Talking Clocks

PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION (277 pp.) --Randall Jarrell--Knopf ($3.50).

Compliments from fellow writers are piled like clover on the jacket of Poet Randall Jarrell's first novel, Pictures from an Institution. "While busy at his mighty task, how gay he seems; how gay we are as we look on! How can we ever thank him?" asks Poetess Marianne Moore. "Immense fun to read," says Critic David Daiches. "A sparkling, damnably clever, wicked piece of work." "I am starting a fan club," bubbles Richard P. (7 1/2 Cents) Bissell.

What Author Jarrell has done is to set up a straw woman, a progressive girls' college, and then knock it down, page by page, for 277 rounds.* The result is resolutely highbrow and sometimes highly amusing, even if Author Jarrell devastates his theme and his characters more than he develops them.

Benton College nestles in rolling foothills, but in its own eyes, it sits in the lap of the enlightened future. Its faculty feels that "if Benton were gone it would no longer be possible to become educated . . . If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you feel guilty. Just as ordinary animal awareness has been replaced in man by consciousness, so consciousness had been replaced [at] Benton by social consciousness."

The top man on Benton's totem pole is President Dwight Robbins, an ex-diving champion who splashes boyish charm over well-heeled alumnae. "Not to have given him what he asked, they felt, would have been to mine the bridge that bears the train that carries the supply of this year's Norman Rockwell Boy Scout calendars." The dragon of the story is Gertrude Johnson, a novelist who teaches a creative-writing course. "For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't."

Other figures in Author Jarrell's comic charade: the liberal do-gooder ("To her, real life was public, what you voted at or gave for or read about in The Nation"), the European refugees who know all about America ("You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause").

Having introduced his characters, Jarrell finds nothing much for them to do. The talk ranges from Holbein to Mondrian, from Balzac to Thomas Mann, and from Beethoven to Alban Berg. But about all that happens in the whole course of the novel is that an English teacher dies and the music teacher hires a secretary. Wound up like talking clocks on Page One. each of the characters finally runs down by Page 277.

As Gertrude Stein once reminded Ernest Hemingway, "Remarks are not literature." But Novelist Jarrell strews enough laughs along his satirical way to raise the question: Who cares?

*Author Jarrell, who now teaches at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina, has also taught at Kenyon College, the University of Texas and New York's fashionable Sarah Lawrence.

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