Unsolemn Sermons
AARON, DANIEL
Unsolemn Sermons SAD HEART AT THE SUPERMARKET By Randall Jarrell Atheneum. 211 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by DANIEL AARON Professor of English, Smith College; author, "Writers on the Left" The...
...He is still persistently-one might almost say relentlessly-clever, but he is never so obtrusive that he Stands in the way of what he is criticizing...
...True, our tradition of anti-intellectualism and our comparative indifference to science, art and scholarship cannot be discounted...
...Its customers are a nation of consumers possessed by what they possess or hanker to possess, a people who mindlessly obeys the directives of the mass media...
...Seeing is believing," he writes, "and if what you see in Life is different from what you see in life, which of the two are you to believe...
...For many people it is what you see in Life (and in the movies, over television, on the radio) that is real life...
...author, "Writers on the Left" The title piece in this short collection of essays sets the tone for the volume as a whole...
...The Supermarket stands for an America surfeited by packaged, canned, and frozen plenty...
...The alternative to this contagion is isolation...
...True, our millions are nourished on what Jarrell calls "Instant Literature" composed of "short, easy, instantly recognizable words instantly recognizable thoughts already-agreed-upon, instantly accepted attitudes...
...And who is the consumer who lives to consume...
...If he hires himself out to the Medium, he begins to think like those he services "instead of stubbornly or helplessly sticking to what he sees and feels...
...has bewitched them into believing that the fantasies of the advertisers are more real than the actualities surrounding them...
...He speaks for the uncorrupted creative intelligence, or more precisely, for the "suffering, helplessly non-conforming poet-as-artist-of-a-sort, far off at the obsolescent rear of things...
...The artist's standards are not monetary...
...As defined by Jarrell, "the knowledgeable consumer is someone who, when he comes to Weimar, knows how to buy a Weimaraner...
...The artist, cherishing the past, seeks continuities...
...True, our children are fed on such literary pap that they can no longer under stand the contents of Appletoris Fifth Reader and are getting less education than their parents got...
...and every-day existence, mere local or personal variation, is not real in the same sense...
...Jarrell acknowledges all these and other signs of cultural decay, but he apparently has some confidence in readers not satisfied with Instant Literature...
...More than a century ago, Thoreau described his townsmen crushed and smothered by their possessions, and he demonstrated to those readers not hopelessly mired in materialism how they might escape from their mean and sneaking existences...
...Ten years ago, Jarrell's assault against the Medium would have seemed more novel than it does today, but whether or not its menace is as all-encompassing as he asserts or American education as depressing, his low opinion of popular culture and his concern for the flouted artist have provided him with texts for some energetic and unsolemn sermons...
...And it is to them that he explains what criticism can be but usually is not, how to read Kipling (one of the best essays in the book), how poems grow from the seed of the idea to the finished product (one of his own provides the model), the virtues of Eleanor Taylor's verse, and what a story is...
...Randall Jarrell is the "sad heart," although his chatty whimsical manner sometimes belies the seriousness of his extravagant misgivings...
...The artist, as Jarrell defines him, cannot adapt to this mass illusionindeed, he is threatened by it-and not necessarily because his miseducated and unread countrymen actively oppose his values...
...the Medium has no memory and lives in a "specious present...
...How then can the artist present the objective world to a people who reject it...
...In his role as exhorter and explicator, Jarrell brings into play the wit and irony and enthusiasm, the poetic feeling and the well-stocked memory that we look for and often find in his other writing...
...As indoctrinated creatures of the Medium, they can't even comprehend them...
...The artist is infatuated with the timeless, the Medium with the timely...
...The satire which he once expended on hapless poets in those tomahawking reviews of the early 1940s is now more benign and directed at the new Philistines and their institutions...
...In the remaining essays and fables, Jarrell elaborates on some of the themes planted in the central piece and, by implication at least, suggests that the saving remnantthe artist of integrity and the responsible lovers of excellence-are not without resources...
...Jarrell is less confident in his fellow citizens' capacity to live poetically, for the "Medium" (his composite word for television, magazines, movies, etc...
...the Medium's are "money, success, popularity...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 23
