Critical Gifts

Born in 1914, Jarrell thought of himself as a poet all his life. But if we know him as great today, it is not for his poetry but for the criticism he wrote while standing around waiting for the lightning that never quite struck him. Belonging to the generation of John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell — those American poets who came of age just as the high modernist experimentation of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound was running down and who spent their poetic lives looking for something to replace it — Jarrell composed the most authoritative and enduring criticism ever written by a poet about his contemporaries. If he wasn’t among the best poets of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, he at least got to decide who was.

Jarrell came from the fringes of Nashville high society. His uncle Howell Campbell ran the company that makes that Tennessee treat, the Goo-Goo candy bar, and the handsome young Jarrell posed as the model for Ganymede on the city’s recreation of the Parthenon. It was the raw material of a mild, southern, shabby-genteel upbringing — but Jarrell’s parents divorced, and he was shuttled between Tennessee and his father’s photography studio in southern California. So he grew up instead a loner, his true parents — he liked to claim — the books at the local public library wherever he happened to be living.

As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, he came under the wing of the reactionary southern “Fugitive” poets John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. He moved with Ransom to Kenyon College after graduating, living in the poet’s attic with Robert Lowell and the novelist Peter Taylor. (Surely, the most talent gathered under one American small-college roof since Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Franklin Pierce bunked together at Bowdoin in the 1820s.)

He eventually found two big faculty appointments, one at the University of Texas, the other at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, filled in for a year as literary editor of the Nation magazine, and spent two more as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress. He enlisted in the army in World War II, but worked as a flight trainer state-side and never saw action. A divorce in 1951 was amicable enough and left him unruffled. Aside from the irascible Tate, who came to think him a “gifted, self-adulating twerp,” Jarrell seems never to have lost a friend, for all the rapier ferocity of his criticism.

But there wasn’t much “excitement” in Jarrell’s life — certainly not as his particularly dissolute contemporaries understood it. As his second wife Mary von Schrader Jarrell points out in her slight and gushy new memoir Remembering Randall, the Cuban missile crisis — which interrupted the 1962 National Poetry Festival in Washington — passed unnoticed by such figures as Robert Lowell, who spent it in a mental ward, and John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, who spent it in jail after a hotel punch-up with Washington policemen. Jarrell was at odds with his contemporaries in his modesty, his sobriety, his sexual reticence, and his very sanity — up until a spiral of depression that would cost him his life in 1964 at age fifty-one.

No Other Book, a generous new selection of essays edited by the poet Brad Leithauser, shows the full range of his critical talents. Jarrell joined many other critics in admiring the new and experimental. But, almost alone among them, he had no interest in consolidating a priestly caste of poetry savants. His conviction, rather, was that most experimental poetry isn’t difficult at all, at least not more difficult than “classic” poetry. He sought to win a Lord Tennyson-sized audience for Wallace Stevens-style poetry.

It was a radically democratic project, and probably a doomed one. On the eve of the television age, it implied great faith in both audiences and poets. That faith is both Jarrell’s most endearing attribute and the great badge of his naivete. Jarrell was happy to speak dogmatically: The top American poets of the century, to his mind, were T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens — period. But it was his dogma; Jarrell was untethered from any preexisting consensus, opining, for instance, that “There is more sexuality [in Robert Frost] than in several hothouses full of Dylan Thomas.” And all of his pronouncements were delivered with a gruff, regular-guy kind of wit, as when he dismissed Richard Wilbur as “the Poet in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Without ever seeming to strive for originality, his essays were brimming with it.

Jarrell’s early frame of reference was a limited and, we can now see, limiting one. He was, for instance, little interested in pre-Enlightenment thought outside of Shakespeare. But how boned up he was on modernity, and how well he deployed that reading! Almost all his essays covered the highly (and increasingly) specialized discipline of poetry. But no essayist in the modernist camp moved so allusively between disciplines: politics, business, the arts, science, and (especially) psychology — and none wore his erudition so lightly. None could use words like “haeccitas” and “haptic” to less-intimidating effect.

Jarrell was writing on the eve of — in fact, he helped bring about — a great transformation. Over the last three decades, essayists and critics have come to be thought (or at least have come to think themselves) the equals of the artists they criticize. But for Jarrell, the critic was always merely “the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars.” He insisted on the subordinate position of criticism, dismissing it as “the poetry of prosaic natures.” If he had thought of himself as a critic, such sentiments would have been evidence of a touching modesty.

The tragedy of Randall Jarrell is that he thought of himself instead as a poet. And Jarrell’s fickle body of poetry defeats the efforts of the most kindly disposed critics to clear even a minor place in the canon for it. Leithauser, in his introduction to No Other Book, credits him with “beautiful piercing poems,” but he’s distressingly unspecific about which ones he’s talking about. Jarrell’s biographer William Pritchard would also like to claim a place for Jarrell as a poet, but it is to the criticism that he devotes the lion’s share of his 1990 biography. The critic Leslie Fiedler spoke of Jarrell’s “unfailing” taste as “something nearer to madness than to method,” but this was only a way of using his criticism to vouch for Jarrell’s creativity in a way that the poems could not.

It is no mystery why lovers of poetry have consistently overvalued Jarrell’s. Jarrell is like a best college friend, the one with whom you discovered poetry. As a reading companion, he is irreplaceable, and there must be a lot of people for whom to lose him is to lose much of poetry itself. What’s more, he is so sympathetic a person that one wants nothing more than to confer on him retrospectively what he most wanted: the title of a Great Poet. Alas, Jarrell is not a good, nor even a passable, poet.

If he’s known as a poet at all today, it is for “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” an atypical squib from his war-poetry period that runs:

 

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

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

No one will ever say of the “Ball Turret Gunner” — as Jarrell once said of a favorite poem — that it is one of the things wise old men will ask to have read to them on their deathbeds. It’s a thin reed on which to hang a poetic reputation, but it is so thoroughly the only poem anyone knows by Jarrell that it drove him almost to despair. As Mary Jarrell writes in Remembering Randall, “He could tell from the outside, somehow, which letters were ‘Ball Turret Gunner’ permission requests.”

But if it is not representative of Jarrell’s poetry, what is? We could start with “A Girl in a Library,” one of the early poems of which Jarrell was proudest, and which has been best received by critics:

 

If someone questioned you, What doest thou here?

You’d knit your brows like an orangoutang

I(But not so sadly; not so thoughtfully)

And answer with a pure heart, guilelessly:

I’m studying . . .

Here, what amazes is the slackness (doesn’t “with a pure heart” mean “guilelessly”?), the hackneyed effects (“doest thou”), the cheap shots (“not so thoughtfully” as “an orangoutang”), the elbowing eagerness for alliteration and assonance that produces only tongue-twisters. Where, for instance, is the metrical gift and euphony that stamp his prose criticism with lines like “The clustering stresses learned from accentual verse” — which would be great poetry if great poetry could be written about great poetry? But above all, where did Jarrell derive the shallow, gratuitous meanness of “Girl in a Library,” so at odds with the blithe man of letters in the essays?

Jarrell’s problem is finally that he had nothing to say. There was nothing in Jarrell’s life so momentous as the religious Lowell’s conversion to Catholicism, the drunkard Berryman’s conversion to alcoholism, or the expatriate Bishop’s conversion to tourism.

But that is not to say Jarrell was without what the French call a “master-thought.” When, as an undergraduate, Jarrell began to study psychology — even to the neglect of literature — he grew convinced he had found the key to unlock human character. This enthusiasm grew into a lifelong obsession, sealed by Jarrell’s discovery that he and Freud shared a birthday. According to Mary Jarrell, he would press a volume of The Interpretation of Dreams or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life into a friend’s hands and say, like one newly evangelized, “You’ll thank me.”

Jarrell thought all poetry arrived on a sort of express-train from the unconscious, with the “unconscious” understood in categorically Freudian terms. “It is not, unfortunately, in the writer’s power to control what he writes,” he once opined. “Something else originates and controls it, whether you call that something else the unconscious or Minerva and the Muse.” Poetry, that is to say, occurs by accident. That’s why Jarrell liked the image of the poet as a man standing in a thunderstorm or as “a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen.”

In Jarrell’s case, psychoanalysis was the critic’s meat and the poet’s poison. If a poet believes poems come out of nowhere, he is tempted to all sorts of counterproductive writing habits, like symbol-mongering and automatic writing — and Jarrell fell into practically all of them. More, he held that all poetry was essentially Romantic, and thus he could find no consolation in being a great critic. When compared with a Romantic poet and his aura of dashing individualism, the critic was a pariah, a stock joke. The critic was the reviewer who killed John Keats or one of those men whom Yeats described as bald heads ignorant of their sins. Jarrell’s views were a recipe for despair.

In 1941, Jarrell attacked Auden’s poems for being lazily formulaic, christening Auden’s signature tic the “Effect by Incongruity” — citing such phrases as “the baroque frontiers,” “the surrealist police,” “the tree’s clandestine tide.” The proposition Jarrell is setting up here is that poetry “represents the unconscious . . . as well as the conscious, our lives as well as our thoughts; and . . . has its true sources in the first and not the second.” Auden’s poetry is “too merely rational: we should distrust it.” In other words, if you set out to write a poem, it doesn’t count. Only poems that strike like a thunderbolt from the unconscious count.

In faulting Auden for using such “devices,” Jarrell was being uncharacteristically unfair. First, any repeated particularity can be called a “device.” Double-entendres are a device in Shakespeare, as enjambment is in Milton. A device is only a style that you don’t like. But second, if Jarrell’s unconscious is working at all here, it is in an Oedipal struggle to kill off Auden’s influence after having spent the first ten years of his own writing life slavishly imitating Auden’s “effect by incongruity.” Take the lines:

 

The rewarded porters opening their smiles,

Grapes with a card, and the climate changing

From the sun of bathers to the ice of skis

Cannot hide it — journeys are journeys.

This, as William Pritchard has noted with some amazement, is Jarrell, not Auden. It would be a spectacular parody — but it’s not a parody. As a critic, Jarrell excels precisely in showing where unconscious plagiarism and trickery result in verse that is slack and mannered. But as a poet, Jarrell never learned this at all. After reading a collection of poems that includes Auden’s “The Capital” (with its lines: rooms where the lonely are battered / slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes), Jarrell writes: “The best of [Auden’s poems] have shapes (just as driftwood or pebbles do) that seem the direct representation of the forces that produced them.” He has become a mimic, even a plagiarist, without realizing it. One sees very clearly what Clement Greenberg meant when, the following year in Partisan Review, he rued Jarrell’s “unimmediate, unsigned style, through which other poetry, notably Auden’s and Yeats’s, seems to have been strained and deprived of savor.”

Jarrell is so good at making other poets part of him that in the end there is no place left in him for him. His progress as a poet is from Bad Imitations of Auden through Bad Imitations of Frost to Bad Imitations of Rilke. The best evidence that something was going really wrong — and very early — is that Jarrell, normally quite thick-skinned about slights, had a hair-trigger reaction to negative criticism. There’s no poet more sensitive than one who’s turning out not to be a poet at all.

In 1948, Jarrell spent several weeks in Austria teaching at a seminar in Salzburg on American civilization, long enough to fall in love — deeply, permanently, obsessively — with Europe. “My reaction to Europe was roughly this,” he wrote to Robert Lowell, “Had I not been there my whole life? Why, how’d I get along?”

His criticism suddenly veered. In the essays he wrote after his mid-thirties, the chit-chat of his friends is replaced by the pronouncements of Rilke, Hoffmannsthal, and — constantly, idolatrously — Goethe. The greatest contribution of Mary Jarrell’s memoir is to show us how all-consuming was the obsession that Jarrell brought to Goethe. Absurdly, he even laid claim to the formula so often quoted by Germans: “We are the people of Goethe.” And he plunged, with only shaky German, into translating Faust.

Immersion in Goethe could have taught Jarrell important lessons. At the very least, it could have led him to rethink his daemonic model of poetic inspiration. Goethe, for all his speculation on unknowable drives, was never one to reject a thought simply because it was too rational.

But while Goethe did not alter Jarrell’s assumptions about what makes poets burst into song, he did challenge Jarrell’s long-standing optimism about American culture. Jarrell had always been skeptical of the nonsensical central credo of American Poetry Boosterism: that poetry arises out of a landscape or a system of government more than it does out of a language, and that Europe’s — specifically England’s — metrics and literary mannerisms were therefore automatically suspect for American poets. But now he began to have his doubts about the whole project of American literature, the Emersonian project, the “American Adam” project by which Americans insisted on looking at everything afresh. He was drawn increasingly to culture in a European sense — of reverence, limits, and wisdom that accumulates through generations.

In short, the poetry that he’d built his career vouching for no longer seemed that good to him. Jarrell’s biographer William Pritchard has traced this evolution in Jarrell’s treatment of William Carlos Williams. In 1946, when the first part of Williams’s Paterson came out, Jarrell hoped it would be the great American long poem. By 1952, with the poem complete, he was saying: “Paterson has been getting rather steadily worse” — when the truth is rather that Jarrell had been getting rather steadily more European. Jarrell’s long-professed love for the poetry of Marianne Moore began to feel similarly torqued up. Jarrell still thought of her as a fantastically accomplished metrician. But as the 1950s wore on, he began to rue that she had deployed her mastery to such limited and artificial ends.

And while he attacked Williams as an “unreasoning” and “intuitive” poet, what did Jarrell think he himself was? Jarrell the critic and Jarrell the poet were by the mid-1950s working wholly at cross-purposes. Jarrell’s strong suit was the hard rationality of his mind — and he distrusted it as much in his poetry-writing as he exploited it in his criticism. It was in an essay on Williams that Jarrell — pondering Henry James’s remark that America “has no ruins” — remarked that “America is full of ruins, the ruins of hopes.”

In a 1951 article, he chided Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot for seeing culture as “the exotic, the past, the Earth-minus-America,” for composing poems in which “foreignness, pastness, is itself a final good.” But he himself had already come to partake of the same disillusionment with things domestic and contemporary. More and more he gravitated towards Hannah Arendt and her husband, whom Jarrell had met during his stint as the Nation’s poetry editor. Arendt would later say of Jarrell, “Whatever I know of English poetry, and perhaps the genius of the language, I owe to him.” Jarrell reveled in the respect he received, coming to see American cultural life as paper-thin and paltry compared with the Central European variant — not a preference Arendt was ever known to discourage.

None of this was any good for his poetry, in which he began importing snatches of foreign words with a zeal that would have embarrassed Ezra Pound. “Deutsch Durch Freud,” for instance, declares: In all my Germany there’s no Gesellschaft / But one between eine Katze and ein Maus. And this isn’t even the worst of Jarrell’s pidgin-German. That honor belongs to “An English Garden in Austria,” which runs:

 

And some Spiessburger, some aquarelliste,

Some Spielverderber from a Georgian seminary

Echo him — higher, higher: “Es muss sein!”

Much of Jarrell’s later poetry seems an effort to channel the work of his favorite German writers. The most revealing evidence of Jarrell’s poetic baggage is an account that Jarrell contributed in 1960 to a new edition of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks’s Understanding Poetry of how he had written “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.” This is one of Jarrell’s better late poems; certain critics have called it his finest. It concerns a woman zoo attendant who, it emerges in the course of a short narrative, is more trapped than any of the animals she guards. Jarrell has obviously put this poem together with painstaking attention. He asks us to notice — as no reader would, unaided — the “sexual metaphor,” for example, by which the attendant is symbolized by the “stale leftover flesh” that “is taken at last by the turkey buzzard with his naked red neck and head.”

In other words, “Washington Zoo” is assembled with a symbol-kit for critics — and only for Freudian critics, who look at literary criticism as a game of Spot the Hidden Penis. We can be sure that Frost never, that Goethe never wrote a poem this way. In fact, even Jarrell claims not to have written the poem this way. He declares that he (or his unconscious) composed it spontaneously: “As soon as the zoo came into the poem, everything else settled into it and was at home there. . . . It is almost as if, once all the materials of the poem were there, the middle and end of the poem made themselves.” But they didn’t. Aside from the phallic symbols larded into the mix, it is Rilke’s who made this poem. Jarrell’s opening is a transplantation to an American urban landscape of the first lines of Rilke’s “The Panther,” while his ending — You see what I am: change me, change me! — is an adaptation of the famous ending of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: There is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.

The result is a competent enough poem, but a repudiation of Jarrell’s idea of poems that “write themselves.” The “unconscious” may be a fruitful source of poetry for a warrior-king singing long hexameters on some ancient Greek isle. But for an undergraduate English professor, tapping the “unconscious” is likely to release nothing but “Highlights from My Library.”

If the poetry he wrote reflected a waning patience with American models, so did his criticism — in a way that made Jarrell doubt even his skills as a critic. His typically American distrust of European canons — proclaimed and pursued in the early essays — collapsed as the years passed, and Jarrell soured on the American counter-canon he’d helped build. Once you start reading Goethe, what a sorry excuse for a man of letters William Carlos Williams — or Ezra Pound, or Sylvia Plath — appears. Always excepting Frost, Jarrell began to find American poets vapid, and limited in range. If we compare any of them to Goethe, he wrote, “we are saddened and frightened at how much the poet’s scope has narrowed, at how difficult and partial and idiosyncratic the application of his intelligence has become.”

“There is one law we can be sure of,” Jarrell wrote in the Yale Review of 1955, “there are only a few good poets alive. And there follows from it another law, about critics: If a man likes a great many contemporary poets, he is, necessarily, a bad critic.” By this standard, Jarrell became a worse critic in the last decade of his life. His address to the 1962 National Poetry Festival, “Fifty Years of American Poetry” — which involved evaluating fifty-seven poets in a one-hour speech, with most of those poets sitting in the audience — has long been called the peak of Jarrell’s criticism. That’s wrong. It is impressive as a feat of concision, but as criticism it is piffle. He treated all but a handful to glowing praise, in the manner of a counselor on the last day of summer camp. He was losing interest.

In the last years of his life, Jarrell turned increasingly away from poetry criticism and toward cultural criticism. It was a sad episode. Jarrell — as Middle American a man of letters as ever lived, who spoke only one language, who at thirty-four had never left the country, who except for his Nation and Library of Congress interludes spent virtually his whole adult life in the rural South and southern California — turned on his native land with ferocity. He was a Washington Redskins season-ticket holder, a subscriber to Road & Track, a lover of amusement parks. But if he continued to enjoy such things, it was not as delights but as consolations.

The essay “A Sad Heart at the Super-market,” reproduced in Leithauser’s collection, laments that American marketing culture, with its creation of “needs” for inferior products, has progressed so far in sophistication, and pervaded so many corners of American life, that there remains no hope of ever restoring anything resembling taste, and thus little hope for serious art.

There isn’t even a language in which to attack such developments, since “words” have been supplanted by “media.” Worse, “America’s present is the world’s future,” and his countrymen are embarked on a project of mental imperialism that will level the world and replace it with a lot of standard-issue garbage. Jarrell calls this development, with more wit than understanding, “The Great Chain of Buying.” He harangues his reader: “Part of you is being starved to death and the rest of you is being stuffed to death.” And later: “Reader, isn’t buying or fantasy-buying an important part of your and my emotional life? (If you reply, No, I’ll think of you with bitter envy as more than merely human; as deeply un-American.)”

Jarrell’s own discernment belied his arguments, and so did his personal habits. Jarrell — a poet! — owned a Mercedes and a Jaguar, and his wife remembers:

Randall never had a savings account, only a spending account where his royalties and honorariums and salaries were transubstantiated into opera, the house in Montecito, the antiques, and a hand-carved life-size swan we bought with his honorarium from Johns Hopkins.

In fact, Jarrell did think of himself as a representative American. His loss of faith in America was the natural response of one who had lost faith in his own representative American project. His confidence was so shot to ribbons that in “Sad Heart” he claimed to be attacking American culture only as a “poet-or-artist-of-a-sort.” This self-hatred masquerading as America-hatred is common enough, but only Jarrell’s friend Alfred Kazin was astute enough to recognize it at the time. “A poet more confident of his talent,” Kazin wrote, “would not have needed to raise himself at the expense of the supermarket.”

What a predicament. Of his generation of poets, Jarrell was by miles the most intelligent — and by miles the least talented. His critical gifts only let him see his poetic failures with sickening clarity. In November 1963, he returned to North Carolina after a long European trip and his life began to unravel. By the following summer he was on anti-depressants. In the fall of 1964, he invited Hannah Arendt to North Carolina to lecture, then took up half her speaking time with a disquisition on what a terrific quarterback Johnny Unitas was. That winter, Jarrell used his credit card for “flying binges,” turning up, seemingly at random, in airports across the country. The university deans urged him to take a sabbatical for his health. In April, the New York Times Book Review ran an essay on his collection The Lost World by critic Joseph Bennett. It cited:

Jarrell’s familiar, clanging vulgarity, corny cliches, cutenesses, and the intolerable self-indulgence of his tear-jerking, bourgeois sentimentality. Folksy, pathetic, affected . . . cultural name-dropping, hand-cranked puns and gags — a farrago of confused nonsense, a worn-out imagination.

It was cruel, but not wrong. Days later, Jarrell cut his wrist open with a knife. He survived, but when the hand didn’t heal, he checked into a University of North Carolina clinic for physical therapy. On October 14, 1965, out for an after-dinner walk, he was run over by a car.

Despite appearances, neither Jarrell’s widow nor his biographer Pritchard thinks he killed himself. They are probably correct, but it comes to the same thing. Visible both in Jarrell’s life and in his writing is that, at some point, he gave up on himself and lost all of those instinctive habits that protect us from doing foolish and self-destructive things.

And so, Jarrell’s poetic life ended not that differently than it began. A career that started with Jarrell standing in a storm waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning, ended with his walking down an unlit highway, dressed in black, waiting for death to come like a car going seventy miles an hour.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.