Randall Jarrell: a Literary Life. - book reviews

THIS elegant study is an impressive attempt at revisionism. William Pritchard, a professor at Amherst, is one of the most valuable people we have at the present time writing about poetry. His scholarship is formidable, his taste impeccable, his analyses of poetry quietly brilliant. Not a word of jargon slips into his prose. The two books that preceded Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life are both important: Lives of the Modern Poets and Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, in the latter of which he defends Frost against the portrait of him as a monster in Lawrance Thompson's three-volume biography, regarded (until Pritchard) as definitive.

This book sets itself a sporting task: to revise upward the current view of Randall Jarrell's poetry.

That current view goes something like this: Everyone agrees that Jarrell was an extraordinary critic, an entertaining reviewer with wonderful oneline zingers; his novel, Pictures from an Institution, is a comic depth-charge of an academic novel. But Jarrell was not able to get his mind and feeling into his verse in the same way. And this, among other things, because his grasp of poetic technique was weak. He could not get from here, the feeling or perception, to there, the achieved poem.

Thus, in a way, Jarrell's case resembles that of Matthew Arnold. Forced to choose, anyone would take Arnold's prose and let the poetry go. Further, Arnold wrote one anthology poem, "Dover Beach." Jarrell wrote one anthology poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." In short, among the 1940s poets, those who came in the wake of the great High Modernists, Jarrell does not belong in the class of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, or Elizabeth Bishop. (Delmore Schwartz's poetry is now forgotten.)

How does Professor Pritchard do for the defense?

He deftly brings to us the life of Jarrell. At Vanderbilt, the Tennessean/ Californian Jarrell sat at the feet of John Crowe Ransom; he was a close friend of Allen Tate and (to a lesser extent) of Robert Penn Warren. His academic brilliance and egotism were intimidating, and his poetry was highly precocious. While still an undergraduate he began publishing in the prestigious quarterlies, amidst the leading poets of the day. Pritchard recognizes the faults of this early poetry. It is derivative (Auden, Crane, Tennyson, etc.), and turgid and ungainly in technique. Nonetheless, in the years before World War II, Jarrell's young reputation rose like a rocket. His poetry reviews in The Nation, The New Republic, Partisan Review, and elsewhere were witty shooting-galleries: Oscar Williams's poems give "the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." His own poems were all over the place. Today, it is hard to understand why.

Pritchard argues that this uncertain and derivative poet was changed by service in the Air Force (stateside, no combat) and that the quality of his work changed too: "With hindsight we can say that what he needed for a subject was World War II: the pilots, planes, barracks, landing fields he would experience and which it was appropriate even necessary-to write about without the rhetorical obscurity that disfigured many of his early poems." You can see what Pritchard means:

Fog over the base: the beams ranging

From the five towers pull home from the night

The crews cold in fur...

Jarrell's poem "Burning the Letters" has great power. The wife of a pilot shot down over the Pacific tries to efface the painful memory by burning his letters to her. And every schoolboy knows-or at least used to know"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Here is the whole poem.

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. Every line of that short poem deserves extended comment. Though the abstract capitalized "State" of line one echoes bad Auden, and though some think the last line sensationalized, this is strong writing.

Pritchard proves that Jarrell's war poems are worth recovering, among the better writings we have about that war, along with works by James Jones and John Horne Burns. But reading Jarrell's poems again, one becomes aware of a sense of monotony due to technical sameness. The dispatches of Ernie Pyle, in the end, are better.

Pritchard makes his strongest plea to the jury with Jarrell's last volume, The Lost World, published in 1965, where Jarrell is at last able to achieve a distinctive voice.

In his final years Jarrell's personality showed signs of disintegration. Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell-only Elizabeth Bishop in this group seems to have been relatively sane. Everyone has assumed that Jarrell committed suicide in 1965 by throwing himself in the path of a car on a highway near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Although the circumstances were murky, Pritchard says Jarrell probably didn't commit suicide. In the dark, he was walking in dark clothing, returning to a hospital where he was being treated for a hand injury. He was side-swiped by the car, the door-post hitting his head and killing him. It appears to have been an accident plus pathological carelessness. In the latter sense, maybe it was suicide.