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

6. The Teasing Paradox

☙ 119 6 ❧ The Teasing Paradox Robert Francis once remarked in an interview that he was careful to keep his distance from people who “might interrupt my thought, misunderstand me, make me feel inferior, or even impose their wills on me” (qtd. in Tetreault and Karcher 9). It is thus surprising that in The Trouble With Francis so guarded a man would reveal his homosexuality in an era when it was regarded as perverse, criminal, and a form of mental illness. Risky at the time, his disclosure removed a barrier of protection against intrusion into his private life and threatened to expose him to calumny, if not judgment, a fear that was realized five years later when Francis read a truncated version of a poem Frost wrote to revile him in the final volume of Lawrance Thompson’s biography, Robert Frost: The Later Years (1976). It was also an extraordinary instance of courage, especially for a person worried about being misunderstood, since disdainful public attitudes toward homosexuals lingered at the time that he published The Trouble With Francis.1 Having now reached a point in his life where two roads diverged, Francis may have felt that his public disclosure satisfied a need to be honest with himself. He could not accept who he was if the alternative meant that he would continue to live in fearful secrecy. Indeed, the sense of protectiveness and fear of self-exposure that Francis had to overcome underlie the account he provides of his decision to conceal an affair with an Italian man he had befriended on a ship returning to America in 1958. Fifty-seven at the time, the poet had never had a homosexual experience because “chance and circumstance had for most of my life conspired with my timidity and my sense of decency to keep my passion from becoming overt” (Trouble With Francis 211). Francis attributed C h a p t e r s i x 120 ❧ the difficulty of “making his friendship known” partly to living “in a New England town.” In spite of what he recognized was “a great change in recent years not only in the freedom to discuss sexual variations but in the willingness to accept them,” particularly in cities where “the homosexual [is] more and more taken for granted in art and entertainment and in life,” he confessed that he was “less concerned with what people in New York do and think than with the people on Market Hill Road.” Complicating the difficulty of living in a small town not hospitable to manifestations of homosexuality was what Francis called “the persistent identification of the homosexual with sordidness, brutality, and crime” (213). His awareness of a cultural conception of homosexuality as reprehensible, coupled with his “sense of decency,” persuaded him to seek the cover of sexual abstinence. Later, after having spent a year in Europe near his Italian friend in 1967, he returned to Amherst, where he “never got started on another affair” and “never found another such friend” (211). Though Francis “would have welcomed other similar friendships,” the “timidity” that kept him “bottled up for so many years continued to do so” (212). Besides serving as a realization of his fears and a justification for having kept his secret from becoming public, Francis’s knowledge that Frost had posthumously planted his vicious revenge in “On the Question of an Old Man’s Feeling” corroborated for him the condemnatory social attitude toward gay people.2 Frost’s homophobia consisted in ideologically pejorative definitions of homosexuality as emasculation, as a contravention of the norms of a matrimonial culture in which accepted sexual behavior was defined by the relationship between man and wife, and as a mental abnormality . His views were a holdover from the turn of the century, when same-sex affections, once “considered a ‘sin,’ ‘vice,’ and ‘crime,’” as Jonathan Katz observes, “began . . . to be reconceptualized and renamed ‘sexual perversions’—types of mental disease” (155).3 Though Francis never said what he thought of Frost’s vengeful poem, we can only imagine how painful he must have found it, especially given that Frost, “America’s national bard” (Thompson, Later Years 346), was the person to whom he had turned for encouragement and guidance early in his career. Francis’s need for concealment, brought closer to home by Frost’s harsh personal attack, underscored for him the problem of self-representation in his poetry. Living a closeted life, and writing in an era of apprehension when the rigid conception of...