Robert Frost and the Walk Retaken

INTRODUCTION

This is a story told to me by Colby Halloran about Robert Frost. Her grandfather Morris Tilley--an english professor--was good friends with Frost. Though unnoted in most accounts, that friendship may have been key in convincing Frost to leave New England long enough to take up highly memorable residencies at the University of Michigan in the 1920s.

Whether this story about Robert Frost has been published before, I cannot say. Though this blog focuses on topics related to the Veblen House, which was named for the mathematician Oswald Veblen who lived there with wife Elizabeth later in his life, topics sometimes stretch a bit--to my astronomer father, and also to a largely forgotten nuclear physicist named Walter Colby, whose life I have researched, due to having lived for some formative years in the house he and his wife built in the 1930s in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Turned out his life had many parallels to Veblen's. Colby Halloran is named after Walter, who was a close friend of her family's and used to play piano duets with her grandmother Mabel Tilley.

For my part, I delved into Robert Frost's poetry after becoming interested in languages during an extended undergraduate career at the University of Michigan. My creative but not altogether successful efforts to assimilate French and German as an adult reawakened in me an awareness of sound, rhythm, and sense, and that in turn opened me up to the satisfactions and meaning to be found in poetry. 

Similar to how some in Princeton got the idea that Einstein had lived in the Veblen Cottage, I also had an imagined connection to Robert Frost in childhood. Growing up next to Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, I had heard that the path through the woods that I took to school every day was the same path that Frost had taken. I imagined the poet walking through a forest strewn with wildflowers. Only later in life did I learn that, though Robert Frost loved to botanize, it was not he who once walked that path, but instead the astronomer Edwin Frost. Coincidentally, the two Frosts may have actually intersected during Robert Frost's brief time at Dartmouth College around 1892, while Edwin was a professor there.

The story Colby Halloran tells below has some relevance to the Veblen legacy. It speaks to the deep connection between walking and thought that seems to have been more common back in the era of Robert Frost, Veblen, and Einstein, who were of the same generation and grew up before cars began taking over the world.

ROBERT FROST AND THE WALK RETAKEN

Colby Halleran lives in her grandparents' house, embraced by history, with Walter's concert grand in the living room, and a study where her grandfather and Frost would sit next to the fire, talking late into the night.

I interviewed her next to that hearth. She's a playwright, which comes out in her storytelling. We were talking about Walter Colby, and how he had lived in a long progression of apartments in town before getting married and building the house at 801 Berkshire Rd. This segued into a story about Frost's days and nights in Ann Arbor:

"... Frost had many, many apartments all over this town. There's a list of them somewhere. And, that was the story of Bapa (grandfather) walking him home, at night, after they sat by the fire talking forever, and Nanny (grandmother) would say "Now time to go. You have to get to bed, Morris." And Frost would stand up. And Bapa would say "But I'm going to walk him home." So they'd start walking down Washtenaw, and then they'd get to Frost's house. He had one on Washtenaw, one on Forest. There were a bunch of addresses all around campus, one after another, because he'd come and go, and Bapa would walk him to wherever he was living, and then Frost would say "Now I'll walk you back, Morris" so they'd come all the way back, and so they'd do this all night long. Bapa would show up at 4 in the morning. And Nanny finally put her foot down, the story goes, and said, "Pick a point halfway. And say goodnight at that tree." And I always wondered where was that point? I wish I knew what tree. They finally agreed, okay, when we get to that tree. And I kind of thought it was one of these mythological family tales, right?, until I read some memory of a student of Frost's who did the same thing with him. He would walk her home. She would walk him back, and they did the same back and forth, because I guess he didn't sleep much, so I thought maybe that is true."

She continued, with Frost:

"I read something wonderful about him recently; his poems have characters. He said you should be able to write dialogue without naming who is talking. It should be so clear that you don't have to put the name. He listened for those casual sounding phrases that people use when they talk, and used them in his poems. He was listening to people talking. How to make it natural."

And about her grandfather: 

Morris’ life’s work was - A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Morris Palmer Tilley. Sadly, he died before he could see it in print. He also was a Shakespeare scholar. I think he and Frost shared this deep love of words and language.