Robert Francis: An American master
1901-1987
1. A neglected poet
Of all the neglected poets, the greatest was Robert Francis.
That verdict came from Robert Frost, one of the least neglected American poets of the 20th century.
The two men knew each other. When Francis, who was 27 years younger, published Valhalla and Other Poems,Frost noticed and sent him a warm letter.
The book won the Shelley Memorial Award, $475. Francis didn’t know what to do with the money so he helped friends.
For most of his life, Francis would struggle to make ends meet. But he realized early that he had to be a writer. He could not be a writer who earned his living as a teacher or as a business executive. His story is enlightening to any young person who is thinking about writing.
2. Fort Juniper
Every once in a while, I make a list of a dozen favorite poems. The list changes, but Francis’s “Juniper” is always there. It’s a way of looking at a conifer that farmers around Amherst, Mass., hated and Francis loved.
Before there were “tiny houses” Francis built a small place that he called Fort Juniper. The house was 20-by-22 feet, sat on a half acre and cost $1,500. It was just big enough for him — physically, socially and economically. He called it “an expression of my way of life, and so something of a symbol of myself.”
When Francis was asked how much space a person needed in a house, he replied: Not more than you can get really clean.
He was like that. He wanted to write, rather than clean house, or work at a job he didn’t like so he could afford a bigger house and perhaps a housekeeper.
For years, he saved money and finally built a place he could afford. He recommended the experience. He said the young need a chance to be realistic, resourceful and independent.
3. A failed teacher
Francis, born in Pennsylvania, was introverted and bookish. People like that are frequently steered toward careers in teaching.
Frances got his bachelor’s at Harvard in 1923. He taught briefly at an American school in Lebanon and then returned to Harvard for a master’s in education. He planned to teach English in high school.
But his first real teaching job taught him that the liabilities outweighed the assets. He said that he lacked the “fear-inspiring element,” the natural authority of a teacher.
He was, at the time, living in three tiny, rented rooms, one of which he had turned into a study.
“It was in this little study that I began to be a writer,” he said. “It would not be quite true to say I gave up teaching in order to write. I gave up teaching because I was too unhappy to continue.”
He decided to try to make a living as a writer. He began sending articles to newspapers and magazines and living off what little income that brought in. He said the year of that change, with all its uncertainties, was the happiest.
He had simply stopped trying to be something he wasn’t.
4. Economics
You can’t live off of poetry. That’s a truism Francis never challenged. If you earn little, spend less. Income rises and falls, he said. “But my frugality has been constant.”
Francis said his first strategy was to eliminate conveniences. The telephone, he held, was a convenience to others.
He sold 12 to 15 familiar essays a year to the Christian Science Monitor for $25 a piece. He hoped for $300 a year. It was his largest source of income.
He was surprised when readers wrote to him, and he wrote back. “It was a pleasant enlargement of life,” he said.
In 1946, he began writing “Country Comment,” a monthly column for Forum magazine.
He slowly built an audience. He continued to write and publish poetry and was eventually invited to lecture at Chautauqua and at Breadloaf conferences.
He reckoned 1954 as the turning point in his finances. He made $502 in 1953. He made $725 in three weeks at Chautauqua in ’54.
Even though his journalism paid the bills, he focused on poetry. After he gave up teaching and was scrambling to earn a living, he published a collection of poems, Stand With Me Here. He said the book made no great difference in his financial affairs but it made a great deal of difference in how he saw himself — as a poet.
5. World War II
By that time he left college, Francis said, he had acquired the “major commitments” of his life. He was first a nature observer and then a pacifist, sunbather and poet.
The great events of the day seemed to have little effect on him. With Europe descending into war, Francis joined the War Resistance League. Despite his pacifist views, he spent 1944 in the Army. He was completely unsuited to be a soldier, but he found a niche as a company clerk. “Here was my opportunity,” he said. “What nobody else wanted to do, I would content myself with doing.” He spent a year filing.
He said the army taught him to judge a man more justly.
6. Wide living, small scope
Francis wrote a book that was never published. Traveling in Concord was about the “resources for wide living in a small scope — the limited man’s limitlessness, the obscure man’s power, the fearful man’s security, the poor man’s wealth.”
Chapter 12 is “A Religion of One’s Own.”
Francis wrote: “Thoreau said he went to Walden to drive life into a corner. My motive was less ambitious: to drive only my own life into a corner. I came to the conviction that for better or worse I was a poet and that there was really nothing else for me to do but go on being a poet … Poetry was my most central, intense and inwardly rewarding experience.”
The thinking behind that book is the foundation of his move to Fort Juniper, a place where he could live a peaceful life and write poetry.
Late in life, Francis said that he had been called courageous for living alone in the woods. In fact, he said, it was an easy, comfortable life.
7. Small-holder’s life
When he wrote his autobiography, What’s the Trouble with Francis, he observed that the small, everyday facts about a person’s life are telling. Food is telling. He was a vegetarian, because he couldn’t stand the idea of killing animals. He visited few restaurants because the economy of his life wouldn’t allow it.
He had a four-point policy about meals: They must be inexpensive, easy to prepare, nourishing, appetizing. He became an advocate of the soybean.
In a letter he addressed to Henry David Thoreau, he pointed out that the Walden diet was high on starch and low on protein. “I think you left the woods to get some square meals.”
Francis loved the small luxuries that can be had by anyone who takes notice.
The nearby brook “was a vast luxury, and for it I paid no rent,” he said. His writing is filled with examples of an appreciation for such things.
• He found an unusual stone and put in on a pedestal, a sculpture in his wooded lot.
• He delighted that his lot included two trees — a pine and an apple — that had grown together. His friends were divided into two camps. Some assumed that of course he would cut the pine, freeing the apple to grow. The others were sure he’d cut the apple. He said the intertwined trees were a reminder that you can go through live without having to choose.
• His property was a gateway to wooded paths and cow tracks. He walked constantly and liked to think of a British eccentric who came across a magnificent tree and gave an oration in its honor.
Some of the things Francis loved were manmade. In his small house was a bench seat taken from an old car, which he put by the fire. The seat was a reminder that a second career is possible, he said. Ammon Hennacy, the Catholic anarchist, once sat on it and told his story for two hours, hardly pausing for breath. Francis marveled at that performance for the rest of his life.
8. Friendships
Although he valued his solitude, Francis also valued friendships. He valued conversation.
Lee Dean, an agricultural scholar and farmer, shy but a conversationalist, always brought word of something: a new idea, new book.
Francis always knew his friend Walter Wileikis was coming before he knocked on the door. Wileikis whistled Schubert quartets.
One of Francis’s prized possessions was a pasteboard box, a gift from James Still, a roommate at a Breadloaf Conference. The box was for his manuscripts. Every time he saw it, Francis was reminded of the way books are written: page by page.
His most famous friend — though not his closest — was Frost. The two had vastly different personalities. There was part of Frost’s personality that was tough and thorny. Francis was gentle to the point of seeming fragile. Yet Frost admired Francis’s poetry, and Francis was a perceptive observer of Frost.
Francis said there were three men inside Frost: the man of the poems, a created persona; the man on the platform, a mischievous entertainer; the man of conversation, quiet and kind. Then there’s the man who was not really Frost, the man who claimed to have never lifted a finger to advance his career while promoting himself relentlessly.
Francis was fond of a question that Frost liked to ask: What do you do when you are not actually writing? For Francis, the question had the force of a koan. It was a reminder that you can’t make someone else understand how to live.
9. ‘Juniper’
Francis admired common things that appeared weak but were actually strong. The poem “Juniper” admits that the scrawny bush isn’t impressive. But of the four common evergreens, the juniper “would be the last for any wind to break …“ A farmer says that one lit match could take out a juniper, and the poet tries to picture it: a swirl of branches, naturally flame-shaped, in flames. He says: Poets
Are rich in points of view if they are rich
In anything. The farmer thinks one thing;
The poet can afford to think all things
Including what the farmer thinks, thinking
Around the farmer rather than above him,
Loving the evergreen the farmer hates,
And yet not hating him for hating it.
The poet sees the color of metals in the color of the berries.
So many colors in so dull a green
And so many years before I saw them.
He sees the things we have in common — what we now call the interconnectedness of life.
Here is my faith, my vision, my burning bush.
The poet speaks for silent things. Silent things speak through the poet.
10. Isolation
Sometimes, in reading Francis, it’s had to imagine anyone who seemed less fitted to survive. But Francis, like the juniper, was resilient. Many would-be poets never develop in a world that doesn’t seem to appreciate poets. Francis, against the odds, was a poet. His poems have a beauty like that of juniper berries — so subtle it’s easy to overlook.
Few writers have described so well the sense of isolation that comes to almost all of us at some point. For Francis, the isolation seemed to be an enduring feature.
He said he lacked confidence and felt socially awkward.
As a freshman in high school, wrote “Rules & Regulations,” which included religious, physical, musical and intellectual duties. “I think there was no clear distinction in my mind between correctness and virtue,” he said.
He did well in school, but felt alone. He said, “I suffered more from the embarrassment of being seen to be alone than from loneliness itself.”
Harvard, the school that was supposed to open doors for him, might have — had he wanted to be anything other than a poet.
“Harvard’s great gift to me was a negative one: It didn’t make me a Harvard man. I was never captured or committed toward my alma mater.”
When he won a scholarship that allowed him to spend a year at the American Academy in Rome, he’d watch dinners in the courtyard, alone on the roof.
He had an affair with a married man while in Rome. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s finally allowed him to live openly, though quietly, as a gay man.
11. Two wonders
I see the same two wonders in Francis’s poetry — the same wonders he saw in juniper berries.
It’s a wonder that, through his poems, I can see so many remarkable qualities in ordinary things. It’s another wonder that it took so many years for me to see them.
There are many fine things in Francis’s poems. I don’t think they are there because of fine writing, whatever that might mean. The wonders are there because Francis lived his life in such a way that he allowed himself to do what he really wanted to do.
And so the poems seem to come naturally, as the berries come off the juniper bush, unique, like nothing else in nature.
Here’s just one example: “Fair and Unfair” is a meditation in six lines.
The beautiful is fair, the just is fair
Yet one is commonplace and one is rare.
I can’t read this poem without thinking of the almost limitless natural beauty of this country — and how little justice has come from it. The current civilization started with the genocide of the native North Americans and the enslavement of Africans.
The poet proposes to use the surplus of beauty to cover the deficit of justice — a brief theory on how to improve the world. The meditation is too deep to be whimsical, too tragic to ignore.
12. Bibliography
Robert Francis, Collected Poems, University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.
Robert Francis, The Trouble with Francis, University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. This lovely autobiography is the basis for this essay.
Robert Francis, The Satirical Rogue on Poetry, University of Massachusetts Press, 1968. This book is made up of short essays and includes the confession: “I do not like poetry.” Francis claimed that poetry is a way to get at something far more interesting: people.