Word: frosted
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...think I'm more sacrosanct than any radical-liberal because my philosophy differs. I have never had a head-to-head encounter where the opposition hasn't scored some points. In that debate with the college kids [on the David Frost Show], I found out they are really highly motivated. They are not simply looking for publicity. But I don't think they have the depth of experience to speak with such assurance...
Reading years of Triumph, I find Frost's image not so much profaned, or de-popularized. It was, for the reader, simply confused. The Thompson biography approaches Frost not with the reverence that one might treat a national monument but with the candor and objectivity that a literary topic merits. In 1939 Frost invited Lawrence Thompson, then curator of books at Princeton, to be his official biographer. Frost died in 1963 and the next year Thompson published Selected Letters in which it begins to be clear that the feelings between Frost and Thompson were not all pure affection and admiration...
...Years of Triumph covers the early years of Frost's fame in England and the United States, up to the death of his wife in 1938. It describes without malice or apparent prejudice several incidents which indicate that Frost was not a benign simple rustic writing pure-hearted doggerel, but rather an impatient, frequently lazy, hyperbolic man. The reviewers were furious. Some treated the book as a personal insult. One almost-yellow journal reduced its reaction to a sixteen-point print blare, "A good poet-but a very...
...find Lawrence Thompson neither the cynical lip-smacking of one doing an expose nor the pretensions of a psychoanalyst. He shows no moral distaste for his subject. Thompson (with the equivalent of a straight face) describes events which reveal Frost to be not Santa Claus, not Albert Schweitzer, not America's favorite nostalgia-evoking bumpkin, but a modern man with popular modern dilemmas such as neurosis, guilt and ambition. We see him terrified of ruin and failure, compensating for his fear with self-aggrandizement, exploitation of friends, and uncompromising demands on his family. Frankly, I'm almost relieved. Somehow...
...FIND FROST'S weaknesses less treacherous, actually, than the slow pace of Thompson's book. A shorter biography would be sufficient. Thompson seems to be compulsive about making his book complete, and thus reports scores of facts which seem to have no precedent, no consequence and usually, no interest. Perhaps Thompson is simply a businesslike writer: meticulous scholars should find no fault with his book, but for the average reader it is tedious and wearying. I have the feeling that many readers went through the book in the spirit of somewhat avaricious voyeurism, searching for expose. Otherwise I honestly cannot...