Into My Own by Roger Kahn

Author:Roger Kahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2012-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Let chaos storm!

Let cloud shapes swarm!

I wait for form.

(Publius Helvius Pertinax, was emperor of Rome in the year 193. He attempted to curb the random excesses of the Praetorian Guard—the storm troopers of antiquity—and restore order and form to Imperial Rome. Members of the Praetorian Guard murdered him. Soldiers then placed Pertinax’s severed head on a lance and held it high as they paraded about the streets. The reign of Pertinax had lasted for three months.)

In Vermont the late afternoon sun brightened a field beyond the window. “Used to play softball out past there,” Frost said. “You remember, don’t you? You remember that I pitched. Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose—unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction. They don’t let me do all the things I want to any more, but if we had a ball, I’d pitch to you a little, and I’d surprise you.” He grinned.

“You still like sports?”

“Oh, yes. You get a certain glory out of being translated, but no, no, it doesn’t work. So much is lost. There are other arts that are international. High jumping. Boxing. They understood Jack Dempsey’s left hook quite readily in French and German. Nothing was lost. But with poetry, I sometimes tell ‘em, ‘Poetry is what’s lost in the translation.’

“I follow baseball. I’m a New Englander, so I root for the Red Sox, but I don’t really like the way the Red Sox play. Too much in the manner of Boston gentlemen.”

“How do you like your baseball played, Mr. Frost?”

“Spike ’em as you go around the bases.”

Then we were serious again and I asked about another strong theme in Frost’s work, the theme of God. “Don’t make me out to be a religious man,” Frost said. “Don’t make me out to be a man who has all the answers. I don’t go around preaching God. I’m not a minister. I’m always pleased when I see people comfortable with these things. There’s a rabbi near here, a friend of mine, who preaches in Cincinnati in the winter. He talks at the Methodist church here sometimes and tells the people in Cincinnati that he’s a summer Methodist.

“People have wondered about him at the Methodist church. One lady was troubled and said to me, ‘How do they differ from us?’

“ ‘What you got there on that table?’ I said.

“ ‘That’s a Bible,’ she said.

“I didn’t say any more.

“ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The Old Testament. Why can’t you have a Jew in church?’ she said, and she understood.”

Frost’s voice was strong. “There’s a good deal of God in everything you do,” he said. “It’s like climbing up a ladder, and the ladder rests on nothing, and you climb higher and higher and you feel there must be God at the top. It can’t be unsupported up there. I’d be afraid, though, of any one religion being the whole thing in our country, because there would probably come a day when they would take me down to the cellar and torture me—just for my own good.

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