Disturbing Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell and His Age. By Stephen Burt. Columbia University Press, 2003

Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection. Edited by Mary Jarrell. University of Virginia Press, 2003

Some literary judgments have the force of bad supreme court rulings—it takes decades to get them overturned. The Plessey v. Ferguson of Jarrell criticism is Helen Vendler's 1969 verdict that Randall Jarrell "put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry" (111). For more than 30 years critics have mounted case after case to topple her decision, but it persists because it makes life—or at least literary history—easier. It justifies ignoring Jarrell's extraordinary poetry and resting contentedly with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as the king and queen of the middle generation prom.

The courts of critical opinion have advanced various theories to explain why Jarrell is not more highly regarded as a poet, but I think the answer is quite simple: he is just too disturbing and in ways that are hard to pigeonhole. Indeed, he seems more disturbing than Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, or John Berryman and all the more so because he does not appear to be shocking. If the poems announced straightforwardly, "I'm going to be difficult and unpleasant to live with!" readers would gird themselves in the protective armor they use for reading Amiri Baraka or John Ashbery, and Jarrell's reputation would have increased. Instead, he fills his poems with folk- and fairy tales, children and talking animals, all the distractions of easy reading, and then shoots you between the eyes. It seems unfair. If only there were the personal revelations of Sexton, Plath, or Lowell or the dirty words of Allen Ginsberg, the reader would feel on safe ground. Jarrell's personal life, by and large, seemed quite wholesome. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he was not a drunk or a womanizer, and until the end of his life he appeared to be a model of psychic health. People remember him being strangely fastidious: he did not use obscene language or tell smutty stories, and he disliked it when others did (Pitchard 121). Yet the reviews of his books as they appeared show enormous uneasiness with the poems. A critic of Jarrell's first volume, Blood for a Stranger (1942), wrote that he presented a boy's thoughts "painfully and almost unbearably" (Lechlitner 17). Karl Shapiro a decade later felt the Selected Poems (1955) were "painful" and "just short of unbearable" because "[t]he technique, or perhaps the pathology, of the language goes to the reader's heart like a scalpel" (31). "Painful" and "unbearable"—these are the kind of terms that haunt the reviews not of his detractors but of his champions. Shapiro's assertion that there is something pathological about the language suggests the kind of distress his poems can cause. Jarrell's work functions on a paradox—it is nearly unbearable because it so determined to be ordinary (one of Jarrell's central terms). It disturbs all the more because it appears to have so little to be disturbed by.

Exhibit #1—look at the opening to the late poem "The Player Piano," one of Jarrell's finest. The speaker, a woman, strikes up a conversation with the owner of "the first Pancake House / East of the Mississippi" when she stops in one night for a meal (Complete Poems 354). They bond quickly, not because they both come from Pasadena, but because of their shared memories of Fatty Arbuckle, one of the stars of silent-screen comedy. It sounds innocent enough until one remembers that Arbuckle went on trial three times before he was found innocent of murdering a young actress during a drunken orgy in which a broken liqueur bottle may have been used as a sex toy (Anger 21-32). The seemingly maudlin song the speaker sings on her return to her hotel—"Smile a while, I bid you sad adieu, / When the clouds roll back I'll...