The Man Who Is and Is Not There: The Poetry and Prose of Robert Francis

Introduction

☙ 1 This study centers on a critical discussion of the prose and poetry of the American writer Robert Francis. Intrigued by the elusiveness of his persona as he displays it in different genres— essays, fiction, autobiography—I tease out the correspondences, continuities , and parallels among these works to demonstrate that they offer several examples of distanced self-portraiture in prose and foreshadow the ways his poetry reveals and hides the self of the poet. Among the topics that inform my discussion of his writing are his affinities to precursors such as Emerson and Thoreau, his emphasis on the regional landscape as a source for poetry, his experimentation with and development of new poetic forms, his protests against the Vietnam War, his ecological sensibility reflected in critiques against human incursions into nature, his homoeroticism, and a comparison of his poetry with that of his friend and mentor Robert Frost. I incorporate aspects of these topics into my definition of “hovering” as a concept that describes Francis’s characteristic attitude, where his speaker or narrator is both subject and object, writing about himself while inhabiting the role of detached observer. Francis weaves his struggle for identity into the distanced self-portraits that appear in the long essay Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins (1988), the novel We Fly Away (1948), the journal Travelling in Amherst, 1931–1954 (1986), and the autobiography The Trouble With Francis (1971). In these stylistically different prose works, the focus of chapter 1, he chronicles the psychological and financial difficulties he faced in his hard-won effort to declare himself a poet. The essay and novel concern the period after Francis left his parent’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1932, where his father, a Baptist minister thinking of retiring, had moved the family years Introduction 2 ❧ earlier from the eastern part of the state. Boarding with a series of older women for whom Francis performed chores to help pay his expenses— among them Mrs. Hopkins, from 1933 to 1935, and Mrs. Boynton and her housekeeper, who were the models for the central figures in the novel—he fulfilled a functionary role that permitted him to remain in the background as an observer of their lives. While he is not the ostensible subject of the essay and the novel, he selects anecdotes of what he saw the women do and heard them say that afford him opportunities for self-disclosure. Incidents emphasizing both their admirable qualities and their fussy idiosyncrasies provide a vehicle through which he expresses attitudes toward himself. What emerges is a portrait of Francis as a writer wrestling with self-doubt, who recognized that forging a literary reputation would require him to strike out on his own and hone his craft full-time rather than subsist on the small income derived from part-time odd jobs. The death of his father in 1940 paved the way for him to dedicate himself fully to writing. Francis used the $1,000 from his father’s life insurance to have a house built in a wooded area outside of Amherst; he named it Fort Juniper. Driven partly by his pecuniary circumstances and partly by his avid reading of Walden and Thoreau’s prescriptions for disciplined self-sufficiency, he followed a life of strict economy. The most candid passages in his journal and autobiography recount the crisis of confidence into which he was plunged when publishers routinely rejected his work from 1944 to 1960, causing him, in 1952, to retreat into isolation, streamline his existence further, and take a fresh look at his life and career. Once he accepted that he would have to live more frugally than ever to remain a poet, he reconciled himself to a contemplative life that freed him to write. Containing passages written after he arrived at this understanding, the autobiography and journal also reveal the playfully detached pose he adopts when he tries to satisfy readers wanting to know how he lived so thriftily. Francis’s inclination not to reveal too much about himself is evident in his poetry both early and late. Formal in structure, varied in tone, conversational in idiom, and mostly small in scope, Francis’s poems draw on his close scrutiny of the things and creatures indigenous to the New England countryside. Living for most of his career in Amherst, he was influenced during its incipient stages by Robert Frost, who took Francis under his wing after they met in 1933 and served as a guide to the younger...