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

1. A Cautious Distance

☙ 7 1 ❧ A Cautious Distance Elusiveness is a hallmark of Robert Francis, a trait that also inhabits the poetry and prose he carefully crafted. In a valedictory issue of the Painted Bride Quarterly (1988) devoted to critical discussion of the poet and his work, Robert Bradley speaks of a late Francis poem composed entirely of compound nouns: “The details Francis attends to are here, but paradoxically, he is invisible” (75). To David Graham, a contributor to the same issue, Francis, if not quite invisible, is a bystander, reserved and wary, through whom “everyone and everything is seen from a cautious distance” (81). To Mary Fell, this wariness is a form of selfprotection designed to guard against intrusions into his personal life: “About the true nature of his relationships with others and their effect on him we learn very little.” Echoing Graham, she writes, “There is always . . . a certain distance” (72).1 While Francis’s reluctance to write or disclose too much about himself applies to both his poetry and his prose, it is particularly acute in his novel We Fly Away (1948) and the journal Travelling in Amherst, 1931–1954 (1986), which chronicle, in part, his lengthy struggle to establish an identity as a poet, and in his autobiography, The Trouble With Francis (1971) and the essay Gusto, Thy Name Was Mrs. Hopkins (1988), which look back on that struggle. Given the personal nature of these works, he reveals only what he wants us to know about himself by engaging in distanced self-portraiture. At times, as in the novel and essay, Francis occupies, to quote from Mrs. Hopkins, the role of “a minor functionary in a fiction” (17), in which he becomes an observer of and actor in the lives of women whose remarks and behavior offer him opportunities for self-examination and self-disclosure. At other times he adopts different attitudes and voices, C h a p t e r o n e 8 ❧ as in his autobiography and journal, on the one hand, documenting with lighthearted exactitude the demands of living frugally, on the other, reflecting with candor on the toll years of publishing failure took on his confidence. Important examples of Francis’s self-portraits in prose, these works pave the way for his poems, which drew considerable praise from contemporaries, that reveal and conceal the self of the poet. Born in Upland, Pennsylvania, in 1901, Francis was a member of one of the most fertile generations in what is considered a golden age in the history of American poetry. His contemporaries included William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. As a poet he matured very slowly; in fact, Francis did not write poems until he was an undergraduate at Harvard from 1919 to 1923. His only other creative outlet at this time was the violin, which he began to study in high school in West Medford, Massachusetts , where his father moved the family in 1911 before relocating to the Amherst area and finding himself asked to become pastor of a Congregational Church in 1926. After living in the parsonage with his parents for over six years, and supporting himself by giving violin lessons, he left home in 1932 and moved to the center of Amherst. Francis, who received a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1926, had actually come to Amherst to take a teaching job at the high school, only to discover that he was not suited for this career. Confident he could survive on his own and become a writer, he tried his hand at poetry and prose while he lived with a series of older women, for whom he worked part-time. During an eight-year span, besides adding to the journal that he began in 1931, Francis published two books of poetry, Stand With Me Here (1936) and Valhalla and Other Poems (1938). In 1937, he rented a rundown house in Cushman, a village within the town of Amherst located a short distance from where he would eventually settle for the rest of his life. After he had his own home built in 1940 with insurance money from his father’s death, Francis saw his third book of poems published, The Sound I Listened For (1944), followed by the appearance of his novel four years later. But the independence and success he had achieved as an artist was overshadowed by the pain of rejection slips, the...