The Best Way Out Is Through

A quote went running through my mind last week: “The best way out is always through.” I’d always thought one of my friends made it up during a work project and for years it was our informal motto when things got tough and we’d feel like throwing in the towel. But apparently Robert Frost said it first. My friend probably knew that but the rest of us weren’t so erudite.  

I went to find it, to make sure I had the words exactly right. First stop, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. When I found the line and the poem ("A Servant to Servants," written in 1914), I dug out a tattered second-hand copy of Selected Poems to see the line in context.  

Paging through those poems always takes me back to 1964 – 10th grade English. It was an Honors course and I was on thin ice, nearly getting booted out of the program in my freshman year because the nuns worried I didn’t have the juice. Joseph Conrad's "The Lagoon" had been my nightmare. I didn't get it. It had to be revised to their standards... or else. So, with my academic future dangling before my eyes, I sat on the cold linoleum floor of my bedroom, back against my sister’s bed, reading and re-reading the damn story till the grinding of flint against cold flint in my brain finally generated some sparks. I was saved. I could proceed to the labors of 10th grade.  

Our first big project as nervous sophomores was to pick an American poet, spend time in the library learning about him or her, and write a paper. My small class of sixteen didn’t show much range: Carl Sandberg, e.e.cummings, William Carlos Williams, and, of course, Robert Frost.  

Why did I chose Frost? What did I know, except that he spoke at the Kennedy inauguration? In those days, in my working class circles, the recently deceased Frost was remembered  as a rheumy-eyed old gent, a grandfatherly sweetie who wrote poems that rhymed. I was 15 and a Joseph Conrad survivor. Frost sounded easy.

I remember the project for two reasons. First of all, it was early winter and Frost conjured lots of wintry woodsy images, even though he was New England and I was St. Louis. I’d spent a blustery Saturday at the University Library with my friend Jane (who had Sandberg), combing the periodical indexes, pulling bound volumes off shelves, and taking diligent notes on cards. I was filled with learning.

When I got home, it was just twilight. I remember standing at the bathroom window. Our house was at the top of a hill and from the bathroom on the second floor you could see across the neighboring rooftops clear out of the city -- vast gray sky and crowns of faded trees. The moment was so powerful that every time I visit St. Louis and look out that window I remember that Robert Frost day.  

I wonder what I was thinking at that moment, but the specifics elude me. What I do remember was a swelling sensation of happiness. The weather had finally chased away the sluggish remains of summer and I was full of purpose. The perfect day.  

What was more important about that project was that I found my way beneath the popular folksy image of Robert Frost. He had died at the age of 88 only 10 months before and – the very week I was researching – the National Observer had published a lengthy review of his tragedy-ridden life. My dad handed me the article on my way to the library that Saturday.  

Robert Frost: Here was a man with a childhood so disrupted by his father's drinking and gambling that he was too nervous to attend school till the fifth grade. His sister died in a mental institution and his children were plagued with mental illness (a son’s life ending in suicide). Frost was driven to collapse trying to collect enough lecture fees to support all the institutional expenses. His wife died 25 years before him and he gradually grew blind – too blind in the harsh sunlight to read the poem prepared for Kennedy’s inauguration so he recited "A Gift Outright" from memory.  

It was a good lesson for a 15-year-old, to discover that life is full of layers, that surprises lie below the surface if you bother to look, that all is not as it seems. The excitement of this learning created the sense of well-being that evening as I gazed out over the rooftops into the gusty twilight.  

Insight doesn’t always lead to success, but in this case it did. My project got an A and portions were read by the teacher to the rest of the class. The other Frost girls had been satisfied with reporting back banalities. I was the only one to struggle with the relationship between mental illness and the creative life. It surprised the hell out me.  

I’m looking now at the text of “A Servant to Servants.” It wasn’t in the Selected Poems, but found quickly on the Internet. It is the unspoken soliloquy of a farm wife directed at some free-spirited campers from her only vantage point on the world: the kitchen window. She’s envious of them and angry that her life is reduced to taking care of loutish farmhands, while her husband runs all over the place. He’s the optimist:.

Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.
He says the best way out is always through.

She is worn down:

And I agree to that, or in so far
As that I can see no way out but through–
Leastways for me
…
I ‘spose I’ve got to go the road I’m going:
Other folks have to, and why shouldn’t I?

It’s such an adult theme – resigning yourself to see through what life has handed you. I can’t imagine what an abstraction that must have been to me at the age of fifteen (and how the heck had I grappled with Joseph Conrad?). 

I went on to major in literature during college but took on my assignments as analytical pursuit, as removed from the creative act as a crime scene investigator. Of course I knew literature had to do with Life, but at some point after the Frost exploration I was taught to never use an author’s biography as an aid to literary interpretation – the work must stand on its own. And certainly one must never write about a novel or poem in terms of how it made one feel or how it connected to one’s own life. Our college had a degree-completion program for older women and they always made that error -- they were such lowbrow saps. Literature was not therapy for godsakes. Snap out of it, ladies.

I guess the only way out of youth is through it.

Published in Rochester Shorts, December, 2000 and in Melange Magazine, June 2004.