindred spirit of an inner haze?

Are we no more than a smoke and a mist upon the land? No more substantial than that? Is that Mr. Frost's intent? That the land is forever beyond us, and that we shall all in time drift off it while the land remains for some future people to be lost in as the Indian was lost in it? Let no man be in a hurry to fix too tight a meaning to it, but the poem itself, its mood and motion, will not be forgotten.

There are only a few pieces in the present collection that sing in quiet so mysterious a music. Some there are but, as noted, Mr. Frost's new voice is toward saying rather than singing. Certainly the longish poem entitled "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation" —a poem more whimsical than bardic— adds a particular gem of wit to the treasury of discursive poetry. Nor are Mr. Frost's more bardic lines "For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration" to be taken lightly as examples of occasional verse.

If the Frost of these poems is less intense than the first impassioned Frost

SR/March 24, 1962

of the lyrics, there is in these a power of mind (the "thoughtfelt thing") that speaks with a breadth and an elevation it could not have achieved through passion alone. The bard has largely replaced the lyric poet. In so doing, he has given America a voice it has long needed and will certainly learn to be grateful for.

THE question that remains to ask must be addressed to the Swedish Academy. Why has Mr. Frost not received a Nobel Prize? It seems all but inconceivable, and certainly insulting, that an academy willing in the past to honor Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck, should so spend its honors upon foot-hills while overlooking our central mountain. I cannot doubt that Mr. Frost would be gratified by a Nobel Prize. Why should he not? He more than deserves it. Why should a man not want what is his by right?

I suspect that the Awards Board of the Swedish Academy, like so many of our New Critics, has been culpably slow in learning to read Mr. Frost's poems. Perhaps the members of that board do not recognize seriousness lightly taken and whimsy seriously taken. If that has been their block, the more bardic of these poems should give them as much straightforward public utterance on man's fate as ever their socially conscious souls may hunger for.

But I suspect rather than their failure has been in their inability to recognize the genius of Mr. Frost's language. Eliot and Yeats, both Nobel Prize winners, wrote in the kind of English a European may come close to learning in his own universities. But Frost's English is of the soil. Only a man with New England in his mouth could write so. Nor is the diction the primary characteristic of Frost's way of speaking; he uses only an occasional New Englandism. Far more than the word choices, it is the rhythm that sings and speaks in New England cadences, the way the rhythm throws the voice down hard on some words and slides it over others. It is the rhythm that makes Mr. Frost the least translatable of poets. But it is also the rhythm that makes him the particular genius of the American tongue.

Perhaps no man raised to another tongue will ever truly hear the subtlety and perfection of Mr. Frost's full voice. But by now, certainly, the Swedish Academy must have heard that truth stated often enough to take note of it, if only by hearsay. The simple truth is that American literature has brought forth none to walk before him. Mr. Frost's recognition by the Nobel Prize committee has been too long delayed. There seems to be no conceivable reason for delaying longer.

## Phoenix Nest

*Continued from page 8*

lace asked me what really happened in Max Perkins's office and I gave him my account of it. When I finished he pulled out a clipping containing Ernest's opposite account.

"What would be your comment on this contrast?" he asked.

In a crisis like that I hardly ever think of the right thing to say until I get home, but in that case I think I did.

"Do you remember Irvin Cobb, the American humorist," I said, "and what an awfully homely mug he had? Once in the old days when he was conducting a column in the *Daily Telegraph* he made some slurring remark about Lillian Russell, the reigning beauty of Broadway. A correspondent wrote in vigorously protesting, and concluded his letter by saying: 'After all you're no great beauty yourself.' In answer Cobb published side by side a picture of himself at his worst and Lillian at her best, and under them in big letters the caption: 'Let the Public Decide!'"

It doesn't matter who came out on top in Scribner's office. Neither of us did anything praiseworthy. But it does matter profoundly—at least to me—who told the truth.

However, you can't ask everything of one man, and I find Ernest's triumph over fear, his scorn for the petty big-city, big-celebrity life he might have lived in New York as a well-advertised literateur, his bold honesty in expressing his dissent from mollycoddle standards, and the superb style in which it is often expressed it—I find these things a joy and an inspiration, I think sometimes in reading him of Walt Whitman's great lines: "This is no book—who touches this touches a man." I think also of those wonderful lines written by Chapman, the translator of Homer:

> Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea

> Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind

> Even till his sailyard tremble, his masts crack,

> And his rapt ship run on her side so low

> That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.

> There is no danger to a man that knows

> What life and death is—there's not any law

Exceeds his knowledge.

That is the kind of man Hemingway tried to be, and he superbly succeeded.

—MAX EASTMAN.

## Chess Corner—No. 68

THE dean of American chess, Herman Helms, celebrated his ninety-second birthday not long ago. His life spans the first and current world champions, from Morphy to Botvinnik, though his personal and over-the-board experiences began with world champion Steinitz. He has encountered, at times successfully, all the giants of his era, including Emanuel Lasker, Capablanca, Pillsbury, and Marshall. And up to a few years ago his pet indulgence was ten-second chess, where he has blitzkrieged some of the finest lightning players of the metropolitan clubs. In 1903, during the famous Cambridge Tournament, he founded the *American Chess Bulletin*, which flourishes today. All chess players salute this modest and lovable gentleman of the old school. A piquant example of his play follows.

### DUTCH DEFENSE

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Smyth<br>White</th><th></th><th>Helms<br>Black</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>P-Q4</td><td>P-KB4</td><td>4 N-B3 P-QN3</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>N-KB3</td><td>N-KB3</td><td>5 P-K3 B-N2</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>P-B4</td><td>P-K3</td><td>6 B-Q3 B-Q3</td></tr></tbody></table>

The development of Black's Bishop at Q3 is unusual. But it is poised in the direction of White's Kingside, where the White King eventually will take refuge.

<table><tr><td>7</td><td>P-QR3</td><td>P-QR4</td><td>9 Q-B2 N-B3</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>O-O</td><td>O-O</td><td>10 P-K4?</td></tr></table>

This "break" in the center is normally good. Here it opens lines which quickly accrue to Black. Better would be 10 N-QN5, driving Black's Bishop.

<table><tr><td>10</td><td>PxP</td><td>15 P-KN3</td><td>QxN</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>NxP</td><td>NxN</td><td>16 B-Q3 R-B6</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>BxP</td><td>NxP</td><td>17 B-K3 Q-K4</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>BxPch</td><td>K-R1</td><td>18 QR-K1 QR-KB1</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>NxN</td><td>Q-R5</td><td>19 BxP</td></tr></table>

To stoop for a Pawn when his defenses are crumbling is bad judgment.

<table><tr><td>19</td><td>Q-R4</td><td>21 B-K4</td><td>QR-B4</td></tr><tr><td>20</td><td>B-K3</td><td>Q-R6</td><td>22 BxQR</td></tr></table>

The game is over!

<table><tr><td>22</td><td>Q-N7ch</td></tr><tr><td>23</td><td>RxNP mate</td></tr></table>

—AL HOROWITZ.

SR/March 24, 1962

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