Remembering Randall Jarrell

...This reminds me of Mencken's definition of faith, which I'll read to you since it's always been a favorite of mine...

...Now that I'm old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting the groceries in my car See me...

...Faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable...

...He was fond of quoting Marianne Moore's famous lines about our language: "grassless/linksless, languageless country in which letters are written/not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read...

...I would even go so far as to say that faith must be irrational since it does not place any particular importance upon empirical evidence...

...Muggeridge on the Christian faith...

...I know these children...

...he would stare back and say, "America's dream...

...To be a Christian is to base one's life on those events and that drama...

...The American "hard hats" or "red-necks" fall heavily and ridiculously between two stools, being neither fully bourgeois nor fully proletarian, cut off as much from the one culture as from the other...

...Where are they...

...Yet much contemporary poetry seems content with only the individual application...

...It is this theme—the loss of innocence and the memories of times "lost"—that Jarrell developed for the final twenty years of his life...

...It is a poetry we must not allow to become lost...

...His wife, Mary, has written of watching "many a sensible person who met him during one of his Enthusiasms get enthralled and leave for home sure in the knowledge that Randall's main side interest was Groddeck...

...William H. Nolte is a regular contributor to The American Spectator...

...In one of the finest of Jarrell's war poems, "Siegfried," a pilot has returned home, and only there, away from the noise and the terror and the violence, does he fully understand: If, standing irresolute By the whitewashed courthouse, in the leafy street, You look at the people who look back at you, at home, And it is different, different—you have understood Your world at last: you have tasted your own blood...

...As he himself said: "I identify myself, as always, /With something that there's something wrong with, /With something human...

...every good poet transforms the universal into the individual...

...The "hard hats" and the "red-necks" are made to seem barbarians...

...What is the case is that there are still different ways of life in Britain, each with its own romance and glamor, its own snobberies, if you like...

...Robert Watson has told of how, when Watson would ask a group of guests what they wanted to drink, Jarrell (who rarely drank at all) "was the only guest who would call for 'milk and cookies.' " He was fascinated by children, as well as by that moment when innocence dies and childhood ends...

...He was a modern poet, which now means being a post-modern poet...

...The distribution of power and wealth bore absurdly little relation to individual talent...

...In one of his last poems a mother is remembering her children as she looks through an old photograph album: I keep saying inside: "I did know those children...

...It is, like Wordsworth's, a poetry of the common, the ordinary, the human...

...Secondly, I think the essential thing about man, and the thing that takes one straight to God, is that he is a fallen creature...

...Today, twelve years later, one gets the impression that Randall Jarrell is rarely read, that he is regarded as a "minor" poet, if not a "minor, minor" poet...

...Others not so well disposed think it's due to the fact that as the capacity to engage in sins of the flesh diminishes with advancing years, one solaces oneself by denouncing them...

...War and its toys were part of a world he was fighting to understand...

...I would be considered an atheist by many people even though I do believe in a certain divine force...

...His wife tells of their walking in the city and seeing their reflection in the store windows...

...I was driving the car The day that she stepped in the can of grease We were taking to the butcher for our ration points...

...He was a terror as a reviewer because he simply could not tolerate bad work, and as a result he made enemies (Conrad Aiken being a famous example...

...A classless society is forever pressuring workers to conform to the one culture, the culture, that is, which the university intellectuals and the media approve of...

...In other words, he needs a God, needs some sort of transcendental perspective to understand the nature of his own life and to make that life bearable...

...Indeed, the two could not be separated...

...Instead, I will begin by saying that it doesn't surprise me that various intellectuals like Malcolm Muggeridge, appalled by the emptiness and absurdity of the nihilism of, say, Sartre, have turned their backs on the modern world and affiliated themselves with the Christian myth...

...At least the British class system spares its lower orders that kind of humiliation...

...Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon...

...But neither do they contain that sense of distance and artifice that one finds so often in these others...

...The same can be said about his own...

...It's equally untrue, in point of fact, and for two reasons...

...Only those possessed of strong ambitions will be prepared to make the effort, which is why the upward thrust is so much less strong in class-conscious Britain than in classless America...

...Yet his poetry itself is evidence that such a judgment is sorely mistaken...

...Failure so to conform becomes the mark of Cain...

...Because all societies are bound in practice to be hierarchical, it is positively desirable that the different social classes should develop and cherish their own ways of life...

...Many of these later poems deal with the relationship between such memories and present experience...

...And your explanation is that I find myself so at odds with contemporary man that I find it inescapable to look towards a God...

...They convey a deep sense of anguish and pathos, a sense of desperate, innocent amazement: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze...

...a tradition of their own, with which they can genuinely identify, than that they should be encouraged, nay indoctrinated—as they are in the United States—into pretending to belong to a bourgeois tradition in which they can never truly feel at home...

...The narrators are often women, individuals who touch some raw nerve in us because their concerns and worries are ours...

...Trade union leaders, for example, although very powerful, do not want to be middle class...

...In the last years of his life, he published three children's books, The Gingerbread Rabbit, The Bat-Poet, and The Animal Family, and he translated two volumes of German fairy tales...

...In the old days, again, this lack of what would now be called social justice or fairness in the British class system was excessive...

...The categories, however, are not such as to justify arrogance on the part of the top dogs or humility on the part of the bottom dogs, since the class divisions so manifestly fail to reflect anything as simple or mechanical as social merit or value...

...What is so distasteful, to my mind, about the classless facade of American society is that workers are compelled to think of themselves as middle class—there being no other respectable status—thereby rendering themselves vulnerable to abuse by the real middle class, which much enjoys mocking the impostors...

...His criticism is filled with praise for these poets, and his essays on Frost and Whitman in particular are destined for a long life...

...That is very much the American experience today...

...Like them, he insisted on writing about ordinary subjects in a language that is actually spoken...

...he did not seek definition in a single, closed vision of self, in the allThe American Spectator December 1977 7 encompassing "I...

...To Jarrell, one had an obligation to oneself, and to one's talent...

...Perhaps one reason that his poetry receives less attention is the simple fact that he does not really fit into the jigsaw of his poetic age...

...William H. Nolte, chairman of the English department at the University of South Carolina, went to Dallas to dispute with Mr...

...The following is taken from the transcript of the conversation...

...they destroyed cities they knew about only from grade school geography classes...

...He has published two volumes of his memoirs, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and is presently writing the third...

...And the intimations of his being a fallen creature do vary from time to time and, of course, one is more aware of them in one's own time...

...Another reason, of course, is the existence in Britain of a middle class that is much less welcoming to new recruits than its American counterpart, since it, too, has a much more clear-cut sense of its own identity...

...Your devotion, in other words, strikes me as a kind of residue of your disgust for the animals that Christ was rumored to have died for...

...When he found something that interested him, he wanted to know anything and everything about it, and virtually every subject held this kind of interest...

...If one didn't want to choose Jesus, one could choose one of the Greek figures or any number of the thousands of gods who are, or were once thought to be, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal—Aztec gods or whatever...

...That strikes me as being an excellent definition of my kind of atheism...

...His best poems ring loud with truth—not with the fashionable or chic, but with the universal...

...Nor does every intelligent worker...

...He was in Paul Lukacs is a senior at Kenyon College in Ohio, an honors major in English, and editor of Hika, the college's literary magazine...

...She would wave and say, "There they are...

...Class consciousness, then, is far from being the unmitigated evil which many Americans believe it to be...

...The individual self is important, but it should not and cannot be isolated...

...Nolte: Well, my objection is that you are basing your convictions purely upon an irrational faith...

...The poems that come from this experience mark the start of his mature work...

...So not only is upward mobility in Britain slowed down by an exceptionally unaspiring working class, but also by an exceptionally unwelcoming middle class...

...In so doing he wrote a poetry that was newer than anything the "new" poets were ever to produce...

...The result of this merger is a British middle class with a far richer culture—richer because to the normal grit of capitalist individualism is added the extra sweetness of aristocratic noblesse oblige—than that of other western bourgeoisies, which also has the effect of making it more resistantto new blood...

...man is a more despicable or more unsatisfactory figure than man was a century ago or five or ten centuries ago...

...Rather, he found definition in the traditional and universal, in the knowledge that in some indescribable way, everything is one and one is everything...

...Writing about Frost, he notes "how much this poetry is like the world...

...It is the legacy of a patrician attitude that the British bourgeoisie inherited from the aristocracy, with which it merged...

...First, I don't think that contemporary Malcolm Muggeridge is the author of many books on Christianity, including Jesus: The Man Who Lives and Something Beautiful for God...

...But it is really much more than that...

...Because he is not concerned with the confessional, with the overbearing emphasis on the individual self, his poems seem more real and (to use a much abused word) more natural...

...his knowledge, insightful...

...And on the evening of October 14, 1965, he was struck and killed by an automobile in Chapel Hill...

...Muggeridge is an unabashed Christian, since I have never been able to decide for myself what a Christian really was...

...No other poet of our age has been able to capture the rhythms and movements of our language so successfully...

...The New Testament conveys the life and teaching of Christ and also the drama of his death, passion, and resurrection and all that followed therefrom...

...Randall Jarrell was one of our finest critics...

...Children and childhood held for him a special magic—not only because childhood is the age of innocence, but because of how adult it actually is...

...Although he failed to qualify for the program, he served as a private in the Army Air Force until 1945...

...Since workers there must be, how much better that the social system should preserve a class structure in which they have a place of their own, instead of seeking to blend them into a bland egalitarian mix which deprives them of all their strong flavor, their distinctive taste, and their marvelously indigestible roughness of texture...

...Lines like the following may lack the verbal anger that is so fashionable, but they surely do not lack verbal energy: But be, as you have been, my happiness...

...Muggeridge for his Christian views...

...He was both fascinated and horrified by the machinery—the planes in particular...

...I braided those braids...

...What Jarrell did in these last poems was to face the modern American scene, with its boredom and sadness and joy, and capture it, in all its complexity, all its simplicity...

...In his poetry he wanted to capture life as he saw and heard it, and it touches us because the life he caught is ours...

...For eighteen years he taught at a small, isolated women's college in Greensboro, North Carolina, and like any good teacher, he was always a student...

...When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose...

...But today, as I have already said, this is no longer the case...

...His lines do not contain the intensity of either Lowell's or Berryman's...

...This is another explanation...

...One is struck, both when reading the poems and when reading 8 The American Spectator December 1977 accounts of his life, by how genuine the man was...

...Although he counted Lowell, Berryman, and Schwartz as his friends, he was not a true part of that generation...

...The soldiers and pilots were in their late teens or early twenties...

...And if one were on the same side of the Atlantic with him, there would be longdistance telephone calls that went on and on....Once you were a student of Randall's, once you were a friend of Randall's, it was for life...

...But they help to avoid another danger which seems to me much more fundamentally threatening: contemporary society's failure to allow working people to be themselves...

...This can easily be disparaged as mere snobbery...

...Most of all he loved literature...

...James Dickey has said that his lines lack "verbal energy...

...This, of course, is not surprising...

...Nolte: I might begin by saying that I was somewhat shaken to learn that Mr...

...What has led me to take this position is a realization that man cannot live simply in terms of his own humanity, that it is not possible for him to create a kingdom of Heaven on earth...

...These enthusiasms were not the result of his wanting to be an artist...

...He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill...

...One of the funny things about becoming a Christian in the twentieth century is that everybody like you looks around for some explanation other than the fact that one believes Christianity to be true, which, indeed, is the only basis on which anyone could become a Christian...

...Muggeridge: Well, of course, that is an explanation...

...William H. Nolte A Question of Faith Last April, Malcolm Muggeridge spent three weeks at the University of Dallas as a visiting lecturer...

...But I object to the belief in anthropomorphic gods...

...I rather agree with that Frenchman who once said that we should never attack Christianity until it's been tried, and I am certainly not going to attack Mr...

...I know all about them...

...Jarrell was an American poet, which means more than being born in the middle of the North American continent...

...Even the Soviet Union seems to be reluctantly conceding this point...

...Like many earlier American poets, he was constantly asking what being an American means...

...The war became so important because it represented such a massive loss of innocence (both for himself and for others), and like so many other American writers, this was a subject which haunted him...

...For Jarrell, as for almost all great poets, this had to be resisted...

...At morning bring me, grayer for its mirroring, The heavens' sun perfected in your eyes...

...In so doing he denied one of the basic tenets of both Romanticism and Modernism (the strict delineation between subject and object...

...He was 51 years old...

...Feared they may be, with good reason...

...Jarrell's themes—solitude, loneliness, aging, memory, imagination—are traditional and universal, yet their applications are almost always specific and personal...

...and as he caught the rhythms, he caught the sense and ultimately the meaning...

...It is a poetry the likes of which few can write, and the likes of which few have written...

...But his genius was in his poetry, which is of the first order...

...Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters...

...They prefer to stay among their own people, because this is where they feel at home...

...He also wrote a marvelous, witty novel, Pictures from an Institution...

...I have no objections, mind you, to a man's having faith in whatever, so long, anyhow, as his faith doesn't constitute a public nuisance, but I think you'll admit that a person could have faith in some particular thing or abstraction and that that faith would act as an aid to him or a crutch...

...But they are not patronized...

...This is nonsense...

...He loved football, and tennis, and motor racing (for years he read every issue of Road and Track magazine...

...And that he would not tolerate....But oh, if you published something he liked...

...A lot of my friends—old friends—regard my Christian faith as a sign of total senility...

...The complaint most often registered against Jarrell' s poetry is that the style is too simple, almost flat...

...love with the world, and he wanted to know all of it...

...Rather, they were the cause...

...The novelist Peter Taylor has written: If you published something he didn't like, he behaved as though you had been disloyal to him in some way—or not that so much—more as if you had been disloyal to some other friend of his—your other self, that is, your artist self...

...When starting from my dreams, I groan to you, May your I love you send me back to sleep...

...In one of his last, great poems, "The Lost World," he writes of his own childhood, and remembers what it was like to approach that moment: Liking that world where The children eat, and grow giant and good I swear as I've often sworn: "I'll never forget What it's like, when I've grown up...

...and the next, graphology...

...A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought...

...The next sensible person was sure it was gear ratios...

...Lowell's Notebook, for example, tells us much about Robert Lowell, but little about life in general...

...One of these women, in the supermarket, "moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All," thinks: When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I'd wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children...

...Jarrell found himself in an age and country which were both longing for definition, and unlike other poets of his generation (Lowell, Berryman, Roethke, etc...

...But the credit side of this situation, to which no attention is ever paid, is that most people in Britain have a much clearer idea of who and what they are than do most Americans—no small advantage in an age characterized by increasing alienation, rootlessness, and loss of identity...

...Now, I realize that you may object to my referring to the Christian "myth...

...and while he was never in actual combat, the war certainly affected him...

...Jarrell's lines, even the best, do lack a certain kind of energy—if one insists on comparing his work to that of the other poets of his generation...

...The poet's voice is compassionate...

...His master was not Eliot or Pound or even Yeats, but rather Wordsworth—or Rilke, or Whitman, or Frost...

...The existence of a proud working class, with its own traditions and values, must mean that those born within its ranks will find it painfully difficult to climb the social ladder, since such an ascent will require them to make a fundamental sacrifice: to pull up roots which are deeply embedded in fertile soil...

...For example, George Santayana once wrote that his atheism, like Spinoza's, is true piety towards the universe, and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests...

...His poetry is anything but "confessional...

...But that faith need not necessarily be in, say, the person of Jesus...

...I would like to ask, also, if perhaps your love of God is not in large part, if not entirely, a reaction against man today, whom by the way you distinguish from man as you conceive him to have been in past ages...

...El Paul Lukacs Remembering Randall Jarrell When he died, Randall Jarrell was commonly considered to be one of America's finest poets, as well as a brilliant critic...

...It bewilders me that he doesn't see me...

...Shortly after Pearl Harbor, at the age of 27, Jarrell enlisted in a pilot-training program in Austin, Texas...

...it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics...

...You said at the beginning that you didn't know what being a Christian was, and I would just like very briefly to point out that being a Christian is being a follower of Christ, which is a perfectly clear, straightforward thing...

...Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot The American Spectator December 1977 9...

...No doubt these feelings militate against the maximum production of wealth, since they help preserve those two-nation attitudes which do so much to engender industrial strife...

...Jarrell was perhaps our most old-fashioned, modern poet, and in an age which virtually cries out because of its lack of truly first-rate poetry, it is tragic that we continue to ignore him...

...There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it...

...In fact, as a critic he was largely responsible for rescuing Whitman from obscurity...

...One winter when I was staying in London, I had two ten-page letters from him about two stories of mine he had seen in print...

...His final, and best, volume of poetry, The Lost World, had just gone to press...

...He wrote, in simple language, of the people and things he knew...

...But that is not the essential point...

...Beneath the lines is what Robert Lowell once called "the merciful vision," sympathetic, illuminative—ours had we only seen...

...But this cannot be done without barriers developing which unquestionably have the effect of slowing down social mobility...