When I came to Billings, I heard, vaguely, that Robert Frost had visited several times and somehow had family ties here. I knew he was raised in California and had western roots, but these ties came much later in his life. Robert and Elinor Frost’s youngest daughter, Marjorie, came to Billings in 1933 when she married Willard Fraser, who would later become one of the city’s most beloved mayors. Sadly, Marjorie died an untimely death from childbed fever not quite a year later. Robert and Elinor didn’t travel to Billings for the wedding, but Marjorie’s illness brought them here immediately, and they stayed for seven weeks until her death and afterwards to help with the new baby. Robin Fraser grew up here and graduated from the local high school in 1952, with her grandfather as commencement speaker.
The letters provide some information about Robert and Elinor's stay in Billings. Their mail was forwarded to 244 Burlington Avenue, though I don’t know for certain if they stayed there. Visiting the Frost house in Shaftsbury, Vermont brought some doubt to my mind because Elinor Frost was pictured at another location, though that doesn't mean anything either. She could have been visiting someone. The focus of their letters in that period is on Marjorie, her suffering and their loss, with the forwarding address as the primary clue to location. One way or another, I like to think of them when I drive past.
After Marjorie’s death, Robert Frost spoke at Eastern Montana College, now Montana State University Billings, and at Rocky Mountain College, though nothing seems to remain from those talks. In 1952, however, he visited both campuses again. The lecture he gave at MSUB was recorded and appears in the Norton collection, Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus. In this presentation, he talked at length about metaphors and other figures of speech, one of his favorite subjects, and ulteriority, which he defined in this talk as “double meanings”:
There are figures of speech, metaphors, that have more lasting value than others. But all
of them, you learn—as you read poetry—you learn to know that you must leave ‘em;
love ‘em and leave ‘em. They have their beauty. . . . That’s all.
. . . Some poems are almost without that ulteriority. But almost always there’s a figure
within the poem, scattered figures in details or in a figure of the whole.
He goes on to say that “intimation” and “hinting” are other words one might use to describe ulteriority (25). I think of it as the subtlety of good metaphors whose surface might be deceptively simple.
Marjorie’s poetry shows this quality of ulteriority just as her father's poetry does. The Frosts contemplated whether to publish Marjorie’s poetry after her death, and ultimately they decided that they would. Her small volume, Franconia, came out in 1936. You can read more about their story and hers by digging through the letters (You can also find an essay about her in These Living Songs: Reading Montana Poetry, edited by Lisa Simon and Brady Harrison, also on Project Muse). Her best poems are elegantly precise and often brief, sometimes only a quatrain or two. Occasionally they are quirky. Frost even considered “If I Should Live to Be a Doll” as the title poem for her book because of its “strangeness” and because it would not “savor the least bit of memorial lugubriousness.” While Elinor Frost wanted to see some of the poems in The Atlantic or Yale Review, she said Robert didn’t want to approach any magazines. He wrote that “the poems are good enough for publication regularly, though I doubt we will have the heart to submit them to public criticism” (Grade, Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost). Yet three of the poems did appear in Poetry Magazine the year before the book was published. For a time, Frost intended to include his poem “Voice Ways” as a preface to Franconia.
Curiosity drew me to Marjorie and her story, and from time to time something new surfaces. Some years ago I wanted to learn more about the history of Montana poetry, in part for very personal reasons. I had noticed a pattern of women writing and then stopping after one or two books and I suppose I feared that pattern might take hold in my own life. I was searching for authors who might have been forgotten, combing through the special collection rooms across the state and reading poetry in the Frontier Magazine along with the reviews published there. As I was browsing in the Montana Room in the local public library, I came upon a beautiful book, 37 pages, with a delicate orange pattern on the cover. It was Franconia, and when I mentioned it to various people who knew about the Frosts, it seemed to be a surprise. Somehow it didn’t become a noticeable piece of the Frost lore in Billings. And this is what I love about primary research. There is an excitement of "discovering," and behind the discovery, there is often a story.
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