Randall Jarrell: Failure in Success

...Can you honestly call these by no means atypical verses poetry...

...There is an interesting passage in Stephen Spender's Journals 1939-1983, jotted down by Spender upon hearing of Randall's death: "One of the things that puzzled me about Jarrell was his bitter complaint that the modern poet has no audience...

...Anna Jarrell remarried, to Randall's jealous displeasure...

...Hethen jejunely declares that "it is not only impossible but also unimportant to 'decide' about Jarrell's death by labeling it suicide or accident...

...though its roots were in something nearer to madness than method...

...Sent, disastrously, to business school, the youth extricated himself through illness and enrolled at Vanderbilt in 1932...

...Why the schoolmasterly head-waggling...

...He was to become a severe critic of such magnificence that even his victims, if they did not exactly kiss the rod, at least endured his censure with respect, sometimes admiration...

...When two sculptors came to Nashville to work on a replica of the Parthenon, they picked Randall to pose for Ganymede...

...Yet to the careful gaze his discipline was hard-won, costly and relative...

...Pritchard can deal with Jarrell's splendid satirical novel, Pictures From an Institution, because (I would guess) there the ridiculing of real people is disguised as fiction...

...I don't know, but I know how the mind goes...

...Still, I disagree even with his basic position, and on this score with Bawer, too: I think that Pritchard greatly, and Bawer slightly, overestimates Jarrell's poetic worth...

...it does mean that they fall short of his own standard...

...Indeed, the more readers and listeners they have, the more it is demonstrable that the values of American life are not affected by poetic values...

...Among British poets, he favored Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin...

...Mary may not have burned anything, but she certainly edited Randall's correspondence so as to make him as close to innocuous as possible...

...Then there was Jarrell's notorious obsession with sports cars (he was to own a Mercedes 190SL and a Jaguar) and with sports car racing (the Jarrells honeymooned in Madeira to watch Phil Hill race...

...Why is there so little about Elisabeth Eisler, the young Austrian woman who was Jarrell's student at Harvard's Salzburg Seminars...

...He believed in Road and Track's theocracy of old, holy motors," and spent as much time reading, and reading aloud from, that magazine as he spent on his favorite writers...

...If, as I believe, poets are remembered as much for particular unes as for entire poems, the importance of the memorable, quotable line becomes enormous...

...Auden was the poetic father who had to be killed...

...In them, the word "change" recurs repeatedly, with often ominous overtones...

...The point at which I felt compelled to let my mind start wandering fromaclose reading of the biography is the one where Pritchard quotes the following from Jarrell's letter to Margaret Marshall of the Nation, accepting a job as pro tem literary editor: " [I have] an even, cheerful and optimistic disposition: What I write is therapeutically the opposite, I guess...

...I wonder what Pritchard would make of Max Beerbohm's or Kenneth Tynan's drama reviews...

...It seems to me, on the contrary, important to understand the nature of Jarrell's death, for it may hold clues to what his life was about...

...His is a life not easy to grasp from what is available in print by or about him—including, alas, Pritchard's hazily enlightening biography...

...It could just as easily prove the opposite...

...a dozen or two dozen imes and he is great" (an idea rather simlartooneinRilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, as Jarrell surely knew...

...Iwatched him play tennis, he picked out my clothes...

...First, Pritchard is not really interested in writing a biography...

...but not with the great, constructively destructive criticism, where people are named before they are disemboweled...

...Named Kitten, it became one of Randall's grand passions, arguably the only one...

...But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I'm anybody, I stand beside my grave Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary...

...What matters to him is analyzing and evaluating Jarrell's verse and prose and, ultimately, exalting the poetry abovethecrirjcism...

...The strategy also deflected autobiography hunters by making pure self-indulgence look like "negative capability...

...In 1940, at age 26, Randall married Mackie Langham, a colleague in the English Department of the University of Texas, where he was teaching...

...not Jarrell...

...Why does Pritchard never question Mary's assertion that this was an unconsummated affair out of deference to Mackie...

...The fact that they have readers, and audiences who listen to them reading their poems, does not console them...

...Back in school there, hetookup journalism and dramatics, excelling at both...

...The university authorities were equally undemanding: "[Jarrell] was away almost more often than he was here," Pritchard quotes a Greensboro colleague...

...But Pritchard can be very un-English-professorish, as when he writes:" Although in later y ears he would recommend Huckleberry Finn andLifeon the Mississippi as good books to read...

...Of his American contemporaries, Jarrell admired especially the poets Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, as well as the prose writer Peter Taylor—and all three became good friends, as to a lesser extent did Berryman and Schwartz...

...Hence the assumption of the role of a woman, for whom, in those days, absorption in one's neurotic problems was less of a misdemeanor...

...I myself concluded a review of Jarrell's fourth and last collection of criticism (NL, September 8, 1980), "Members of his family...

...The locus classicus in Jarrell's criticism occurs in an essay on Stevens, where a good poet is defined as "someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times...

...The poem, by the way, is a woman's dramatic monologue, as is many a poem in Pritchard's anthology, yet Pritchard does not consider the phenomenon peculiar...

...while posing, he astounded them with his discourses on Greek myths...

...Take, for example, Pritchard's comment about a single devastating remark in an otherwise glowing tribute to Whitman: "This is both very funny and eerily right...

...That he does this by deliberate choice does not make it any more acceptable to me...

...Two of his chief critical strategies show up in an early review of Yvor Winters: aggressive use of one-liners and praise by quotation without explication—the good being beyond the power of words to explain...

...The American poet feels himself conducting a war...

...Now, however, WilliamH...

...All warts, except the lovably comic ones, are removed...

...Flint, who saw combat as a Navy gunner, says he learned something additional about his own experiences from Jarrell's poetry...

...Mary Jarrell made public only Randall's happy warts, yet even those are, in their way, disturbing...

...The only help for Randall's poetrywouldhavebeenaPound, thePound who was able to edit Eliot brilliantly— though not often, alas, himself...

...Twain, like other 19th-century American writers, seems to have played a rather minor part in his constellation...

...Here, too, his overambitiousness and tactlessness worked against him...

...Second, he clearly feels so respectful of, so grateful to, Mary von Schrader Jarrell that he strives to write a book that will not upset her in any way...

...You would not get from her—or from Pritchard—what James Dickey told me: that the driver of a car on the road where Randall died had phoned the police about a man trying to commit vehicular suicide...

...One can go farther: Why doesn't he tell us anything about Mackie after the divorce or, for that matter, about the divorce itself...

...And while I applaud the honesty with which Pritchard declares that his aims include enhancing Jarrell's status as a poet, I am a little worried when defense takes the form of arguing that "slightly awkward syntax...

...Theendofthepoem, "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose," is such a line...

...it does not have many companions in Jarrell's verse...

...The dimly sensed subaltern status in poetry could have been in large measure what killed him...

...Jarrell, like anyone else, had a life outside his work, but the biographer does not bother much with that...

...There the only conceivable rival, Peter Taylor, was, unlike an R.P...

...But there was in Jarrell what, in pre-feminist days, was called a feminine streak: a passivity, a narcissism, a need to be coddled and pedestalized without having to compete for it...

...into the stuff of self-delusion...

...I went along to his classes and he went along on my errands...

...who have tried to make his death appear an accident do himadisservice: They turn intoa prosaic mishap what was a meting out of poetic, or at least critical, justice, mistakenly but gallantly applied...

...Languages, though, gave him trouble—particularly German, his favorite in later life—and a failure in science pushed him back into literature...

...He'd study himself for minutes, thinking—I know not what...

...Again: "Hehad his favorite mirrors and his 'un-favorites,' but I believe he looked into every one we ever saw...

...But so far as I know I've never been dishonest enough to say unfavorable things for a chance to be witty...

...He had to be at the top in everything that mattered to him, and poetry mattered more than criticism, though first-rate critics may be even rarer than first-rate poets in America...

...Pritchard is an intelligent person and a sensitive scholar-critic of sundry aspects of Jarrell's work...

...There lies for me the chief weakness of Pritchard's book...

...That eventually Jarrell's sanity broke down does not seem to be a warrant for turning the remarks...

...How does it go...

...I think of all I have...

...In the same year, his first poetry volume appeared—really one-fifth of a collective volume...

...Instead, he and Mackie acquired a black Persian cat...

...Did that car hit him or did he hit the car...

...There was something manic about Jarrell all along...

...T? get back to Pritchard, Bruce Bawer has rightly raised the question of why the biographer did not interview anyone who was in the service with Jarrell, or indeed the many surviving people who knew him...

...Did hejust pity himself and all the Others, in a kind of monstrous, abstract, complacent, and inhuman Compassion...

...But throughout his three-and-a-half years in the Air Corps, the inspiration for some of his best early poetry, he made no friends...

...and usually they accept bitterly that the poet is quite inefficacious...

...I think that American poets, far more than English ones, cling to the idea that the poet is the 'unacknowledged legislator...

...Help...

...I beg to differ...

...Such embattled certainty may, without loss of critical acumen, be a cover-up for profound anxiety...

...but that another car, just ahead of it, was unable to swerve in time and fatally sideswiped Jarrell...

...The boy was closest to his paternal grandparents and great-grandmother, least close to his younger brother, Charles, with whom he was never to be comfortable...

...But in the 50 Selected Poems, once the poet is out of the Army, this happens over and over: "Moving," "Seele im Raum," "The Face," "The Black Swan," "The Woman in the Washington Zoo" (Jarrell's second most popular poem), "Next Day," "The Lost Children," "Gleaning," and the tailpiece, "The Player Piano," are all of that ilk...

...Born in Nashville to a workingclass father and a middle-class mother, Randall was soon whisked away to Los Angeles, where his father struggled along in the photography business...

...I quote from her in Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965, the posthumous collection of tributes assembled by Lowell, Taylor and Warren: "We took three meals a day together, every day...

...The Bobbsey Twins at the Plaza' he'd say up in our room at the Plaza...

...Auden, whose work Jarrell began by loving and emulating, but later turned against with increasing, and by no means wholly unjustified, asperity, was puzzled by the attacks and remarked in conversation (Pritchard might have quoted this), "Ithinkheisinlovewithme...

...I find both styles unsatisfying: Most of Jarrell's poems read to me like prose outlines of a poem yet to be written— by someone else...

...This does not mean that they lack any interest, or that they do not occasionally hit a true poetic note...

...Pritchardhas joined the widow's campaign by arguing at great length against the suicide theory in Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (Michael Di Capua/Farrar Straus Giroux, 338 pp., $25.00...

...indeed, when the latter are quoted, there is usually no bibliographical reference enabling us to check or explore a source...

...That was one mode...

...that a squad car was dispatched to the scene...

...He did teach quite steadily, and did not go off on periodic binges or stays in nonacademic institutions...

...he'd ask me...

...The man who was more and more obsessed with flashy clothes and flashy cars, who—uncharacteristically—was beginning to stray (Pritchard mentions "rumors" about a young woman at Goucher College with whom Randall "fancied himself in love," which "doubtless contributed to his estrangement from Mary"), who became ever more enamored of sports celebrities like the quarterback Johnny Unitas (and spent 20 minutes recounting a meeting with him in the course of introducing a lecture by Hannah Arendt), the man, furthermore, who was flying nonstop all over the country on his Amex card, and tipping a waitress $1,500—that man was as crazy as they come...

...The Jarrell she would have us buy had a breakdown for no profound reason, was on his way to becoming pristine again, and was accidentally killed by a stray car...

...And what unfailing taste he possessed...

...As Pritchard records repeatedly, Jarrell could not even accept helpful suggestions from beloved poets and friends, the very people he had no compunctions about upbraiding and correcting...

...As Bawer perceptively observes, "on at least one occasion in the biography it is clear that he has not been permitted to see everything...

...feeling that Jarrell can and does say anything so long as he not only believes it but believes that it will amuse his audience and himself...

...In Randall Jarrell's Letters, edited by her, there are a mere 35 items from the last two troubled and often demented years, and those mostly business notes...

...Pritchard puts a heavy emphasis on the adjective in his subtitle, A Literary Life, and shortchanges the noun...

...Replying to an attack on his criticism, he stated what was to become a large part of his critical credo: "Astring of sober no's would bore any reader, so I try to phrase my no's as well as I can...

...Let me ask you to read "Next Day," a poem so quintessential that Jarrell chose to open his last and best collection, The Lost World, with it...

...Harold Nourse tells in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, about Lowell reading at the Y from his recently published Lord Weary's Castle: "Randall Jarrell greeted him loudly, 'Here's the genius!' and Lowell visibly cringed...

...Pritchard writes: "My inclination is not to understand or 'accept' this split as an indication of a character at troubled odds with itself, but to take it rather as a measure of Jarrell's sanity...

...But lightning, I think, never struck Jarrell...

...In Randall Jarell: Selected Poems (Michael Di Caupa/Farrar Straus Giroux, 115pp.,$17.95)acompanion volume to his biography, Pritchard has judiciously and tastefully culled 50 pieces from the nearly 500-page jumble that is The Complete Poems...

...The reason is twofold...

...He was already concerned with bringing his poetry closer to unrhetorical speech, which proved a mixed blessing...

...In addition, Jarrell's one work for the stage was a version of Chekhov's The Three Sisters, a play whose three deeply frustrated women monologuize copiously...

...If we look at the chief American poets born just before or during World War I—Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell—we are struck by the truth of Leslie Fiedler's observationin Waiting for the End: "Sometimes, indeed, it seems asif thepathwhichleads back and forth between the classroom and the madhouse is the one which the modern American muse loves especially to tread...

...for the hand mirror...

...Inahuman way, this may be to his credit...

...Pritchard rightly assumes that Randall, after his parents divorced and Anna Jarrell moved back to Nashville with her children, needed to be first in his mother's affection...

...I think not...

...Somebody come change the music...

...Fiedler, in a tribute quoted by Pritchard, speaks of Jarrell as " responsible only to his own responses, hushed only before his own taste...

...Pritchard sums up Jarrell's Army years as having been lived in the writings—poetry, criticism, correspondence —and adds, "In a sense one could say this about any period of his career...

...How young I seem...

...After a day in bed with a cold...

...Similarly, in connection with the seminal essay "The Obscurity of the Poet," Pritchard remarks, "One has a...

...Perhaps more pathetic was the adulation of Kitten...

...Although he was not shipped overseas for actual combat, he kept writing poems about it...

...actually guards against slickness" and sentimentality—an argument pro domo if I ever heard one...

...To still another mentor, Allen Tate, Jarrell described his mind as unsystematic, but so, he added, was the world...

...he pronounced The Wild Duck "the greatest play of the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare...

...Nevertheless, the critic R.W...

...There were to be no children: Jarrell was interested only in other people's and in the abstraction "Children...

...There are not a few linguistic and stylistic lapses throughout the book...

...But it is equally worth noting that his real emotional troubles began when he passed 50...

...In fact, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" became his albatross: that one popular anthology piece that eclipses many other, better ones...

...There was no such deference when Randall met Mary...

...In this quincunx, Jarrell would have appeared, until the last phase, the healthiest mentally...

...The final deranged phase of Jarrell's life is simply an intensification of all this, brought on, as I have suggested, by loss of youth and inspiration...

...Yes, Frost, one of Jarrell's idols, wrote similar women's monologues...

...Hechanged his major from English to psychology (with a minor in philosophy), read more voraciously than ever, played tennis extremely competitively, had his first love affair with a young woman who would remain a good friend, and in general did very well...

...I once heard him give a lecture at Harvard ["The Obscurity of the Poet"] to 2,000 people, going on about this, which struck me as rather absurd, but in the light of what has happened it now seems tragic...

...In this ludicrously dangling construction, Twain would seem to be peddling his own wares...

...in another, the poet waxed recondite, cryptic, obscure...

...Pritchard cites the examples of Karl Shapiro and Conrad Aiken...

...Blackmur, no competition: He was a self-effacing friend, and he wrote fiction...

...Perhaps the most interesting item Pritchard adduces from Randall's Army years is a letter to Mackie in which he thanks her for some snapshots she sent him, and becomes far more rhapsodic about the ones of Kitten than those of her...

...As Bruce Bawer remarks in his excellent essay "The Enigma of Randall Jarrell," in the May New Criterion, "'Monstrous' may be going too far, but Dickey is otherwise right on the money: The graver his theme, the further back Jarrell tended to step from it, indulging in empty rhetoric, ponderous ironies, and a facile, generalized pity...

...Mary argues—and got the coroner to partly agree—that Randall's being sideswiped proves accidental death...

...Moreover, the genteel girl students on that somnolent campus were largely unchallenging heroworshipers of their dazzling teacher, content to have his lectures be mostly readings out loud of favorite passages...

...at best it grazed him...

...Imaginative reductio ad absurdum is, in other words, not acceptable as criticism by professionals, only as criticism by amateurs...

...The poem "The Face," moreover, puts it about aging: "I know, there's no saying no,/But just the same you say it...

...During his last years, teaching at the low-powered Women's College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he would drag Mary on lengthy treks to hunt down copies of Road and Track, hard to find in the area...

...What is supremely revealing about Jarrell—and is noticed but not interpreted by Pritchard—is his inability to function in such places as Sarah Lawrence and Princeton, where he was not the big cheese in the department, but only at Greensboro, where he was...

...In a famous review of Jarrell's Selected Poems (1955), James Dickey argued that "you can't legitimately offer your personal interpretation of 'reality' as though it were universally acceptable...

...Most of his friends believe his death to have been a suicide...

...Jarreix's tragedy—a not uncommon one in American literature—is that a man who could dish out some of the most truly useful rubble-clearing criticism in the history of that genre was so thin-skinned where he himself was concerned...

...In 1926, the 12-yearold went to Califomia to visit his father and spent a year in Long Beach, where he read more books in new libraries, saw movies and watched them being made, and had an all-around good time with his grandparents...

...The car sideswiped him as he was returning one evening from a hospital where he was being treated as an outpatient for an improperly healing hand injury incurred when, in a fit of depression some months earlier, he had slashed his wrist...

...His first solo effort, Blood for a Stranger, was published in 1942, the year he enlisted in the Army Air Corps...

...against the debased values of modern society...

...If we set this alongside Auden's remark quoted earlier, are we to conclude that, as in Tennessee Williams, a homosexual author is projecting himself into his female characters...

...Yet by this time both Ransom and Warren were publishing his poetry and criticism in their prestigious quarterlies...

...I'd do it myself but I'm holding Kitten—as that phrase goes...

...What other way is there of saying it besides suicide...

...In Jarrell's case, this may prove a point...

...Sometimes we were brother and sister 'like Wordsworth and Dorothy' and other times we were twins...

...If the FM station Jarrell was listening to switched to the wrong music while he was holding Kitten on his lap, he would yell, "Help...

...Yet she is the kind of widow who verges on being a Nora Joyce: the sort that destroys her husband's disquieting manuscripts and does everything to turn him into a plaster saint...

...Dickey spoke of the general prosiness, the ordinariness of Jarrell's poetry...

...but is of course not 'analysis' so much as something a novelist or poet might produce as the only adequate response to Whitman's grotesque phrase...

...I feel that the "so long as he not only believes it" is thrown in simply to satisfy the likes of Mary Jarrell, for it weakens Pritchard's point— apoint, by the way, that troublesour biographer, too...

...It is a theory worth entertaining that Jarrell died of public neglect—as he interpreted it—and of a sense of his own impotence...

...Having studied with Ransom, Jarrell followed him to Kenyon as a graduate student and junior teacher...

...I am exceptional...

...Why is there only one brief mention of brother Charles, to the effect that relations were "less than satisfactory...

...Pritchard himself relates how Robert Penn Warren, Jarrell's admiring teacher, nevertheless had to reprimand Randall for his patronizing insolence to fellow students at Vanderbilt University, and John Crowe Ransom, another appreciative mentor at Kenyon College, deplored the young man's overbearing attitude...

...they do not make the reading easier...

...He was devastated about having to return to Nashville...

...Actually, of course, it was a car...

...Lowell recalls: "You felt that even your choice in neckties wounded him...

...only his widow, Mary, has fanatically maintained it was an accident...

...This may reflect the publisher's wish not to scare off the nonacademic reader, but it may also be a way of protecting Pritchard from the charge of having done insufficient homework, a charge that must give the most easygoing professor pause...

...He spent most of his time reading, at home or at the library...

...the new heroes were Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost...

...Among other things, he wrote drama criticism, and was already able to upbraid a local theater group for using the wrong text of Hamlet...

...Could he have felt, in actuality or delusion, his powers waning...

...Randall Jarrell, amazingly, does not even include a bibliography of writings by and about Randall Jarrell...

...They have a public concept of the efficacy of poetry...

...But that is precisely the point: Mary is, figuratively, looking over Pritchard's shoulder as he writes, and he is either taken in by her, or pathetically grateful for access to some unpublished material...

...the "he," of course, is meant to be Jarrell...

...Most people would have been satisfied with this...

...after 50 years, it cracked...

...James Dickey, reviewing the 1955 Selected Poems, wondered: "Did Jarrell never love any person in the service with him...

...Even if Joseph Bennett's harsh review of The Lost World in the New York TimesBookReview was damaging to Jarrell's equilibrium, Pritchard, as a professor of English, should know that Jarrell was not killed by the Times any more than Keats was killed by the Quarterly...