The Last of the Vine
SIMON, JOHN
Writers & Writing THE LAST OF THE VINE BY JOHN SIMON With the publication of Kipling, Auden & Co. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 381 pp., $17.95) the fourth and final collection of Randall Jarrell's...
...But writing what seems to you good poetry is always easy" have merely skimmed some of the cream off this dazzlingly thought-out and expressed evaluation...
...thus 1 would love to reproduce in extenso the notice of Marya Zaturen-ska's The Listening Landscape, a critical performance of sustained and controlled devastation, but must content myself with the conclusion: "[Zaturenska's] pieces are like stage scenery, imposing and successful to the glance, coarse to a closer look: approximations...
...he has shouted so long into the intense inane that his yells, by a natural protective metamorphosis, have taken on something of the character of their surroundings...
...but it is, in fact, an exact description and insight...
...I know of no other critic whose tastes were so catholic as to encompass with equal enthusiasm poets as antithetical as Whitman and Rilke, Frost and La-forgue...
...Take that last statement as irony, and it wins the intellectuals over to Kipling...
...The danger of writing about Jarrell (as many have noted) is the temptation to do nothing but quote him...
...Yet hardly has Jarrell dispatched "the country mouse," as he calls her, before he takes on her husband, "the town mouse," Horace Gregory: "A fortuitous collocation of the anti-poetic (plus, for emotion or profundity, the same old romantic and sentimental excesses)" is no way to express the modern world...
...but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don't have the pearls...
...Members of his family and friends who have tried to make his death appear an accident do him a disservice: They turn into a prosaic mishap what was a meting out of poetic, or at least critical, justice, mistakenly but gallantly applied...
...Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition...
...So, "unless you are one critic in a hundred thousand, the future will quote you only as an example of the normal error of the past...
...lies back in himself as if he were an unmade bed, and every line in his sleepy, placid face seems to be saying: But whoever makes beds...
...that they are never going to have the objective impersonal Tightness they should have, but only the subjective, personal wrongness from which we derived the idea of the rightness...
...About Joyce Kilmer he said: "I do not want to give the impression that his poems are unusually absurd—unusually anything...
...and this at a time when, as Jarrell must have known perfectly well, Hillyer was as alive as ever he was...
...or of an Edmund Wilson, whose occasional attacks disappeared into the aura of the grand old man of letters with the happy knack of making his very crotchets rays in his halo...
...But they are not snap judgments...
...Pound has never submitted to a fact (or anything else, for that matter) in his life...
...his distinction between virtuous and noble characters could come, in fact, only from reading widely and wisely...
...And join to this one more trait, finely observed by Lowell-exacerbated sensitivity: "You felt that even your choice in neckties wounded him...
...Alas, Jarrell wanted to be a major poet, but was only a fine minor one...
...But he passes the supreme test for critics: He sees the good in what he dislikes and the faults in what he reveres...
...Pound's universe became more and more a solipsistic one...
...the form, logic, and amenities of his criticism some time ago assumed the proportions of a public calamity...
...Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 381 pp., $17.95) the fourth and final collection of Randall Jarrell's essays and reviews, it behooves us all to join in grateful rejoicing: America has one more major critic of literature, the arts, culture and, therefore, of life...
...On any number of further subjects-music, fine arts, sports cars, sports, love, society, history (you name it)-there are nuggets of golden wisdom...
...Says Fiedler: "He is resolutely unsystematic, committed to no methodology or aesthetic theory...
...Auden is that "most professional magician...
...they are rough and evitable successes-the work of a poet who has real talent, but not for words...
...Here were capital reassessments of Frost, Whitman, Stevens, and Williams, among others, as well as reflections on poetic "obscurity," on the nature and value of criticism, and on the "situation of the poet...
...that they are going to write in their way, not ours...
...Auden, for example, was a witty poet and man, but his criticism, albeit frequently shrewd and always intelligent, is not particularly epigrammatic and witty...
...Of course, there have been many poet critics...
...With his initial collection of criticism, Poetry and the Age (1953), Jarrell established himself as a remarkably viceless centaur: both a careful reader whose perception never flagged, and a writer whose lucidity and elegance no amount of prodigality could deplete...
...The best I can do in brief space is to quote Leslie Fiedler's remark from the memorial volume by various hands, Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965...
...I disagree with him on only one major point: his overestima-tion of the very slight talent of Adrienne Rich...
...Eliot," and "the best poet alive," Robert Frost...
...The irony spreads-like one well-pitched blot of ink devouring an entire sheet of blotting paper?from the man to the work, from the preposterous notions of the Cantos to their stylistic caducity...
...For Gregory's tough-guy pose, like Hart Crane's, is ultimately as much of a romantic cliche as its opposite: "To the Muse of Poetry-A neutral monist from way back-crane's burnt match skating in a urinal is just another primrose by the river's brim...
...deprive him of his favorite words and he would be simply unable to write poetry at all...
...I can recall some characters in literature who I thought were virtuous in the highest sense-prince Myshkin, for instance-but none of them was ever noble...
...so lifelike and terrifying that nobody a foot away can tell it isn't a real, live man...
...Heads of colleges and English departments found his frankness more unsettling and unpredictable than the drunken explosions of some divine enfant terrible, such as Dylan Thomas...
...Denny is wonderfully academic-here at last is what everyone has been dreading, a poet to take Robert Hillyer's place (going on the safe assumption that Mr...
...These sentences (in both the syntactical sense and the classical one of sententiae) fall into place with the snap of finality...
...All that, I submit, is in a nutshell what made Jarrell the critic he was...
...Even more epigrammatic is this, from one of several pieces about the Kipling Jarrell loved: "Illustration and conversation and description...
...As I suggested earlier, though, and as Delmore Schwartz said earlier still, "His formulation may seem at first glance to be merely a piece of wit...
...But, pace Fiedler, Jarrell did construct logical sequences, except that nearly every sentence in the sequence was an apothegm...
...There is additional delight in the many, various, unusual and unusually apt, quotations that Jarrell's omnivorous reading and prodigious memory spew up with geyser-like dependability...
...And Jarrell continues, brilliantly and justly destructive, but without disallowing that Pound "is obviously one of the most talented poets of our time," until he answers his own question: "What has happened...
...As Robert Lowell said of Jarrell in the aforementioned volume, "He...
...Just consider the agonizingly judicious tributes, strictures, reversals, laments, and guarded exultations with which he followed Auden's later career, the decline from primacy into prestidigitation: "A little of the time Auden is essentially serious, and the rest of the time he's so witty, intelligent, and individual, so angelically skillful, that one reads with despairing enthusiasm...
...Isaac] Rosenberg surely was a poet of no merit whatsoever...
...there is no doubt that his poetry lent wings to his criticism...
...often seemed tone-deaf to the amenities and dishonesties that make human relations tolerable...
...Apothegm is brought to its peak in: "Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets-And, in a better world, it may be...
...the one who gets bored with magic, who at last has nothing up his sleeve, not even his arm "In the late poems "the Conscious and Moral Auden is, quite consciously and immorally, coming to terms with the Unconscious Auden by going along with it, letting it have its way-And not just in life, where we can do and gloss over anything, but in poems, which are held against us by us and everyone else?Auden...
...About Erskine Caldwell, he remarks: "A writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, and not to matter...
...Yet Jarrell should have known better, and in a way did, since he wrote: "A good critic-we cannot help seeing when we look back at any other age-is a much rarer thing than a good poet or a good novelist...
...Jarrell is always willing to concede what is good in a mediocre artist, though his praise is often deadlier than his censure...
...and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you...
...the title is infeli-citously exclusive) a whole magisterial course in poetry appreciation, and another in the practice of criticism unencumbered by theory...
...Jarrell was that one critic in a hundred thousand who is a perennial, undiscardable calendar...
...Or to name categorically "The best poetry critic of our time, T.S...
...At this point the reader may expect an analysis of Jarrell's critical method...
...If you think that oxymoron is a handsome thing, there is better yet...
...Few other critics have dared to be so unequivocal: "Yeats' poetry-which seems to me far and away the best of our time...
...Now add to the rare combination of exceptional taste and epiphanic wit an absolute fearlessness, of the kind that the critic has to live in order to get it into his writing...
...Writing good poetry is only occasionally difficult: usually it is impossible...
...Let's go on, however, to the equally definitive-And succinct-Assessment of Conrad Aiken's verse: "He could write fairly pleasing and interesting poetry about any subject whatsoever...
...Hill-yer is dead...
...Consider what Jarrell could do in the earliest of these pieces, a review of 10 books of fiction written when he was 21...
...Early in his life Mr...
...They are no more oversimplifications than was Columbus' egg: like it, they remain standing-for the eternal good or ill of their subjects...
...trusting to insight and depending on his feeling and talking self as a sufficient source of unity-he preferred stringing apothegms together to constructing logical sequences...
...Even to dissenters, such gallant commitment must loom large and inspiring...
...Insights and judgments expressed with supreme limpidity and wit-such a gift cannot pass unnoted and unresented by those who do not possess it...
...under the cream there is, actually, more cream...
...Perhaps that is why-in 1965, aged 51 like his beloved Rilke-he died of letting a truck run him over...
...Pretty astute for such a young critic, especially if you realize that 21 in a critic corresponds to roughly IS in a poet or composer...
...Chesterton, conversely, was a wonderfully witty and gnomic critic, but his values, colored by his combative Catholicism, were often too eccentric...
...Not only did these essays state their subtle points with exceptional clarity, they also managed to be almost continuously epigrammatic...
...Jarrell, as poet and critic, criticized poetry simultaneously from within and without, which is to say thoroughly...
...Notice how the mild irony of "unusually absurd" yields to the sarcasm of "unusually anything," and how this in turn leads into the quiet annihilation wrought by that slight substitution: copy, where the allusion to Voltaire led us to expect invent...
...For "a critic is half writer, half reader: just as the vices of men and horses meet in centaurs, the weaknesses of readers and writers meet in critics...
...But he was, finally, deflated into suicide- I don't know whether by a sense of the world's insufficiency or of his own...
...We read them, as Jarrell said about Malraux's art criticism, "breathling] irregularly and jerk[ing] our heads from side to side, like spectators at a tennis match...
...Mr...
...Already Jarrell had read so much, and so well, that there is nothing arrogant about his sounding as if he had read all books...
...He has taken all culture for his province, and is naturally a little provincial about it...
...Here is Jarrell at 26 about Pound in 1940: "I had thought of Ezra Pound as the one thing constant in this fleeting world...
...Can criticism, any criticism, do more...
...One can get from Kipling, A uden & Co...
...Only those incapable of it would call such criticism oversimplification...
...Critics are discarded like calendars...
...Again in his second collection, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), in the first posthumous one, The Third Book of Criticism (1969), and now in Kipling, Auden & Co., we find that "a passage of ordinary exposition" is not ordinary at all, but an extraordinary expose or a panoramic insight, with shocks of recognition or revelation coming at us from one edge of the page to the other, leaving us indeed in the head-jerking exhilaration of spectators at tennis, one of Jarrell's two or three favorite sports...
...What coolness and pith...
...What has been rare, extremely rare, is the combination of such taste and such wit...
...For instance: "The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks...
...Admirable, too, about Jarrell is his unshilly-shallying courage...
...if they had not existed, it would have been necessary only to copy them...
...If we are bothered by Kipling's flaws, we must "consent to the fact that good writers just don't have good sense...
...and, of course, Jarrell backs up his judgments with cogent argumentation and soaring language...
...It may be that his uncommonly developed critical faculty hampered his poetic creativity...
...Add to this the vengefulness of poetasters who were the victims of Jarrell's skewering ironies, and it is small wonder that his reputation still lags behind that of a Lionel Trilling, whose loftiness hovered far above the vulgar necessity of straightforward negative reviewing...
...being a critic, even a great one, meant relatively little to him...
...The wit advances by leaps of the imagination and bounds of stylistic suppleness...
...Take that wondeful ad from 1910 that offers to keep car thieves away by means of "Bosco's collapsible rubber driver...
...Continents sank under the sea, empires fell: Vienna fell, Canton fell, Warsaw fell: the unmoved sage sat on at Rapallo, like Idiosyncrasy on a monument [again that fine effect by changing one word]-the warm Italian breeze bore out over a universe of cretins his condemnations and invective, his wcTs and ccTs and shefs, his American slang unparalleled outside the pages of an English novel...
...When not in use, this marvelous device is simply deflated and put under the seat" Unlike Bosco's driver, Jarrell was the real thing from less than an inch away...
...Poems like 'The White Dress' or 'Forest of Arden' show her at her rather disquieting best...
...They are distillations of scrupulous reading and thinking, of taste that developed gradually and genius that was there from the start...
...And somewhere between the per-ceiver and the purveyor was the sifter, the assayer with enough love not to be blind to faults others overlooked, enough purity not be be jaded about virtues others discounted...
...have merged into a 'toothsome amalgam' which the child reads with a grownup's ease, and the grown-up with a child's wonder...
...Or take this, about Gale Wilhelm: "Her characters, like Hemingway's, are noble...
...If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools...
...take it at face value, and it flatters and converts the nonintellectual objectors...
...A few years later, in a review of poems by Reuel Denny, we find: "Mr...
Vol. 63 • September 1980 • No. 16
