A Love Affair with Learning

By Paul Gray

RANDALL JARRELL'S LETTERS edited by Mary Jarrell Houghton Mifflin; 560 pages; $29.95

Randall Jarrell never received the attention given his flamboyantly talented and troubled friends. Robert Lowell's struggles with manic-depression and mental institutions found their way into his later, confessional poetry. John Berryman's alcoholism was legendary while he lived, and his suicide made headlines. In contrast, Jarrell refused to exercise his poetic licenses. He did not drink or philander; his first marriage ended in an amicable divorce after twelve years, and his second lasted until his death in 1965.

He spent most of his adult life on college campuses, teaching and writing: poems, critical essays, reviews, a novel (Pictures from an Institution), translations and children's books. His visible eccentricities were mild. He appeared vain about his looks. As a young man, he turned himself out like a river boat gambler, slim, dark, natty and sporting a pencil mustache; in his late 30s he raised a bushy, patriarchal beard. When he was excited, his high, piercing voice had a tendency to rise in volume and exaggerate his Tennessee twang. For the most part, though, he kept his inner fires banked behind a fac,ade of polite aloofness.

This selection of about 350 of Jarrell's letters, stitched together via a running biographical commentary by his second wife Mary, offers the best look yet at a man who described himself as "someone whose principal work-and-amusement is writing, and reading and thinking about things." He had a love affair with learning, and he gave his correspondents glimpses of this passion that were enhanced by vivid imagination and caustic wit.

Jarrell's poems were first published in the mid-1930s, when he was still a student at Vanderbilt University. But it was his ferocious reviews of other poets, particularly in the New Republic and the Nation, that made his name and exacting standards widely known. Deciding that Conrad Aiken had become a lazy poet, Jarrell wrote, "He seems as much at ease as Merlin pulling a quarter from a schoolboy's nose." The best of Jarrell's contemporaries learned to fear his scorn but value his insights. Said Karl Shapiro after Jarrell had roughed him up in print: "I felt as if I had been run over but not hurt." Others, including Aiken, complained bitterly about "this self-appointed judge and executioner." Jarrell replied in print that "it is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad." In private he was a shade more merciful. He wrote but then urged an editor not to print a review of an Archibald MacLeish book: "It would depress and vex the poor guy and do no good at all."

In his letters, Jarrell struggled constantly with his contradictory urges to chastise and create. When Edmund Wilson praised him for a review, he wrote back expressing thanks and explaining, "Of course I care about [my] poems a million times more." In another letter he summarized an essay he was contemplating called "The Age of Criticism": "Brothers, if you write enough criticism like this, in the end nobody will even want to write a limerick." It did not escape Jarrell's notice that he was a prime example of a tendency he deplored.

Similarly, he had reservations about the swarming of poets into U.S. colleges and universities after World War II, even as he joined the throng. Teaching, which he called "the next thing to hereditary wealth," paid his bills, but the maverick artist in him rebelled against "this whole literary-academic, semi-fashionable, established accepting-things-at-their-own-valuation world." Privately, he bit the doddering hands that fed him: "The faculty of the college are very much like the city of Greensboro [N.C.]--though this is doing an injustice to several trees which are cleverer than several of this faculty."

On the whole, his intellect prevailed; as new readers continually discover, Jarrell became one of the best and probably the most erudite of American literary critics in this century. The question "Have you read . . .?" recurs often in his letters, and he seems to have read nearly everything: psychology, anthropology, quantum mechanics, most of English and American literature, German folklore, sports-car magazines, science-fiction pulp, the comic strip Terry and the Pirates. He was also quirky and instinctive, peppering his letters with slang like "gee" and "do-vey" (meaning good) and bursts of imagination: "I felt quite funny when Freud died, it was like having a continent disappear." Or, after a nosebleed: "I've noticed that the blood is the freshest gayest most innocent red imaginable, without a thought in its pretty head."

Jarrell kept his disparate natures tightly linked until shortly after his 50th birthday. Then, a depression followed by medication led to manic episodes that landed him in a hospital. A terrible irony ensued. He saw a hostile review of his latest book of poems; several days later the onetime scourge of other poets slashed his left wrist. He recovered and picked up his normal life. Within a few months, while walking along a North Carolina highway shortly after dusk, he was sideswiped and killed by a car. The official verdict was accidental death; the rumor of suicide arose and persisted. No one will ever know what was on Jarrell's mind during his last moments, but the mature products of a remarkable intelligence are now splendidly available. --By Paul Gray