A prose fanfare for the common reader

Randall Jarrell once said, in the wonderfully confiding manner he adopted in his critical essays, that without literature human life was animal life. By literature, he meant, equally, both the writing of books and the reading of them. Reading, Jarrell thought, gave us back ourselves in a way that no other kind of nonmaterial nourishment could match. In the ordinary dailiness of life, we are alone in our heads, locked into a chaos of half thoughts, fleeting angers, confused desires. When we read, the noise clears out. We start having full thoughts. Full thoughts begin an internal conversation. Soon, we’ve got the company not only of the writer but of our responding selves as well. Now, there are three of us in the room. We’ve made society. This, I think, is what Jarrell meant, speaking to us, as he did, as if we were surely in possession of a truth he was merely pointing out.

Randall Jarrell is easily the most beloved of his generation of literary critics, the one that includes Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe. He is set apart from the others by the directness with which he addresses the common reader, as a friend and an equal. It is through his belief in, and love of, the common reader that Jarrell found his way into his strongest writing. It is important that he was a poet himself, that he knew in the flesh what it meant to actually make literature, but it is not in the poetry that one experiences Jarrell fully; it is in the critical essays, essays infused with a mysterious, glowing strength, essays that are the work of a man who had himself been, supremely, remarkably, uxoriously a reader. Whatever else he was -- poet, husband, Southerner, teacher, translator, champion talker and serious music-lover -- it was here in the country of book reading that Jarrell came into his true talent, moved freely, breathed deeply, reached out from the center to touch the borders of a territory he called his own. To read his essays is to find oneself in the presence of a man one can see reading -- the books everywhere, the pencil perpetually in hand -- inside the house, outside the house, in the bedroom, the garden, the car, at school, on the tennis court, in the classroom; a man who reads for the sake of reading; a man who is always in the presence of the book, the one book, that is waiting to be found, the one for whom he will become the inevitable poetic respondent.

Robert Lowell said famously of Jarrell, “Randall was the only man I have ever met who could make other writers feel their work was more important to him than his own.” And indeed, Jarrell once wrote that it was not his poems but poetry that he wanted people to read. If they would read Rilke and Yeats and Hardy, he “could bear to have his own poems go unread forever.” These words are often quoted as an example of Jarrell’s selflessness, but, in fact, they are the words of a man speaking out of the deepest self, the words not of a critic, not even of a writer but of one devoted to the act of making literature because it leads to reading. It was a world of reading that Jarrell wanted to inhabit, a world where there would be no talk about how “difficult” contemporary poetry is because “[i]f we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.” Jarrell wanted reading to become as elemental as air and food.

So you can see how such a man would have hated, absolutely hated, the growing professionalization of literary criticism after World War II by intellectuals and academics. They read, he said, not to nourish their inner lives but to have opinions and to make careers. They read systematically, purposefully, excludingly, and they were more interested in one another’s opinions of the books than in the books themselves. If, at a literary party, he wrote in 1952, “you talked about the writings of some minor American novelist or short story writer or poet ... your hearers’ eyes began to tap their feet almost before you had finished a sentence.... But if you talked about what the ten thousandth best critic in the country had just written, in the last magazine, about the next-worse critic’s analysis of ‘The Ambassadors,’ their eyes shone, they did not even interrupt you.”

Out of this negative passion, Jarrell wrote memorably -- in pieces like “The Age of Criticism,” “The Obscurity of the Poet,” “The Taste of the Age” -- to remind the reader of why writers actually write. At the end of one of his celebrated essays on Robert Frost, he tells us that for him, Frost’s poems never actually seem to be things made of words but “things made out of lives and the world that the lives inhabit.” These essays on Frost are unforgettable, not so much for the critical analyses embedded in them as for the beauty of Jarrell’s own responsiveness: the care and patience and delicacy with which he reads and rereads the poems, making the case for Frost as “that rare thing, a complete or representative poet, and not one of the brilliant partial poets who do justice, far more than justice, to a portion of reality, and leave the rest of things forlorn.”

One of the most endearing examples of Jarrell’s live relation to reading is provided by his argumentative return again and again to the work of poets like Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden. In these pieces he is writing to, as much as about, fellow poets, and he is fervent: a true believer who does not hesitate to speak sternly, even curtly, to the brethren. He loves, analyzes and rebukes them all at once. His is the conditional adoration of the true reader. Supposedly, Jarrell, angered by what he thought a less than perfect collection, reviewed negatively a new book of Auden’s in language of such reckless outrage that Auden crowed, “Oh! Randall is in love with me!”

Among those to whose work he returned often was William Carlos Williams. When Book I of “Paterson” was published in 1946, Jarrell wrote that it seemed to him the best thing Williams had ever done. As time went on, he liked each of the subsequent volumes of Williams’ famous poem less and less -- and said so, in his energetically violent way. But years later, in an introduction to the “Selected Poems,” he writes as though discovering the poet for the first time: “Williams’s attitude toward his people is particularly admirable: he has neither the condescending, impatient, Pharisaical dismissal of the illiterate mass of mankind, nor that manufactured, mooing awe for an equally manufactured Little or Common Man, that disfigures so much contemporary writing. Williams loves, blames, and yells despairingly at the Little Men just as naturally and legitimately as Saint-Loup got angry at the servants: because he feels, not just says, that the differences between men are less important than their similarities.”

Throughout his life, Jarrell was made uneasy that he wrote criticism so fluently and so brilliantly (he had wanted above all to be a great poet), yet he could not resist; he was drawn repeatedly to write about reading; and he had the courage not only to not deny his talent for it but also to apply to it the same sense of responsibility one applies to making poems and stories. Criticism, he said, demands of one “a terrible nakedness; a real critic has no one but himself to depend on. He can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response.”

In his own person, Jarrell -- alternately fey, brilliant, manic, theatrical and malicious -- was as complicated and disordered as his prose was simple and lucid. It is this Jarrell who is at the center of Stephen Burt’s schematic but intelligent and empathic book, “Randall Jarrell and His Age.”

He was born in California in 1914, grew up in Nashville and began writing poetry at Vanderbilt College under the Southern poet John Crowe Ransom. Later on, at Kenyon College, he wrote prose pieces about poetry, and between 1939 and 1942 he made his name as a critic in the Nation and the New Republic. After the war he went to work at the Woman’s College of North Carolina in Greensboro, where -- except for short stints in New York (as literary editor of the Nation) and Washington, D.C. (in the position now called poet laureate) -- he spent the rest of his life. In 1963, as he was turning 50, Jarrell went into a depression that required treatment. After that, it was one long round of drugs, mood swings of frightening extravagance and hospitalization. On the evening of Oct. 11, 1965, he left the hospital without permission, began walking along a road that led in the direction of home, was sideswiped by a car and was killed. The death was judged accidental, but many believed, and still believe, that his recklessness was suicidal. He was mourned intensely by the entire English-speaking literary world. Burt’s book is an attempt to address the how and the why of this painful spiraling down inside a man whose delight in life had once seemed boundless.

Jarrell brooded endlessly on the crucial question of how to engage with life, but ultimately the capacity seemed to elude him. Burt traces, rather wonderfully I think (and almost entirely through the poetry), his obsession with youth, age and aging. The whole process terrified him. All his life, he indulged a manic enthusiasm for childlike behavior, a pronounced anxiety at being left alone (throughout his marriage his wife was glued to his side) and a recurrent need to write poems in the speaking voices of women, especially aging women, for whom he felt a sympathy clearly born of identification.

Experience, he knew, depends on self-knowledge. One must know oneself so that one might know others. “The ability to recognize other individuals, and to be recognized by them,” Burt tells us, was for Jarrell, the “test of personhood; to be anonymous is not to have lived.” At the same time, he pondered endlessly -- and ultimately to no avail -- the idea that as you age, you change, slowly becoming unrecognizable, even to yourself. Who was that creature in the mirror staring back at you, year after year, as childhood was consumed by youth, youth by maturity, maturity by age? If you cannot recognize yourself, how can anyone else? What does it mean, then, to know and be known? The reader sees easily why the open “invisibility” of a person who is an aging woman was the perfect foil for such a temperament.

As he passed out of youth, and then out of early middle age, these obsessions plagued Jarrell to the point of breakdown. He seemed to know less and less rather than more and more how he had come to be who he was. His final book of poems received irritated reviews that accused him of wanting to retreat forever into a childhood innocence the critics now found intolerable. There was probably enough truth in this meanness to make Jarrell’s final despair overwhelming. He began to experience his inner life as an entity that could no longer be confirmed. He became, in his own eyes, a man empty of self.

It is painful to have to realize that, while reading gave Randall Jarrell his life, in the end it could not save his life.