Ashamed of the Planet

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 7 · 30 March 2000

From Stephen Burt

Ian Hamilton can think what he will (LRB, 2 March) about Randall Jarrell's poems and essays, but his account of the man ought not to be let stand. Hamilton makes Jarrell sound unmannerly, oblivious, unbearably ego-driven, 'pretty good at looking after Number One'. Jarrell, he writes, 'was praised as one of America's best war poets but saw no military action': in fact, he underwent training for combat flying in early 1943, but (as he put it in a letter) 'washed out (I got into a spin on a check ride and the chief pilot … decided I wasn't a safe flyer)'. If Jarrell's principal goal was protecting himself, this seems a roundabout way to do it.

What about his marriages? Jarrell 'had with stunningly abrupt efficiency exchanged an insufficiently worshipful first wife', Mackie, for Mary, who put her interests second to his. Randall married Mackie in 1940; his wartime letters testify to their affection. In Salzburg in 1948, Randall began a romantic friendship with the Austrian sculptor Elisabeth Eisler – a friendship he moved to cool down by the end of that year, out of deference to Mackie. Randall and Mary met (and fell in love) in 1951. Some 'efficiency'.

Jarrell, Hamilton alleges, 'wrote successful children's books but had no children'. Mary brought two pre-teen stepdaughters into their marriage. Perhaps she didn't want more children; and whose idea of ethics obliges children's authors to procreate? Hamilton says Jarrell wrote 'in the voices of downtrodden women but was fairly adept at downtreading them himself, or so it seems'. Hamilton doesn't say who got trodden underfoot, unless he means Mary, whose attitude towards her late husband, Hamilton admits, remains 'adoring'. All the published evidence suggests that Jarrell was practically the only male poet of his circle who didn't sleep around.

Jarrell attacked with gleeful ferocity the works of art he disliked but he didn't, as Hamilton thinks, encode insinuations about their authors. Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren's poems, Jarrell wrote, stand to John Crowe Ransom's as 'two nightmares' to 'a daydream'. Hamilton thinks this a coded dig at 'lovable Red Warren', who 'might not have been as cheerful as he seemed'. But the comparison – among poems, not people – makes sense without any inside dope: 'lovable Red Warren's' early poems fairly crackled with carnage and chthonic sin, while Ransom's were fragile, formal and pastoral. (The contrast between pleasant Warren the man and bloody, violent Warren the poet can be found in Jarrell's letters, too.)

Hamilton sees in Jarrell a critic who couldn't admit that he was wrong. But were Jarrell's 'changes of mind (on Stevens, Graves, Williams, and – somewhat – on Marianne Moore) … vehemently unashamed'? Jarrell thought Moore a superb poet, but didn't like her war poems – a position that never changed; he loved, consistently, Book One of Williams's Paterson but thought the later books a letdown. Jarrell attacked Stevens's The Auroras of Autumn (1950), then praised Stevens's earlier and later poems in an essay on the 1954 Collected. He wrote that Stevens's

marvellous successes with his method, in its last bare anomalous stages … make me feel that the hand of the maker knows better than the eye of the observer, at least if it's my eye. Without his excesses, his endless adaptations and exaggerations of old procedures, how could he ever have learned these unimaginable new ways of his. A tree is justified in its fruits: I began to distrust my own ways, and went back to the poems (in The Auroras of Autumn) that had seemed to me monumental wastes … I managed, after a while, to feel that I had not been as familiar with the poems, or as sympathetic to the poems, as I ought to have been. And there I stuck. Whatever is wrong with the poems or with me is as wrong as ever; what they seemed to me once, they seem to me still.

What would Hamilton rather have had him say?

Stephen Burt
New York City