The pairing was a disaster. By the 1950s, Thompson had come to dislike Frost, Frost himself had become increasingly contemptuous of Thompson (“He’s a charming man, but charm’s not enough, is it?”), and both of them may well have become romantically involved with Frost’s secretary, Kay Morrison, who became a constant companion in his later years. The poet was soon only half-jokingly asking friends to “save” him from his own biographer. They couldn’t: A few years after Frost’s death, Thompson issued a Selected Letters whose critical glosses made Frost look manipulative and petty at best (“Repeatedly throughout his life, RF indulged in a spoiled-child attitude toward any major crisis that thwarted his own wishes”). This was followed, over a roughly ten-year period, by three biographical volumes collectively weighing in at more than two thousand pages, the last of which had to be completed after Thompson’s death by one of his graduate students.

The books are scathing toward Frost and, worse, are scathing without quite seeming to want to be so. Thompson wasn’t a stupid man, nor did he want to write a bad biography; he understood that he wasn’t fond of the poet and that he needed to guard against his own biases. Yet as the scholar Donald Sheehy has demonstrated by reviewing the biographer’s source notes, Thompson became convinced that Frost was neurotic—that his personality, in fact, neatly dovetailed with a theory of neurosis developed by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney, whom Thompson had recently encountered—and under the cover of that diagnosis, his own antipathies bloomed. To show the general slant of the books, it’s become customary among Frost critics simply to list some of the subheadings under “Frost, Robert Lee” in the index to any of Thompson’s volumes: “Anti-Intellectual,” “Baffler-Teaser-Deceiver,” “Brute,” “Charlatan,” “Cowardice,” “Enemies,” “Hate,” “Insanity,” “Jealousy,” “Murderer,” “Rage,” “Revenge,” “Self-Centeredness,” “Spoiled Child,” and so on. As Thompson tells it, when Frost played baseball as a boy, it was because the sport permitted him to sling objects at other people’s heads. When his daughter, distraught after the death of her mother, reproached him for selfishness, not only did this demonstrate a “habit of vindictiveness she had acquired from her father,” but Frost also probably deserved the abuse (and Thompson hastens to suggest that Frost would, of course, soon seek out people who would reassure him that these accusations were more than he really should be asked to bear).