The Poet and Critic in Retrospect

Indulgent, or candid, or uncommon reader--I've some: a wife, a nun, a ghost or two--If I write for anyone, I wrote for you; So whisper when I die, We was too few; Write over me (if you can write; I hardly knew)

That I--that I--but anything will do, I'm satisfied...And yet--and yet, you were too few; Should I perhaps have written for your brothers,

Those artful, common, indulgent others?

Randall Jarrell wrote this bitter-sweet little obituary for himself more than ten years before he was struck by a car one night as he walked along a country road near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His wife and the nun have returned to whisper his praises in a volume of appreciations published this fall. Mrs. Jarrell recalls her husband's enthusiasms for sports cars, Mahler, and a giant cat named Kitten; Sister M. Bernetta Quinn plods patiently through an exposition of "Metamorphoses in Randall Jarrell."

But how about "the ghost or two"--the handful of fragile souls that Jarrell forsesaw clustering about his grave? Instead we have nothing less than the United States Cultural All-Star Team. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, James Dickey, Allen Tate, Robert Fitzgerald, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Leslie A. Fiedler, Hannah Arendt, all take the podium.

Jarrell was one of the elite, and one can read this book for titilating glimpses into the insider's world of working poets. In places Lowell is called "Cal" and William Carlos Williams "Bill," and the coziness is compulsively fascinating to an outsider. But the real question is what brought this great and loving fraternity of American poets together? And the answer--God-like Randall--is fascinating too.

Mrs. Jarrell may be suspected of instigating the movement to canonize her husband. She has been touring the country reading his poems since shortly after his death. And she was the star performer at an immensely emotional memorial service at Yale in February, 1966, in which many of the contributors to this book spoke in his honor.

The mythology that is growing around Jarrell started with his death. He died, "an apparent suicide" the papers and newsweeklies reported. But Mrs. Jarrell wrote letters to Time and Newsweek, explaining that her husband was wearing dark clothes and "a favorite pair of brown gloves, that the road was narrow and badly lighted, and that the car brushed past him at approximately 45 m.p.h. bruising his shoulder and glancing the side of his head at windshield height, causing instant death." Like Jay in Agee's A Death in the Family, there wasn't a mark on him, but suddenly he was dead.

At times his life seemed to belong as much to the picturesque world of fiction as did the manner of his death. We get only glimpses of Jarrell in the book of memorials. None of the writers attempt a miniature biography, but the anecdotes all add to the same picture of paradoxical man, warm to those he respected, yet always distant enough to be awe-inspiring.

He was a terror as a reviewer--and treated mediocre work from his friends as a personal reproach. But merciless as his criticism was, the poets treasured it. "I wrote to the mind of Randall Jarrell," Adrienne Rich writes and many of the contributors like her recognize Jarrell's capacity for understanding just what they were trying to do in their poetry, telling them when and how they failed, and encouraging them to keep going. "Twice or thrice, I think he must have thrown me a lifeline," Lowell says.

A Figure from Fairyland

Arendt calls him "a figure from fairyland," and none who knew him can resist commenting on the sparkling, playful eyes lodged in his deep and at times overpoweringly sad face. Elizabeth Bishop remembers him looking "small and rather delicate but bright and dazzling, too" on the crest of a Cape Cod sand dune, writing in a notebook. Robert Fitzgerald finds his face "old-fashioned and rural and honorable and a little toothy." His wife says that he grew the immense beard to look like Chekhov, but to another observer it hides "the naked vulnerability of his countenance."

The book is loaded with stories of Jarrell the gamesman. He and Lowell used to sit in an empty classroom playing "Who's First?", a game in which they would downgrade fellow-poets until they were the only two left at the top. From his youth, he loved tennis and he lavishly admired professional football, spending countless Sunday afternoons in front of his TV and eventually making Johnny Unitas a figure for the poet's craft. Once, while a house guest, he lost a croquet game to some children, and his hostess detected him at 5 a.m. the next morning on the front lawn, rearranging the wickets.

"If you can write; I hardly knew"

This viciously competitive streak poured over into what he wrote. His writing had the same sparkle as his talk, and the contributors are as much in awe of the man's power with words as they were with the man. Most of them are conscious of the irony of writing a volume of eulogitic criticism on Jarrell, for he was the most violent and the most effective of professional critics.

His Poetry and the Age begs for a criticism that "sounds as if it had been written by a reader for readers, by a human being for human beings," instead of by "a syndicate of encyclopedias for an audience of International Business Machines." He could dismiss the pedantries of his associates with a single slash. He ends an essay on Whitman: "I have said so little about Whitman's faults because they are so plain: baby critics who have barely learned to complain of the lack of ambiguity in Peter Rabbit can tell you what is wrong with Leaves of Grass."

"Like It!"

Those who admire Jarrell admire his taste, and it is fortunate that he was always right in his criticism, for he wrote with an authoritarian voice that could have sounded smart-aleck were he ever a shade off target. At times he seems to reach out from the page, shake the reader by the collar, and command "Like It!" with dictums like "these lines are so good that even admiration feels like insolence, and one is ashamed of anything one can find to say about them."

Because as Lowell says, "his dogmatism is completely unspoiled by the hedging equanimity that weakens the style and temperment of most serious writers," he became the most powerful American critic since Eliot. It is unlikely that anything better on Frost will ever be written than his "To the Laodiceans"--an exuberant reading of 35 of the best, but once unrecognized poems--most of them from Frost's dark side which he virtually discovered. And his review of Lowell's Lord Weary Castle reads, as one of the contributors says, like Coleridge on Wordsworth.

The subject of his successful criticism weren't always so happy. While he could communicate his enthusiasms with joyful immediacy, he could and did destroy bad books with a few merciless phrases. "He was immensely cruel," John Berryman writes, "and the extraordinary thing about it is that he didn't know he was cruel." Jarrell had some pity for bad poets ("it is as if writers had sent you their ripped out arms and legs with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick.") but he could write nothing kind about their poems. And even a few of his memorialists (Allen Tate, for instance) clearly bear scars from the lash of his terrible swift tongue.

Jarrell, too, wrote poems. They read like his essays--pure, uncompromising, and dazzlingly intelligent. But Jarrell wasn't merely being modest when he said his readers must be indulgent of him--what he says is largely said elsewhere and without the grace of his voice, his poems might seem banal.

His best poems are about women, lonely middle-aged women facing their own decay. "The Face" describes without a touch of comforting illusion, a long hard stare into the mirror...

Not good any more, not beautiful -- Not even young. This isn't mine. Where is the old one, the old ones? Those were mine. It's so: I have pictures,

Not such old ones; people behaved Differently then...When they meet me they say: You haven't changed. I want to say: You haven't looked.

This is what happens to everyone. At first yo uget bigger, you know more,Then something goes wrong. You are, and you say: I am -- And you were...I've been too long.

I know there's no saying no, But just the same you say it. No, I'll point to myself and say: I'm not like this. --And even that's not so.

I thought: If nothing happens...and nothing happened. Here I am.

But it's not right.

If just living can do this, Living is more dangerous than anything.

It is terrible to be alive.

Jarrell had to be brave to even attempt a poem so simple as this. There is no structured poetic theory like Stevens', between him and his subject, no fluffy metaphor to make the horror manageable, no "T. S. Eliotscotch-tape," as one of his memorialists says, to put the shattered lost world together again. And this is where Jarrell parts company with most of his contemporaries.

Jarrell's last poems go straight at contemporary situations. He is displaced and dispossessed by the whirl of American culture and finds himself in 'The X-Ray Waiting Room in the Hospital"...

I am dressed in my big shoes and wrinkly socks And one of the light blue, much-laundered smocks The men and women of this country wear All of us miss our own underwear And the old days.

His favorite writer was Proust and in his final book, The Lost World, he dipped back into his Hollywood childhood in two long poems. Though he tries to escape into the past, the book has residues of bitterness against the present from a collection of violent essays entitled A Sad Heart in the Supermarket he wrote in the early '60s. In The Lost World he writes a wonderfully weary poem of the suburban house that could have the same title as his earlier anthology:

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food gathering flocks Are selves I overlook.

Twenty years ago, Jarrell had a reputation as America's great war poet, because he was writing about a different set of realities with the same kind of immediacy. He wrote then too on conventional themes, but extraordinarily well--the loneliness of the individual soldier, the bursts of sudden violence. His much anthologized "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," ends, "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

Jarrell's sudden death hasn't been as anonymous, and the Committee of memorialists has contrived to write something far more elaborate than the "anything will do" he asked for as an epitaph. Buried in this courteous and often adoring book are kernels of the familiar sad story of the American artist that poured out in Jarrell's poems. He was recovering or perhaps failing to recover from a nervous breakdown that October in North Carolina. "When I last saw him, not long before his death," Arendt writes, "the laughter was almost gone and he was ready to admit defeat."

The Tributes

This hint of nihilism in his death, helps explain the emotional flood it called forth from American poets. Some of the tributes are extravagant. "His poems give you a feel of a time, our time, as no other poetry of our century dies," James Dickey says. Even when Jarrell was in college, Ransom writes, "you knew that he had to become one of the important people in the literature of our time." Robert Watson is more to the point when he says, Randall Jarrell "looked open-eyed at the delights and horrors or our time."

In "A Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket" Lowell contemplates the brakish shoal, longing for the whalers who

....died

When time was open-eyed.

The memorialists may fear that in losing Jarrell, they have lost the last poet brave enough to look straight into America's face