A Poet Who Was There

RANDALL JARRELL, 1914-1965 edited by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor and Robert Penn Warren. 307 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.50.

"The public," Randall Jarrell once wrote, "has an unusual relation with the poet. It does not even know that he is there." As if to refute this bitter complaint against an unpoetic age, two dozen of Jarrell's brother poets have joined in lament for his death and to explain the mysterious ways in which this minor poet had been of major importance to them.

In 1965, Jarrell at 51 was killed by a truck while walking on a highway near the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he had ?. lived and taught for many years. In a touching memoir, his widow recalls the "desperate valor" with which he faced the final nervous breakdown before his death. He was "granted a few magic weeks" in which "poems flew at him, short ones, quatrains, haiku, aphorisms, parts of speech, parts of poems, ideas for poems, until just words beat at his head like many wings."

Passionate Know-How. Jarrell's chosen theme was life made precious through knowledge of its vulnerability, and with unerring instinct he chose to express it often through the reveries of a woman --a woman who hides her deepest findings about life lest they destroy family morale. The theme is best expressed in "The Woman at the Washington Zoo":

Oh bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.

And there come not to me as come to these,

The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain....You know what I was,

You see what I am: change me, change me!

Although this passive element in Jarrell's verse seems against the American grain, he also possessed the American male's obsession with practical detail, the ritual and vocabulary of a job. His common man's delight in the way things work gave him a great technical advantage over his brother poets. This is especially notable in his war poems. Jarrell, a washed-out pilot (too old), was a dedicated pilot instructor. He wrote about war, says Poet Karl Shapiro, not as other poets "sweating out the war in uniform," but as a participant, armed with military expertise.

In a generous tribute, Robert Lowell called Jarrell "a Wordsworth with the obsessions of Lewis Carroll." He focused his poet's eye on a central moral problem of the age, which might be called the Eichmann syndrome, and expressed it in bitter doggerel:

"I lived with Mr. Punch, they said

my name was Judy, I beat him with my rolling-pin, he

hit me with his cane.

I ran off with a soldier, he followed

in a carriage, And he drew a big revolver and he

shot me through the brain.

But that was his duty, he only did

his duty--" Said Judy, said the Judy, said poor

Judy to the string.

Gold in Sea Water. In addition to poetry (four volumes), Jarrell was probably the best poet-critic since T.S. Eliot, as his critical volume, Poetry and the Age, attests. He rejected what Poet Shapiro calls "Eliot's High Church voice" in favor of "plain American, which dogs and cats can read." He demanded plain speech and uttered it. Thus his heroes were homespun Wordsworth, unfashionable Kipling, Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and, of course, the greatest American poet to speak for the common man--Walt Whitman.

John Crowe Ransom says that Jarrell wore a "triple crown"--"a pure Pity, an embracing Weltschmerz, and a wry ironic Wit." The pity sometimes seemed absent from his own reviews. Alfred Kazin recalls a sideswipe in which Jarrell wrote that some crypto poet's work had "hidden treasures," but that finding them was "like looking for the gold in sea water." This sort of wit provided the sparkle to his otherwise brackish novel, Pictures from an Institution.

Handsome, small, competitive, Jarrell was savage to the false in art; yet he spoke to his own students, in the words of Poet Robert Watson, "as if they were potential Homers." Berryman recalls the "black wit" and "cruelty" of his criticism, yet he was personally kind. Lowell himself acknowledges a debt to Jarrell, who "twice or thrice must have thrown me a lifeline."

It could be said of him that he knew all about death before he died. Out of this knowledge came the most quoted poem of World War II, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner":

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.

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