Pursuing Beauty's Origins

Following Randall Jarrell's sudden death in 1965 a distinguished group of friends and fellow critics, poets, and intellectuals contributed to an anthology of commemorative essays, Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965 (1967), which amply testifies to his charm and genius and offers the would-be student an extraordinarily rich point of departure. To my mind, the opening comments of Jarrell's friend Peter Taylor might best initiate an investigation into any phase of this writer's exceptionally diverse canon: "The first I ever heard of Randall was that he was a boy who knew a lot and that he had posed for the figure of Ganymede in the pediment of our Parthenon . . . in Centennial Park, Nashville, a full-sized model of the original with the exact Athenian dimensions. The sculptors . . . asked Randall to pose as cup-bearer to the gods. . . . The child Randall is there in Centennial Park today, perhaps as good ajustification as you could ask for the existence of our Parthenon" (241).

Jerome Griswold's Children's Books of Randall Jarrell might be said to succeed to the extent that it incorporates the implications of this and other richly suggestive anecdotes about an image of Jarrell offered by such intimates and admirers as Hannah Arendt, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Alfred Kazin, Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, and John Crowe Ransom. In this respect Griswold's volume is a generally welcome addition to the writings about Jarrell—indeed, it is the first book-length study of his children's stories. Unfortunately, though, it offers a somewhat limited investigation of Jarrell's commitment to the presentation and value of the beautiful and its intimate relationship with wisdom, as suggested by Taylor's remembrance, and only a dim sense of Jarrell's particularly American extension of these traditional romantic, originally European themes. Griswold might have placed greater emphasis on the formative early years in California and especially a critical year in Hollywood in which, as his poems suggest, Randall was surrounded by an American landscape at its most glittering and confusing. Griswold quotes from a letter from Jarrell to his editor in which he suggests that an illustration of the fox in The Gingerbread Rabbit "should be very smooth and flashy, like Valentino playing W. C. Fields" (7)—though he probably meant it the other way around—and the photograph of Jarrell on the frontispiece of Griswold's book invites us to think of him as a veritable kid from Hollywood. Here is Randall the leading man, urbane and handsome like Ronald Coleman, Brian Ahearne, or Errol Flynn. Mary Jarrell's preface in Griswold's study extends this view by developing some of the ideas of her moving concluding essay in the commemorative collection. She lingers on those romantic qualities in Jarrell that led him to create worlds of beauty and magic around him and those he loved; indeed, many of the lovely trappings of the stories were transplants from Jarrell's own life.

We have to place Jarrell in a context that is not really so far removed from F. Scott Fitzgerald's—other photos in the commemorative essays reveal Randall and Mary as first-rate stand-ins for Scott and Zelda, glamorous, for example, in a low roadster—against which he struggled to distill out of a "meretricious beauty" the pure blend and "fresh green breast of a new world." Further, we need to see Jarrell as a modern-day romantic, in the long run not unlike Wallace Stevens in his desire to experience and evoke the magical as a counter to the generally dull gray of everyday life. In following this line of investigation we must also necessarily confront a problematic if beguiling picture of Jarrell. Hannah Arendt seems to admit that she was under his spell, revealing that he was in some ways like a child, and not without some irony granting that he was a "prince." Taylor adds to a portrait of an irrepressibly seductive Jarrell, a prince of the academic towns, whom women of all ages sought to please...