I watched from the weeds as Robert Frost poled a looper into left and lumbered slap-sally up the first-base line.  The throw was wild, handing Frost second uncontested.  This was the way he relished ushering in the 1940s at Bread Loaf, he the celebrity among celebrities, at 66 or so still rounding the diamond and running up the score.  Throughout most of its existence from 1926 until his final conference in 1962, the Middlebury College-sponsored Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference practically belonged to the willful, oft belligerent Frost, known by conferees for (all greatness aside) jealous stunts like ripping paper during a poetry reading by rival/colleague Archibald MacLeish and setting it ablaze.  So too must Frost stand center over the storied annual softball game out amid the lumps and stones of the Homer Noble farm in Vermont's Green Mountains.

The better players were always put on his team to ensure a W, as losing was not a recognized word in the poet’s vocabulary.  Bread Loafer and noted author Benny DeVoto cautioned that a Frost loss at softball would drive him from the Conference—cause him to "chuck" it.  That its greatest asset and attraction should be sacrificed over a recreational outing was unthinkable.  So he won.  A.B. Guthrie, Jr. would write in The Blue Hen’s Chick^[1], “He argued about balls and strikes.  He protested calls at the bases.  Chin out, red-faced and furious, he kept confronting the umpire, waving wild arms as if ready to swing.”

True, all this Bob Frost lore was true, for I was there watching from the Whose-Weeds-These-Were.

Now that he’s gone they write hard about him for his tempers and imperious demeanor.  I see simply a case of the dominant cowing the submissive.  The price of their place at the king’s table was their egos and they chose to fork over.  If, whether in his eyes or in fact, the naturally inflated self-regard of writers rendered them incapable of appropriate respect, Frost would accept their submission.  It was a concession they would have to redeem when the king was no more and they could fork him over. 

Or so it appears from the weeds.

Now the rude goose of rumor honks of an exquisite double cut dispensed in 1950 by publisher and Bread Loaf faculty regular William Sloane.  All ears, I was secreted in a basket there in Treman Cottage, connecting dots in literary history, in which there are many dots and even less many connections.  I salute the goose and affirm the rumor. 

In the presence of Bread Loaf fellow Mary Elizabeth Witherspoon and a quietly embarrassed Richard Wilbur (the poet), Mr. Sloane saw fit to impugn the smarts of a certain Bread Loafer who need not be further maligned with a naming, who was not present to defend.  Mary E. spoke up for the victim, in essence saying to Sloane, “Maybe he isn’t as intelligent as you are, but you don’t have to trash him like that.” 

To which Bill Sloane snorted, “Intelligent?  He isn’t even as intelligent as you are.”[2]  

My snickering threatened to blow my concealment.  That was a very special thing to say.  Mary Elizabeth Witherspoon went on in recollections thereafter to fashion for herself some notion of a mutual experience wherein she and Sloane figured as equals in a learning moment—Sloane presumably as abashed as herself. 

Don’t you rather doubt it?

Bread Loaf is still strumming along as perhaps the nation’s most prestigious annual writers’ conference.  Admission is highly competitive, meaning (I suppose) they take by whim and association.  Count on there being also that certain pressure for politically correct quotas, so if you fit one of these, congratulations on the magic accident of your birth.  (All talk; I've no data indicating any of it.)  It’s said you will learn much about the craft at this Conference, as you are critiqued and advised by the big names in modern literature and academia.  Perhaps it’s worth the *ss-kicking you’re in for by somebody like Bob Frost or Bill Sloane.