The Notebooks of Robert Frost were published three years ago to rapturous approval. Frost is still an American icon and an American nonesuch, the last major poet to find a public audience—his poems say more about the American character than any poet’s after Whitman. Though Frost’s America seems distant almost a century after the publication of North of Boston, he remains the most quoted American modern. The notebooks gave a rare look inside his workshop, showing the painstaking and sometimes clumsy way his poems, essays, and talks were put together. Reviewers for newspapers and magazines, working to short deadlines, usually trust the labors of scholars. Still, it was hazardous for the New Republic to call the book “expertly edited and annotated” without apparently checking the editing or annotation, or the TLS to declare the editing (apart from one minor cavil) a “superb job” and a “labour of love,” saying that “anyone who dips into them has reason to be grateful to their editor.”

Late in 2007, a review by James Sitar in Essays in Criticism accused Robert Faggen, that very editor, of making monstrous errors of transcription, some so embarrassing they made him—or Frost—look like an idiot. A few months later, after six months in press, my own review in Parnassus condemned the edition in similar terms. Both pieces claimed that Faggen, though in many places a canny reader of Frost’s diabolic hand, had offered hardly a page that did not need revision. The errors ran to the thousands, many of them major; and a good proportion gave readings that were nonsensical or preposterous. Who would believe, had a scholar not said so, that Frost wrote “picktie exhibition,” or a “hide [linigue] for harriners,” or “Columbus brooch alone awhile,” or “In colleness or in the quest of fruit,” or “all he is parinian,” or “use of lipstitch and howdy,” or many like acts of myopic absurdity?

Where Faggen was not making nonsense of Frost’s sense, he was misreading with suicidal creativity: Frost’s “brought up to date” became “brought up dull,” “if I blame your Bently” became “if I become your Bently,” “any of us” became “angry,” “belong to the highest class” became “belong to the highest clan,” “It seems poor spirited” became “It runs poor spirited.” On and on it went. Faggen showed a hapless gift for transcribing words that were not there while overlooking the words that were. Lines perfectly legible were called illegible and left untranscribed. Punctuation was invented on some occasions, ignored on others. Words Frost had misspelled were mistakenly corrected, words he had spelled correctly bizarrely misspelled. Though Faggen declared that everything in the notebooks was included, entire lines were missing, as well as a whole page found by James Sitar. The editor showed a genial talent for transcribing his own editorial notes and private queries, as if Frost had made them. The phrase “When spoken to unsympathetically attack ally as by a hostile lawyers” should have read “When spoken to unsympathetically as by a hostile lawyer.” The two extra words were Faggen’s initial attempt to read “unsympathetically”—he simply forgot to remove them. This is among the damning evidence that the editor failed to proofread his text against the original manuscripts.

Sitar minutely examined four notebooks housed at Boston University and Dartmouth; I used xeroxes from half of the forty or more at Dartmouth. We worked independently, without knowledge of each other’s discoveries. When The New York Times pick- ed up the story, Faggen responded with scholarly hauteur. “My practices are in harmony,” he announced, referring to one mistake, “with those of most other editors of Frost’s manuscripts: I let his misspellings stand. This is not an error. In short, we have here a matter of critical judgment, the sort any responsible editor must exercise. I maintain that most of the passages about which Mr. Logan raises questions fall into this category.” So it was all due to a difference of opinion or poor Frost’s misspellings. Faggen later wrote the editor of Parnassus in high dudgeon, darkly threatening legal action.

Faggen assured the Times that “any project of this nature and magnitude is bound to invite criticism and undergo changes and improvements, a great many of which have been incorporated in the forthcoming paperback edition.” This technique, entirely fitting for a Frost scholar, is called stonewalling. It’s true that scholarly editions sometimes have to correct a handful of errors in subsequent printings; but Faggen’s tone is curiously dismissive, if he already knew that a “great many” corrections were necessary.

An editor is a beautiful drudge, the sort of drudge to whom all readers must be grateful. It’s a pity that modern English departments hold editors in such contempt. Very few departments teach the first thing about editing manuscripts, preferring that graduate students scribble some airy nothing in the latest critical jargon. There are not many second chances in scholarship—though a good edition may last a century, a bad one may not be replaced for a generation or more. New editions of Shakespeare are issued by the hour; but half a century after Eliot’s death we are just getting round to scholarly editions of his work, and the last modern edition of Drayton’s poems was published before Eliot died.

Now at last the long-postponed paperback edition of the Notebooks has been published.[1] It should first be said that Faggen has used his delays wisely, repairing a good many of the freakish readings he had blithely defended (a “great many” changes in fact meant thousands). Numerous pages show that he has sometimes radically altered the earlier text—the new edition contains, in other words, every evidence of the pernicious and corrosive errors he once blandly denied. Take, for example, the now infamous transcription of a bit of Frost’s Yankee wisdom. (Curly brackets mark words Frost wrote above the line.)

Thus there is another rule of life I never {always think of when} I see a player serving two or three bats once before he goes to the plate to fan pitcher with one bat. Always try to have arranged that you were doing something harder and more disciplinary [illegible] than what you the picktie exhibition you have before you are about to make of yourself. [Faggen 1]

It should have been obvious to a child that something had gone wrong here. Serving two or three bats? Fan pitcher? The picktie exhi- bition? I offered the following corrections in my review (changes to Faggen’s copy are marked by italics):

Then there is another rule of life I never {always think of when} I see a m player swing two or three bats at once before he goes to the plate to fan the pitches with one bat. Always try to ha have arranged that you were doing something harder and more disciplinary that than what you the public exibition you have before you are about to make of yourself. [Logan]

Here is Faggen’s new version:

Then there is another rule of life I never {always think of when} I see a player swing two or three bats at once before he goes to the plate to face the pitcher with one bat. Always try to have arranged that you were doing something harder and more disciplinary [illegible] than what you the public exibition you have before you are about to make of yourself. [Faggen 2]

This is much better. It follows my suggestions almost exactly, and in one place improves upon them—Faggen is surely right that Frost wrote “face the pitcher,” not my “fan the pitches” or Faggen’s original “fan pitcher.” Still, the editor has missed two small strike-outs, claimed a perfectly legible word is illegible, and oddly struck through the word “exibition,” though it is uncanceled in the original. He has reduced some ten errors to three. They are not important errors, perhaps; but then he has had two chances to get the passage right.

Take another bewildering excerpt, some doggerel about Christopher Columbus.


Colundres! Christophes! No less!
What no one left alive but you


He boards again
Columbus boards in I [illegible]
Till someone comes up over [side]


The meekly [?vaunt] single file
Columbus brooch alone awhile
[Faggen 1]

The editor who believes that sensible old Robert Frost wrote things like Colundres! Christophes! or Columbus brooch alone awhile simply isn’t thinking. Frost occasionally misspelled a word or botched a phrase, but the notebooks show he did not write nonsense. This was my proposed transcription:


Columbus! Christopher! No less!
What no one left alive but you


Columbus broods {He broods again} in Spanish pride
Till someone comes up over side


They meekly vanish single file
Columbus broods alone awhile
[Logan]

I kept Faggen’s couplet order, though here and elsewhere he ignores Frost’s instructions for inserting marginal additions. Here is the editor’s second try:

Columbus! Christopher! No less!
What no one left alive but you
He broods again
Columbus boards in I Spanish pride
Till someone comes up over [side]
The meekly vanish single file
Columbus broods alone awhile [Faggen 2]

This, alas, is only a little better than his original. He adopts many of my readings, including “Spanish pride,” but in the same line continues to transcribe “broods” as “boards” (the word is clear and unmistakable), fails to mark correctly the phrase Frost wrote in superscript (He broods again), and leaves intact the “I,” which was his earlier misreading of the “S” in “Spanish.” He then keeps “side” in brackets for no reason, and takes “They” for “The.” Only the last could be called arguable. On the following page of the notebooks, he continues to offer “They’ve named it for Americas” for what is obviously “They’ve named it for Americus” (i.e., Amerigo Vespucci—Americus was the Latin form of his name, feminized to America because continents were by custom given women’s names).

Consider the third passage I examined, in which Faggen transformed Hanno the Carthaginian into “Hannof the Carlingian” (the notes had the name correctly, but the transcription was cheerfully grotesque—there’s no “f” to be seen, and “Carlingian,” whatever that might be, cannot possibly be the word on the page). In his revision, Faggen has done fairly well through most of the passage, making some twenty corrections on the page, all following my version, though he misses a word and misplaces a phrase, misspells another word, and somehow renders “all to the good, if I was chasened” as “all to the good. I was chasened.” Worse, at the end of Frost’s draft, Faggen at first offered this (I have expanded my earlier transcription by one sentence):

It would go on tell how the sailors getting impatiently with her intractability were permitted to skin her by Hanno to skin her and take her hide home for a trophy of one of the earliest voyages in the Atlantic. They they hung it up in the temple of Ashtaroth as hide [linigue] for harriners. Tunique ought to be rhymed somehow with Runic–Runique. [Faggen 1]
so It would go on to tell how the sailors getting impatient with her intractability were permitted to skin her by Hanno to skin her and take her hide home for a trophy of one of the earliest voyages into the Atlantic. They They hung it up in the temple of Astaroth as a hide unique for hairiness. Unique ought to be rhymed somehow with Punic–Punique. [Logan]

Faggen’s second trial is better, though not by much.

It would go on tell how the sailors getting impatiently with her intractability were permitted to skin her by Hanno to skin her and take her hide home for a trophy of one of the earliest voyages in the Atlantic. They they hung it up in the temple of Ashtaroth as hide unique for hairiness. Unique ought to be rhymed somehow with Runic–Runique. [Faggen 2]

The first sentence has been left unchanged despite the obvious mistakes. Getting impatiently? Elsewhere “Astaroth” is still “Ashtaroth” and “a hide” still “hide.” “Runic–Runique” has been left uncorrected, no doubt because Frost’s capital P’s are slightly malformed (he sometimes dragged the end of his stroke—and in “Punique” he started to write a lowercase “p” and changed his mind). A little thought would have suggested that “Runic” makes no sense—Hanno came from Carthage, not the snowy wastes of northern Europe. In the jocular poem Frost imagines, the rhyme will be unique / Punic (or “Punique,” his Ogden Nash–like joke). Ho ho. Having forgotten the Punic Wars, Faggen barrels on, often in error.

There are so many additional passages to choose from, it’s difficult to select the best examples. Here’s part of a draft of the unpublished poem “Old Gold for Christmas”:


You’re one fool walking so you can’t yourself
It’s where I wanted {I want to claim} claim my residence.
[jllegible phrase]
The house is not much but the barn is standing.
There! Midnight I suppose or one o clock.
The city should be careful it does
Blowing its lights out all at once so suddenly on {on people}
Like eighty candles on a birthday cake.
[Faggen 1]

This has been left uncorrected in the new edition—Faggen has not even bothered to change the hilarious “jllegible phrase.” Here’s how the passage should appear:


You’re on foot walking so you can’t yourself
It’s where I live and {I want to} claim my residence.
{The next election if I have to vote}
The house is not much but the barn is standing.
There! midnight I suppose or one o clock.
The city should be careful what it does,
Blowing its lights all out at once so suddenly {on one breath on people}
Like eighty candles on a birthday cake.
[Logan]

This should be mortifying, since in transcribing an earlier draft Faggen has on foot correctly; but the lines are representative of the problems throughout—words misread, words missed entirely, words inverted, words not read at all, and one word duplicated where it stands alone on the page. The “jllegible phrase” is difficult but not impossible to read, even in a smudged xerox.

Here’s a difficult excerpt from Notebook 1, which Faggen initially rendered as follows:


The pod {may be an Egrets} [illegible] carapace
From many flowers one [illegible]
But yet so bursting full of fertile seed
[?Found] Then {sound for} the stackling sake
The moon [illegible] talking is the worse the late
[Faggen 1]

The moon talking! His second try is little better:


The pod [illegible] {may be an Egrets} carapace
From many flowers one [?such] ace
But yet so bursting full of fertile seed
[?Found] them {sound for} the state’s [illegible] sake
The more [illegible] tally is the worse the take
[Faggen 2]

He has given greater attention to rhyme here; but, difficult as the handwriting is, Frost wrote this:


The pod [?is our lone] {may be a [?lonely]} carapace
From many flowers one [?servile grace/?sowing race]
But yet so bursting full of fertile seed
Count them if but {someday} for the statistic’s sake)
The more the tally is the worse the take)
[Logan]

The problematic lonely in line 1 is written over another word, perhaps car (a false start at carapace), making decryption difficult. Egrets, however, makes no sense. Yet the line “From many florets one lone carapace” occurs the page before. I found belatedly that Frost kept other drafts of this passage in Notebook 23, where “Count them if but for the statistics sake” suggest the accuracy of my transcript. Why did Faggen not notice these drafts and use them? He seems to have deciphered one word at a time, without thinking that words must make phrases and phrases sentences—or even that individual words ought to be in the dictionary. That’s the only way to explain how, in both editions, Faggen records another version of the last line above as “The more the rally thing the worm the tale”!

Or consider these lines:


He knows exactly where to draw the line
Between the good for nothing and the bad
He’s they were kept at their expense
[illegible line]
Better that good for nothing kept them
At your expense than that we had to keep them
[two illegible lines]
[Faggen 2]

Frost was here trying to draft a particular thought. In the first edition, Faggen offered “He knows sadly” and “He’s there were kept,” so he stared hard at this and made two changes, though the latter is nonsensical. The passage should read:


He knows just w exactly where to draw the line
Between the good for nothing and the bad
He’d rather theywere kept at their expense
He’d rather people kept themselves

Better the good for nothing kept themselves
At our expense than that we had to
Than that we kept them

At our expense than that we had to keep them
[Logan]

As elsewhere, words and strikeouts are missed or misplaced, a canceled word is canceled no longer, and legible lines are called illegible. Or, to take a final example, here’s Faggen’s original transcription of a bit of Frost’s light verse:


A thousand years ago in Rome
And I was in a catacomb
Upon a rosmary shelf
Stretched out upon a strong shelf
I had entirely to myself
I lay apparently becalmed
From having died and been embalmed
With toes upturned arms composed
And you would never have supposed
What I lay there a thinking of
Of many things but mostly love
Venus with who wrote Anchises lay
So far from having had her day
Her reigning was just begun
She was is the one and only one
The element of elements
That all the universe creates
That when the elements were brutes
Was observing was
[Faggen 1]

This remains unaltered in the new edition. It should read:


A thousand years ago in Rome
And I was in a catacomb
Upon an [?ossuary]shelf
Stretched out upon a stony shelf
I had entirely to myself
I lay apparently becalmed
From having died and been embalmed
With [illegible word] {toes upturned} arms composed
And you would never have supposed
What I lay they there a thinking of
Of everything but mostly love
Venus with who with Anchises lay
So far from having had her day
Her regency was just begun
She was {is} the one and only one
The element of elements
That all the universe cements
That when the elements were booked
Was obviously was overlooked
[Logan]

More than a dozen errors, many of them comical. Again, there are words and strikeouts missed entirely, and readings that invent nonsense where sense was there to be seen. Frost usually drafted his poems metrically, so setting down a line like “Upon a rosmary shelf” or “Her reigning was just begun” ought to have warned any editor with an ear that something was amiss. Faggen also seems not to notice when Frost was drafting in rhyme. Frost made mistakes (here he forgot to delete “they” in one line and “Was” in another), but he was not subject to the sort of errors with which the editor burdens him. Venus with who wrote Anchises lay? A few lines further, the editor transcribes a line simply as “To” when it reads “To hydrogen and [?oya] oxagen.” Lines nearby show similar lapses, as if he had started his labors and been interrupted by the doorbell.

Faggen has corrected about half of the painful nonsense I pointed out in the review, in each case embracing my proposed revisions: the newspaper he called the Tribute is now the reliable Tribune, “to consider bear one year” now “to consider fear one year,” “In colleness or in the quest of fruit” now “In idleness or in the quest of fruit,” and his “lipstitch and howdy” now “lipstick and powder.” The editor has accepted that Frost wrote “dig your grave in if you died” not “dig your rave in if your dead,” “all he is poor man” not “all he is parinian,” “wild heaths and deserts” not “wild hearths and deserts,” “go to wrack and ruin” not “go to wrack and mine,” “two rows of rock maples” not “two rows of rock samples,” and “He might {have} parroted the thinking folk,” not “He might {have} arrested the thinking folk.”

Unfortunately, Faggen has failed to adopt readings just as obvious, so we still have “History that coming / I [illegible]” instead of “His son thats coming’s / Is State Police,” “Who are you marring with now?” instead of “Who are you marrying me to now?”, “And if I did today” instead of “And if I died today,” “Lets not be persona!” instead of “Lets not be personal,” “And put in y in some fold of her dress” instead of “And put it by in some fold of her dress,” and “got know down” instead of “got knocked down.” He perversely continues to maintain that Frost wrote “Sog Magog Mempleremagog” instead of the Biblical “Gog Magog Memphremagog.” (The glacial Lake Memphremagog lies north of Vermont, above the Magog River.) Frost’s capital “g” is plain; it lies on the notebook page just above the identical “g” of God. Faggen’s idea that “Sog” was a joke is a nifty defense, but would need some shred of evidence.

Worse, Faggen is still certain Frost wrote “No one ever took a wife for wise except by mistake in reading old print Wife Wife.” The type form of the old “long s” looked like an “f” with part or all of the crossbar missing—the running titles in the First Folio seem to include plays called The Tempeƒt and Meaƒure for Meaƒure. Frost took great care in his notebook entry to print out the words “wife wiƒe”—in other words, in an old book “wife” might have been mistaken for “wise.” Ho ho. The poet went to a lot of trouble for such a dull joke, but it has been entirely lost on Faggen.

Among blunders I did not mention in my review: “The works … they can say” should be “The worst … they can say,” “rise on skipping stones” should be “rise on stepping stones,” “taken sure of” should be “taken care of,” “the Post office has recently appeared” should be “the post office has recently agreed,” “The mining of them that nod and not” should be “The misery of them that read and read.” If Faggen believes Frost wrote any of the things he transcribed so recklessly, he’s beyond salvation. To take another lucky dip in the voluminous sack of errors, Frost wrote “tell my daughter,” not “till my daughter”; “in the street light,” not “I the street light”; “any state in the union,” not “any sate in the union”; “Such is his social … fancy,” not “Struck is his social … fancy”; “the city should be careful,” not “the really should be careful”; “all the people they to sleep have bored,” not “all the people they to sleep have poured”; “with our {new} novelties,” not “will our {new} novel”; and so on. Not one of these silly blunders has been corrected. Many of the mistakes remaining are small, and few possess the high comedy of those in the first edition; but when you multiply them, page after page, you still have a gruesome monument to the scholar’s nemesis, Error.

Even after superficial acquaintance with these notebooks, the editor’s governing philosophy should have been that Frost tried to make sense. There are moments of distraction and slips of the hand; but only at hazard can an editor pretend that Frost was an ungrammatical and illiterate moron who could write “A propiting toward old prodigal romance” or “Then {sound for} the stackling sake” or “Of all empodered in our pachyderm” or “That is not gathered to abidale”—three of them on the same page! The poet did on occasion misspell words or botch a phrase; but the incompetent transcriptions the editor defended he has now often silently corrected, if not always convincingly (the third example, for example, is now “If all [?unpacked] in our pachyderm”—it should be “Of all embodied in our pachyderm”). He has even humiliatingly been forced to revise most of the longer quotations in his introduction. (In the acknowledgments, he tries to correct which notebooks Boston University holds, only to get them wrong in a new way.)

The paleographer, that miserable soul, delights in spending his mortal hours among a’s that look like u’s, t’s that could pass for l’s, p’s acquainted with no letter in any human alphabet, and words, whole words, that beg to be mistaken for twins entirely unrelated. If he does not love such things with his horny heart and weary eye, he has no business in the business. The finest corrections here show a flair for reading a hand sometimes fiendishly difficult (at worst it makes a doctor’s prescriptions look legible). Unfortunately, Faggen is rarely thorough, and the resulting patchwork of readings reliable, almost reliable, and grossly mistaken makes the edition unusable. He simply lacks the attention and finicky care necessary to make his transcripts perfect. It’s bemusing to compare a page of these editions and find twenty or thirty corrections—my favorite being “He made a sort of fling latched on me” reborn as “He made a sort of flying tackle on me” (in another draft of this line, Faggen rendered the phrase “a f lying Lachle”).

Harvard must have asked the editor not to increase the size of the volume. A missing line has been squeezed in here and there (as well as the whole page noted by Sitar), but there’s still no sign of the fragmentary draft, probably of a poem, Frost left on both sides of the torn page in Notebook 31. Rather than attempt some more sensible system of numbering the notebook pages, Faggen has soldiered on with his comically ambiguous system—in Notebook 47, there are forty sheets that might be known as 47.1r (that is, Notebook 47, page 1, recto). For the purposes of the index, the editor has simply thrown in the sponge, so you learn only that Thoreau is mentioned somewhere in the wastes of Notebook 47—it’s up to you to thumb through the thirty-seven pages of this edition to find him. Why didn’t Faggen simply use the volume’s page numbers? “Thoreau, 655.” Done. The index has been expanded by a full page, but there are still entries missing or inadequate—good luck if you want to know where Frost mentions Lenin, or Warren Harding, or Richard Bentley. And why, even after the error was pointed out, is Walter Pater still William?

There is still some mystery surrounding so-called Notebook 47, a bundle of unrelated and miscellaneous sheets. The note regarding its location has been left unrevised, so the innocent scholar who thinks all the pages lie at Dartmouth will be surprised when he shows up at Hanover; a buried footnote reveals that some pages are at Virginia (there was no good reason for these caches of orphaned sheets to be married in shotgun fashion). Still, if you were curious about the page where Frost said that in public women should not be permitted to wear “lipstitch and howdy,” you’d be hard up. Dartmouth has no knowledge of this page. I suggested that Frost probably wrote “lipstick and powder,” and, as noted, the reading has been corrected. Though I’m delighted that a reader, without ever having seen the page, can decipher Frost more accurately than Faggen, I’m sure scholars would like to know where it is held.

This is a tale of scholarly hubris, editorial incompetence, and academic cowardice, a sorry tale whatever moral you attach to it. The first edition bore every sign of haste and monstrous carelessness, a deaf ear to meter, and an unhappy inability to look for the sense of a passage, or to compare it with drafts elsewhere in the notebook, or even on the same page. Alas, this is sometimes still the case.

Here a scholar has tacitly admitted to making thousands of errors, many of them ludicrous and humiliating in nature. This paperback edition amounts to a wholesale rejection of the earlier volume, which was defective in just about every way one could imagine. Since the Notebooks have now in many places been corrected (even if not half so well as necessary), you might think the editor would mention the fact in his introduction, or that Harvard would blazon it on the title page. Alas, about these crowds and mobs and throngs of corrections there’s not a single word. The poor reader will ransack this freshly dry-cleaned edition in vain for any sign that it isn’t the exact text pub- lished in hardcover three years ago. Will Harvard now offer to replace the condemned hardcover edition free of charge, particularly in the university libraries on whose shelves that calamity now sits, waiting to ambush any unwary young scholar?

The difference between Frost and the other modernists is that Frost seemed to like people. His private life was messy and sometimes cruel; but his poems care about people’s cares, are troubled by their troubles. He might have viewed this whole sorry episode with sang-froid, just another sign that men and women are often guilty of vanity, pride, and unwitting self-delusion. That might be called the human condition. Frost would have invented a rueful phrase to cover it.

Notes
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  1. The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen; Harvard University Press, 848 pages, $19.95. Go back to the text.

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