INTERVIEWS WITH ROBERT FROST.

Edited by Edward Connery Lathem '51.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1966. 295 pp. $7.50.

Mr. Lathem, Associate Librarian of the College, was one of Robert Frost's most intimate friends during the latter years of the poet's life. He has given loving care to three volumes about Frost: Robert Frost: Farm-Poultry man (1963), edited with Lawrance Thompson of Princeton; Selected Prose ofRobert Frost (1966), edited with Hyde Cox; and the present volume, Interviewswith Robert Frost, which he has edited alone.

To an extent rarely accorded an American man of letters, Robert Frost was a national figure and all the media of public communication were eager to report his ideas, his wit, his honors, his unique appearance and personality. Frost unfailingly was "good copy," partly because he knew what was expected of him and enjoyed being a good performer. Interviewers from newspapers were after him all his adult life, and a great body of these printed pieces exists. Mr. Lathem has made a chronological selection, spanning the period from 1915, when Frost returned to this country from England, through 1962, the year of his death. They provide, as the editor points out, much about his life and thought that is recorded nowhere else, and publication of Interviews is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Frost as poet and man.

The interviews chosen for this volume are predominantly from the daily press, with a few from Sunday magazines and book reviews, national magazines, and TV and radio broadcasts. The campus press is represented (including The Dartmouth), as are publications in England, Scotland, France, Russia, and Brazil.

In the earlier interviews, printed mostly by the Boston papers, Frost talked of the craft of the poet and of what he was trying to accomplish as a poet. The course of the discussion stayed mainly within the lines of the interviewers' questions. As the years moved along, Frost ranged ever more widely over topics of national and international import, and he increasingly took charge of what was to be talked about. One can only applaud him for this; his interviewers, with too few exceptions in this collection, were an unimaginative lot, asking routine, repetitious questions about Frost's life and work. The poet comes out of this volume as an exceedingly kind-hearted and long-suffering man, especially since this is only a fraction of what he had to endure.

But it was almost impossible to write an uninteresting story about Robert Frost. He was one of the most quotable of men, and choice nuggets abound throughout this volume. The total effect of his talk, both serious and puckish, as assembled by Mr. Lathem, is to give one a deeper understanding of this unique American poet.

"I think in all my work there's a consistency," Frost said in a 1961 interview. "It takes serious brainwork to see the consistency." One should add that the most consistent thing — and it doesn't take serious brainwork to see it - is Robert Frost himself.