Randall Jarrell and His Age

“Tomorrow,” Jarrell complained in 1951, “some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous—for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem” (Age 15). Jarrell’s poetic contemporaries (Robert Lowell makes the best example) indeed became famous for the high drama of their lives and for their extraliterary deeds: Anthony Hecht even called Lowell, after his death, “le Byron de nous jours” (32). Jarrell himself displayed a striking personality, a demanding intellect, and a need for affection: his life, by his own choice and luck, lacked public drama until its hard last months. This book addresses Jarrell’s literary accomplishment and its contexts; it is not a biography. It does, however, hope to revise and deepen our view of the man who wrote Jarrell’s works, and it draws on manuscripts and anecdotes to adumbrate his career. To that end, I begin with a view of his life.

Randall Jarrell was born in Tennessee, on May 6, 1914, the oldest child of Owen and Anna Campbell Jarrell. Asked later in life why he lacked a Southern accent, he would reply that he learned to talk in California, where his parents moved in 1915 and where Owen’s relatives already lived. Owen worked in Los Angeles as a photographer’s assistant, and it was in Los Angeles that year that Jarrell’s younger brother Charles was born.¹ Soon afterwards the family moved to Long Beach, where Owen opened his own photography studio. At least from this time, Anna seems to have been high-strung and sickly: Randall’s few comments later in life portray her as alternately controlling and helpless. Mary von Schrader Jarrell, the poet’s widow, recalls that Randall told her, “My mother is a disaster” (Remembering 141). Some readers take parts of the late poem “Hope” as portraits of Anna: one passage describes “a recurrent / Scene from my childhood. / A scene called Mother Has Fainted.” Playing out the familiar scene, the children

Anna left Owen in 1924 to return to her native Nashville, where she taught at a secretarial school; there she could count on help from her relatives, especially from her prosperous brother, Howell Campbell, who owned a candy company. Mary has remembered Randall’s descriptions of his mother’s kin: “In Nashville, Randall said, he was ‘covered with relatives.’ The Campbells … were an intimate, dominating family of strong wills” (Remembering 141). Yet Randall also told his college sweetheart, Amy Breyer, that he had “lived all over, and always been separated from at least half of a very small family, and been as alone as children ever are” (Letters 60).² The congeries of Nashville relatives lacked, for him, the warmth he found in L.A. Young Randall spent much of his free time at Nashville’s Carnegie Library, which became the source of several poems (among them “The Carnegie Library, Juvenile Division”) and of some moving prose. He wrote, in an unpublished lecture for librarians,

Mary describes the young Randall as “easily bored” and therefore constantly active: besides his constant and voracious reading, Randall was also, by age twelve, a tennis player—in high school he would take up touch football and acting. Young Randall also served as the model for a statue of Ganymede in a Nashville park. The sculptors, Randall learned from his mother years later, had asked to adopt him: “I would,” he recalled, “have gone with them like that” (Remembering 141).³

In the summer of 1926 Randall returned to California to live with his paternal grandparents (“Mama” and “Pop”) in a big Los Angeles household along with Randall’s great-grandmother (“Dandeen”). The first surviving documents in Randall’s hand are a long series of letters from that year, written to his mother in Tennessee. These chatty letters make clear that young Randall enjoyed himself with “Mama” and “Pop” in Los Angeles, and that he wanted to stay. (An early letter concludes, “P.S. Am I writing enough?”) Randall was also fascinated by Hollywood:

Jarrell’s mother returned these letters to him in the early 1960s; the happy experiences they describe prompted his late long poem The Lost World. (Randall may have been writing poems even then: the same cache of papers includes a long narrative poem, inspired by Kipling, Longfellow, and Rudolph Valentino, called “The Ballad of the Sheik Who Lost His Shine.”)

Randall returned to his mother’s household in the fall of 1927. His sense of his life there did not improve; he would tell Amy Breyer much later that “just being in Nashville upsets me” (Berg Collection). “In Campbell minds,” Mary recalls,

At Hume-Fogg High School, Jarrell practiced tennis, starred in some school plays, and began his career as a critic with satirical essays in a school magazine and scathing reviews of Nashville Little Theatre shows.⁴ His social life sometimes included his mother—they attended movies together (“people thought she was my sister or my date”) until she remarried in 1932 (Pritchard 23). During his last year of high school, Jarrell lost many of his books in a fire. The list of lost books he gave the insurers (discovered by Richard Flynn) shows the range and depths of his early interests: it includes two volumes of Proust (in English), D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious, T. S. Eliot, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and the science fiction novelist Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men) (Lost 147–149). After high school, Randall, unsurprisingly, hoped for a literary career. Uncle Howell, however, intended him for the candy company and demanded that he attend a commercial school in Nashville, where he promptly became incapacitated with (perhaps psychosomatic) respiratory illnesses. Howell relented and sent the young man to Vanderbilt; he matriculated in the fall of 1932.

“I had a scientific education and a radical youth,” Jarrell recalled in 1950 (Age 21). Evidence for both begins at Vanderbilt. So does Jarrell’s precocious literary career. In his first term he encountered Robert Penn Warren, then a graduate student, and professor John Crowe Ransom, already a well-known poet. Both men were struck by Randall’s precocity and by his tactless self-assurance in class. Over the next few years he found early mentors in them and in the poet and critic Allen Tate. He also took over the college humor magazine, the Masquerader, where he opposed attempts to transform it into a serious literary magazine, eventually writing much of its satirical prose himself. By Randall’s senior year he had published—with Tate’s and Warren’s assistance—poems in national magazines. These earliest productions show a prolific, ferociously smart young writer in love with verbal complexity for its own sake and deeply in debt to the early Auden. By the end of 1935 Jarrell had also produced his first notable book review, a characteristically fearless roundup of the year’s fiction for the Southern Review. “Can you recite a review from memory when you finish it?” Jarrell wrote to Warren that year; “I was astonished to find I could” (Letters 5).

Randall combined his literary productivity with prodigious reading in other fields, among them philosophy, economics, and especially psychology, where he found himself fascinated by Gestalt theory. In his senior year he switched his major from English to psychology and then did a year of work (1935–36) at Vanderbilt toward a master’s degree in that field. A draft of a capsule biography Jarrell prepared in 1940 explained that he “studied psychology; but after I had to learn radiophysics I went over into English where I belonged. (I remember … thinking it would be better for everybody if I lay down on the table, and let the cat set up the cathode ray oscillograph)” (Letters 29).

He made the switch back to English in 1936, completing the coursework for an M.A. in 1937 with courses entitled “Chaucer,” “the English Lyric,” “American Literature,” and “Spenser and His Age.” He then began a thesis on A. E. Housman. (Jarrell had at one point wished to write on Auden; the Vanderbilt English professor Donald Davidson prevented him.) Though he may have been hard to take in a classroom, by his last few years in Nashville Randall attracted a following; a clique of students (including the unathletic Peter Taylor) attended his games of touch football for their literary conversation, while a rival literary group congregated at a bar with the poet George Marion O’Donnell.

Vanderbilt had become the de facto headquarters for the Agrarians, the conservative Southern school of social thought represented in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), to which Davidson, Ransom, Tate, and a very young Warren had contributed. Jarrell—a devotee of Marx and Auden—embraced his teachers’ literary stances while rejecting their politics. Taylor remembered that Jarrell “was opposed to Agrarianism from the beginning” (Conversations 117–118). One Masquerader cover caricatured John Crowe Ransom with a spray can, trying with apparent futility to defend Southern flora from Northern pests. Jarrell’s Marxist interests persisted through the forties: he wrote Edmund Wilson (his editor at the New Republic) in 1942, “I guess you can tell pretty well what I think about politics, economics and so on—and it’s just the opposite of what [Ransom and Tate] think” (Letters 59). He made notes for an essay called “The Reactionary Intellectual And What To Do About Him,” a critical (and slightly mocking) examination of “Hulme Eliot Pound Wyndham Lewis Winters Tate Criterion writers neo-Thomists other Catholic intellectuals etc” (Berg Collection). His published writings reflect a similar stance: Tate, Jarrell declared in the Nation in 1941, was one of the “greatest living poets,” and yet “it has been later than [he] think[s] for four hundred years” (KA 66).

By 1937 Jarrell had become involved with, and probably engaged to, a sophisticated and literate medical student, Amy Breyer, whose family he had known since high school. Their romance would last until 1938. An unpublished poem about the end of a romance (almost certainly with Breyer) contrasts Jarrell’s special dispensation (now ended) with the loneliness he takes to be the normal condition of “Man”:

Companionship is “fool’s gold,” the lines suggest—but it is the only gold we can have. Breyer (later de Blasio) made a disastrous first marriage to another doctor. When it ended in the early forties, she wrote to Jarrell again from New Haven, Connecticut, and a moving, introspective exchange ensued; one of its subjects was Amy’s psychoanalysis.

In 1937 Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, offered Ransom a chair and more money than Vanderbilt gave him; Tate and Jarrell led a campaign to keep him in Nashville through pressure on the Vanderbilt administration. Though three hundred students signed Jarrell’s petition, Ransom departed for Kenyon, and Jarrell followed. He would spend two years as an instructor at Kenyon. In 1937–38 Randall lived in Ransom’s attic, along with an undergraduate transfer student from Harvard named Robert Lowell. Jarrell spent 1938–39 as the resident faculty member in a small college-owned dorm called Douglass House: among the ten undergraduates there were Lowell, Robie Macauley, and Peter Taylor, who had transferred from Vanderbilt.

Jarrell at Kenyon seems to have combined great tactlessness with great charm. Lowell, writing in 1967, remembered the young man as “upsettingly brilliant, precocious, knowing, naïve, and vexing”; he could be (Lowell continued) “tender and gracious, though he seemed tone-deaf to the amenities and dishonesties that make human relations tolerable” (RJ 101–103). Jarrell not only taught English but also coached tennis; Peter Taylor recalled the improbable spectacle of “members of Kenyon’s champion tennis team,” under their coach’s influence, “sitting about the soda shop reading Auden and Chekhov and Proust” (RJ 245). Randall also inspired “a good number of … ladies and young girls … to sewing for him” (RJ 244). Taylor would later claim (perhaps self-servingly) “Jarrell treated everybody very badly … [Lowell] and I were the only ones who stuck by him through thick and thin” (McAlexander 51).

In 1939 Jarrell submitted his thesis on Housman. (His preface acknowledged debts to William Empson.) That fall Jarrell accepted an instructorship at the University of Texas-Austin. His poems continued to appear in leading journals; in 1940 James Laughlin at New Directions tapped him for the anthology Five Young American Poets, along with Mary Barnard, John Berryman, W. R. Moses, and O’Donnell. A first book, Blood for a Stranger, appeared from Harcourt, Brace in 1942. Most of the poems from this period share a declamatory style derived from Auden, Empson, and Marxist theory; others, however—including the exemplary “90 North,” the crushingly personal “The Bad Music,” and the dramatic monologue “The Christmas Roses”—show him finding his characteristic style, attending to the cadences, exchanges, and hesitations of private speech.

During those years Jarrell made his name as a critic. Always witty and self-assured, sometimes enthusiastic, and often caustic or sarcastic, his essays and columns in the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere established him as a reviewer to watch (and to fear). A 1942 attack on Conrad Aiken in the New Republic prompted Malcolm Cowley (an editor at the journal) to defend Aiken in print against “Poets as Reviewers.” Jarrell responded with a letter to the journal: “I feel as if my decision had been overruled by the Supreme Court” (Letters 40–41). When Aiken attacked him again in 1947 over another negative review, Jarrell responded with a valuable list of poets he liked:

Part of the thesis on Housman appeared in Kenyon Review in 1939; other critical essays from the 1940s saw print in Kenyon, Partisan Review, Southern Review, the Nation and the New Republic. One important theoretical piece, an invited lecture at Princeton in 1942, saw print only after his death; Thomas Travisano, who found it in the archives, titled it “Levels and Opposites.” Jarrell was also reading and rereading Auden. Thorough, and sometimes angry, dissections of Auden’s oeuvre appeared in 1941 and 1945, complementing Jarrell’s reviews of The Double Man (1940) and other individual books. Asked later about Jarrell’s essays, the English poet supposedly remarked, “Jarrell is in love with me” (Simpson 110).⁵

At Austin, as at Kenyon, the precocious student was learning to be a teacher. “If I were a rich man,” he liked to say later, “I would pay money for the privilege of being able to teach” (RJ 105; Remembering 31). Several poems from the forties consider Jarrell’s place in academia; one of the breezier examples is “Randall Jarrell Office Hours 10–11,” in which “Mr. Jarrell” tells his “Lost Students,”

Jarrell wrote to Tate that he liked the students at Austin, though he also expressed frustration at his colleagues’ indifference to his poems and criticism: “If I had equal amounts of stuff published in the PMLA,” he complained, “they’d make me a full professor” (Letters 51). One colleague, Mackie Langham, inspired warmer feelings: she and Randall wed in 1940.

Like many left-wing Americans, Jarrell was uneasy about the coming of war in Europe; many early poems consider the growing conflict as a vague catastrophe of global capitalism. His letters continue to express a pessimistic Marxism up until February 1943, when he volunteered for the army. Jarrell spent the next several months in the dry heat of Sheppard Field in Texas, where he waited for an assignment. He was then transferred to Chanute Field in Illinois, near Champaign-Urbana, where his tasks included evaluating soldiers’ aptitude tests. By the end of the year he had been assigned to Davis-Monthan Field in Tucson, where Mackie and their cat, Kitten, finally joined him. Randall, Mackie, and Kitten would remain in Arizona until 1946.

Numerous letters to Mackie (eighty-five in all) from his army years attest to Jarrell’s attachment to her and to Kitten; they also show his feelings about the army. “Everything’s so slow, dumb and crude,” he wrote in his first days at Sheppard Field; “I’ve never seen any conversation in a book (well, naturally) that reproduces the way people like these talk; the intelligence, society, vocabulary all surprisingly low.” On the other hand “People are surprisingly friendly, and I’ve had not a single unkind word spoken to me yet; though I’ve heard some to others.” Astonished by his bunkmates’ good-natured ignorance, Jarrell was also appalled at the army’s impersonal scale. “I’m just a needle in 75,000 haystacks,” one letter decides; another exclaims “It’s so dumb: the poor soldiers are as dumb as the way they’re treated, almost … O poor New World!” (Berg Collection) At Sheppard Field, he told Tate, “we normally spent over four hours a day just standing in line” (Letters 118).

Jarrell considered becoming a pilot. He underwent training for that job but failed a test for motion sickness (Mary Jarrell, conversation). He may have been of two minds about it all along: a 1943 letter to Mackie promises to “stay safe and on the ground and come back to you. You have to ask for flight duty to get it, I’ve been told, and I’ve lost any inclinations that way” (Berg Collection). This and other letters from 1943 contemplate the safer assignment Jarrell eventually obtained at Davis-Monthan. There he operated a celestial navigation tower. Jarrell described his job in a letter to Tate:

The army gave Jarrell his first distinctive poetic subjects; it also helped him develop his style. His forties poems paint military life in a series of sad, expressive scenes: prisoners loading and unloading garbage, a “drunk sergeant shaving,” nocturnal airplanes’ “great lights floating in—from Mars, from Mars” (CP 143, 177). Though Jarrell deplored the soldiers’ illiterate speech, he also notated their conversation with pleasure and quoted it in some poems; the voices he heard in the army helped him develop the sound of speech in his own work. “One’s a very severe critic of literary magazines in the Army,” Jarrell decided in another letter; “I think ‘The same old game—and done worse than ever,’ and the heart sinks” (Berg Collection). In the army, and in his poems about it, Jarrell found himself thinking less about literary conventions and more about the human person as such: writing to Lowell, he described the army as a place where “your knowledge and the other person’s ignorance doesn’t differentiate you at all” (Letters 150).

Poems about the army, the army air force, and the war took up most of Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and much of Losses (1948). (Other poems on military topics appeared in magazines but were never collected.) These books gained relatively broad attention (Losses, for example, received reviews in Time and the New York Times Book Review). Along with Karl Shapiro (who completed his Pulitzer-Prize-winning V-Letter under fire in New Guinea), Jarrell became the prominent highbrow soldier-poet of America’s war. By 1945 he was also planning several prose books—one on St. Paul and the origins of theology, another on Hart Crane; none of these projects came to fruition. (He accepted, and later returned, an advance for the volume on Crane.) Jarrell’s time in Illinois and Arizona also saw an intense correspondence with Lowell, much of it devoted to the poems in Lord Weary’s Castle, which Lowell revised with Jarrell’s detailed help; Jarrell would later review it with thunderous enthusiasm.

By the end of the war Jarrell had again become a prolific critic, writing a regular column on poetry for the Nation, whose book review editor, Margaret Marshall, planned a sabbatical year for 1946–47. Marshall asked Jarrell to describe his qualifications “as a possible Literary Editor of the Nation” during her year off. His long enthused answer sheds light on his varied interests; it reads, in part,

Jarrell claimed to hate New York’s crowds, high cost of living, statusconscious sociability, and lack of greenery, barely alleviated by a midyear move to Queens.⁶ He wrote (but never published) a satirical ballad about the five boroughs, “The Man Who Was Born and Died in New York City”:

(Jarrell would feel more warmly toward the city when he returned for brief visits later in life, setting his last significant love poem, “A Man Meets a Woman in the Street,” in Central Park.) The city Jarrell so disliked as a place to live gave him important friends and influences. He and Peter Taylor became close friends not at Kenyon but in New York: “I doubt I could have ever got started [writing fiction] again after the war,” Taylor recalled, “if I had not had Randall to talk to or to listen to” (McAlexander 94). Other important companions included the poets John Berryman and Robert Fitzgerald; Lowell, who liked to visit Manhattan though he lived in Maine; and the classical music critic B. H. Haggin, whose columns in the Nation Jarrell had admired. Jarrell orchestrated a dinner party in order to introduce Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop; she remembered “feeling very much at home with Randall Jarrell and his wife, and their big black cat, and Jarrell talked a blue streak while putting Kitten through his tricks” (quoted in Millier 186). It was in this year, too, that Jarrell broadened his style beyond the range of his war poems, writing to (and about) William Carlos Williams and learning from him, Bishop, and others how to expand his repertoire of rhythms and tones.

Another key New York friend was Hannah Arendt, then working at Schocken Books. She later recalled that she “had been impressed by some of his war poems and asked him to translate a few German poems … and he edited (translated into English, I should say) some book reviews of mine for the Nation” (RJ 3). Jarrell’s other work for Arendt included a translation of Ferdinand Gregorovius’s “Lament of the Children of Israel,” included in Schocken’s English translation of Gregorovius’s book about Roman Jews. Jarrell and Arendt slowly became quite close: by 1951 they were (as she put it) “intoxicated with agreement against a world of enemies,” and Jarrell was able to write to her, “Someone said about somebody that ‘while that man is alive I am not alone in this world’; I guess I feel that way about you” (Letters 250). Jarrell’s interest in Rilke—important to his later style—may also be traced to Arendt, who helped him read German poets while he helped her read Americans. In the spring of 1947 Jarrell taught alongside Mary McCarthy at Sarah Lawrence College, soon to become the basis for his satirical novel, Pictures from an Institution, which he planned to dedicate to Arendt (Remembering 1).

Jarrell worked hard and well finding and editing poetry and book reviews for the Nation, though he liked to complain about the job: “I’ve had so little space,” Jarrell wrote Berryman, “and most of the reviewable books are so bad, that I haven’t been able to do a good many things I meant to do” (University of Minnesota, n.d.). Anyone else might conclude that he did a lot: during his year there the Nation printed poems by Bishop (“Faustina”), Robert Graves (“To Juan at the Winter Solstice”), Weldon Kees, Lowell, MacNeice (“Slow Movement”), and W. C. Williams, and book reviews from Arendt, Berryman, Kenneth Burke, Fitzgerald (on Graves’s King Jesus), Irving Howe (on Palestine), and John Crowe Ransom (on Henry James). Jarrell brought in his onetime hero, William Empson, who reviewed Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Sartre’s No Exit.⁷Jarrell offered reviewing work to the young James Baldwin, who forty years later would thank him (along with other editors) for helping Baldwin get his start as a writer (xiii). Jarrell also solicited Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters (who had given up reviewing), and George Orwell (who died soon after Jarrell’s request arrived) (Beinecke, Margaret Marshall papers).

Jarrell sought academic jobs for the fall of 1947; he chose to join Taylor at the Woman’s College of North Carolina in Greensboro (later the University of North Carolina-Greensboro), where Taylor had moved in 1946. Randall and Mackie and Peter and Eleanor Taylor purchased a Greensboro duplex and moved in together. Peter remembered Jarrell’s “go[ing] over” his stories from this period “sentence by sentence”—he would also read Eleanor’s poetry with careful sympathy. Taylor also remembered Jarrell as hard to live with: Kitten was unavoidable in their duplex, as was classical music played at high volume (McAlexander 100). The Taylors would move in and out of the Greensboro duplex several times over the next few years.

Though he liked to gripe about how little most students knew, Jarrell clearly enjoyed his classes in North Carolina, where he would stay for much of the rest of his life. Writing to Arendt in October 1947, Jarrell mentioned “several good students in modern poetry and writing,” one of whom had “turned in a faithful imitation of Robert Lowell. But the only thing to do with the freshmen here is to write a ballet with a Chorus of Peasant Girls” (Letters 180). Cleanth Brooks remembered discussing “the advantages of teaching in a coeducational college, a man’s college and a woman’s college. … Randall spoke up for the woman’s college, and when asked why, said, in his serious, innocent way, ‘I suppose it’s because I like girls better than boys’” (Beinecke, Randall Jarrell collection).⁸ The next few years were perhaps Jarrell’s most productive. In them he wrote many of his best-known essays, including pieces on Bishop, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Whitman, and Williams. Jarrell had second thoughts about his reviewing, sending a pan of Archibald Macleish’s Actfive (1948) to Marshall with instructions not to bother printing it; he would, however, publish other negative reviews throughout the fifties (Beinecke, Margaret Marshall papers).

Jarrell’s next book of poems, The Seven-League Crutches (1951), reflected his postwar interests in the titles of its three sections: “Europe,” “Children,” and “Once Upon a Time.” The “Europe” poems grew, in turn, from Jarrell’s 1948 summer job at the Salzburg (Austria) Seminar in American Civilization. This U.S.-government-sponsored event, housed in a castle called Leopoldskron, brought American teachers to European students; there Jarrell fell in love with German Romanticism and with the vistas of Mitteleuropa. He also fell in love with Elisabeth Eisler, a Viennese ceramics artist in her late twenties, who had signed up for Jarrell’s class in American poetry. The two spent much of the summer together and then exchanged intimate, passionate letters. Jarrell decided at the end of the year to stay with Mackie, telling Elisabeth that their correspondence would have to lose its romantic character.

These years also saw more stateside honors. One well-known essay, “The Obscurity of the Poet,” began in 1950 as an address given at Harvard. Jarrell also accepted other teaching engagements at summer writers’ conferences. At one such conference in Boulder, Colorado, in 1951, Randall encountered an adult student named Mary von Schrader (they were introduced, she recalled, by W. D. Snodgrass) (Remembering 131). Randall and Mary spent the evening together, ending up at the library; they quickly became inseparable. By the end of the summer Randall had asked Mackie for a divorce.

He and Mary were already planning their new life. Yet Randall had already agreed to spend the academic year 1951–52 teaching at Princeton, where he and Mackie, before their divorce, had arranged to rent a house.⁹ Living alone for the first time since the war, Jarrell spent much of his year writing letters to Mary (far more survive than could be included in his published Letters). Mary recalled his obsession with mail delivery: “What Princeton needs,” he quipped to her, “is an Institute of Advanced Postmen” (Remembering 13). At Princeton Jarrell wrote a few poems (some, such as “The Lonely Man,” clearly set there) and finished a number of essays. He also gave a series of lectures on Auden, some reworked from his earlier writings. The ambitious and witty talks remain in manuscript, with some fragments apparently never delivered. One lecture proposes to “start an Early Auden Society, to be called the Friends of Paid on Both Sides, and give a performance of it every five years, in Iceland.” Another argues that though many of Auden’s changes have been for the worse, he “has begun to get better again … and is not locked away in that real graveyard of poets, My Own Style, going on like a repeating decimal until the day someone drives a stake through his heart” (Berg Collection).

Mary and Randall were married in California in November 1952. They moved first to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where Jarrell taught for one term, and then back to Greensboro, where they made their home with Alleyne and Beatrice, Mary’s preteen daughters from her previous marriage. “To be married to Randall,” Mary would write, “was to be encapsulated with him. He wanted, and we had a round-the-clock inseparability” (Remembering 135). A Greensboro graduate, Emily Wilson (later Herring), recalled that when students invited Jarrell to read in a dorm, “Mrs. Jarrell came with him, and they held hands or he stood by her, entwining his arm in the curve of her shawl” (quoted in Quinn, Randall Jarrell 133). In Greensboro, Randall finished his first books of prose—Poetry and the Age (1953) and Pictures from an Institution (1954). The former, collecting his essays and reviews, established itself as a touchstone of mid-century practical criticism; the latter sold well enough to pay for a sports car. (Automobiles had joined tennis among Jarrell’s serious hobbies; he subscribed to Road and Track and recorded his fascination in two sparkling essays for Mademoiselle and Vogue.)

Despite a few long new poems (chief among them “The End of the Rainbow,” set in California) and a 1955 Selected Poems, Jarrell had come to feel blocked as a writer of verse. He complained to Mary that “a wicked fairy has turned me into a prose writer” (Remembering 51). Some of his energy surely went into teaching, as the awed memoirs of his students attest.¹⁰ A complex fight over the Woman’s College curriculum also ate into his time. Jarrell kept on writing reviews and essays about poetry, among them “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.” He had, though, begun to turn his critical energies elsewhere: new essays and lectures (many given repeatedly on various college campuses) reflected his dismay at American education and mass culture. Jarrell also began a translation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (staged on Broadway in 1964); an anthology of short fiction (The Anchor Book of Stories, 1958); and a translation of Goethe’s Faust, Part 1 (published posthumously in 1976). A ballet scenario and a psychoanalytic explication of T. S. Eliot stand among other projects he never completed.

In 1956 Jarrell was asked to serve as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (the position now called Poet Laureate). Someone (likely the family of a disgruntled student) told the Library that Jarrell had been a Communist, which almost derailed the nomination; nevertheless, he, Mary, Alleyne, and Beatrice moved to Washington, D.C. that fall. Jarrell by all accounts performed splendidly, soliciting poets to record their works, requesting that they will their manuscripts to the library, arranging public programming in Washington and elsewhere, involving himself in the city’s intellectual life, and answering random letters from literary-minded citizens. He largely extricated himself from reviewing, ending his regular stint at the Yale Review, because the negative comments he would have made conflicted with his consultant duties (Yale Review files). Living at 3916 Jenifer Street NW, near the Maryland line, Randall and Mary loved Washington almost inordinately: it offered museums and orchestras along with civility, greenery, and tennis. “I’m not a native Washingtonian,” he wrote, “but I wish I were—it’s my favorite American city” (to Johanna Curran, 3 January 1957; Library of Congress). Their frequent trips to the National Zoo (on Connecticut Avenue, a long walk from their house) generated two important poems, “Jerome” and “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.”

The new job also brought a higher profile: one public lecture, “The Taste of the Age,” gathered local and national attention (in the Washington Post, the New York Times, even House Beautiful!) and brought him a wave of requests for reprints (Library of Congress). Jarrell had been anxious for years about the academic-formalist turn fifties poetry seemed to have taken, objecting in 1955 to the “many young poets” for whom “poetry is a game … they play with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence” (KA 231). At the library he tried to help nurture alternatives, offering advice to Jonathan Williams of Jargon and to the new editor of the Colorado Review about running a magazine, and to Princeton University Press about starting a poetry list. Invitations to lecture or teach brought the Jarrells on trips from Washington to Dallas, Cincinnatti, Columbus, Ohio, and San Francisco, where he discovered the Beats: Jarrell quarreled in public with Allen Ginsberg but took a liking to Gregory Corso, whom Mary remembered as “pleasingly promising,” “a streetwise waif” (Remembering 41).

That winter Corso came to visit the Jarrells at Jenifer Street; he stayed for six weeks, inviting Jack Kerouac over, writing “a poem a day,” and never revising. “Disenchanted with Corso,” Mary recalled, “Randall was relieved” when Corso moved out (Remembering 41–42). Another visitor was Robert Lowell, then on the cusp of a manic episode. “I wish all the San Francisco poets would eat all the University poets and burst,” Jarrell wrote to Karl Shapiro the following year; “it’s pretty awful to look at Mass Culture, and at its side High Culture, and hardly know which you like less” (Letters 436). Randall did like Italy, where the Jarrells, the Taylors, and their children traveled for the summer of 1958: they stayed at Levanto and Buonassola, near Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. Mary and Eleanor have both left glowing records of that occasionally fractious summer, during which Peter finished stories, Randall played with the children, and Eleanor (with Randall’s help) revised what would become her first book of poems.

The Jarrells returned to Greensboro, where they moved into “a rustic house on a red clay road in a small forest” (Remembering 143). Randall worked on Faust and on The Woman at the Washington Zoo, which garnered the National Book Award in 1960. A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962) collected more essays, most of them on education and American culture. In early 1962 Michael di Capua, an editor at Macmillan, invited Jarrell to translate a few Grimms’ tales. Jarrell soon offered him not only translations (of Snow White, among other stories) but also an original children’s book, The Gingerbread Rabbit, which Garth Williams would illustrate. The charming but unsteady narrative follows its titular animal as he runs away from a kitchen to live as a real animal in the forest. Jarrell’s next and far superior children’s book, The Bat-Poet, paired him with the illustrator Maurice Sendak, who was years away from his own fame: Sendak would later call “working with Randall … the most charmed experience of my career” (“Unlimited”). Two more children’s books followed, both with Sendak’s pictures: the much longer The Animal Family (1965) and Fly by Night, published posthumously in 1976.

Jarrell welcomed the Kennedy era, remarking in a televised discussion “What a pleasure to think that for the next few years our art and our government won’t be complete strangers” (quoted in Remembering 156). The White House Conference on the Arts in November 1962 became the stage for his final verdicts on modern poets, delivered in the lecture “Fifty Years of American Poetry”: the speech, and the conference, coincided with the Cuban missile crisis. Other late prose includes essays on Kipling and Frost and a long introduction to Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, a novel that “knows as few books have ever known—knows specifically, profoundly, exhaustively—what a family is” (Third 3). 1963 began auspiciously, with plenty of new poems and plans for a summer in Europe: Jarrell had probably finished his last book of poems, The Lost World, by the time he and Mary embarked in June (Pritchard 288). His letters from England, Germany, and Italy to Taylor, di Capua, Lowell, and others record a busy, exuberant season of opera, art galleries, motoring, and sightseeing. Jarrell was also delighted with Adrienne Rich’s new poems, which he critiqued in letters to her.

Mary and Randall returned to America in November, and Randall’s behavior began to change. Approaching his fiftieth birthday, he seems to have worried deeply about his advancing age—he liked to call his condition torschlusspanik (German for “door-closing panic”) (Remembering 159). After President Kennedy was shot, Randall spent days in front of the television, weeping. Sad to the point of inertia, Randall sought help from a Cinncinnati psychiatrist, who prescribed “a newly marketed mood elevating drug,” Elavil: the drug bears much of the blame for what happened next (Remembering 159, Pritchard 290–291). By the fall of 1964—after months on Elavil—Jarrell became hyperenergetic, erratic, and sometimes grandiose or irrational. (The psychiatrist, meanwhile, proved disturbingly willing to renew prescriptions by phone.) At Greensboro, Randall alienated the Taylors—and his other friends—as he fought hard for an impracticable scheme to remake the English department. When Hannah Arendt arrived to give a lecture, Jarrell introduced her with a rambling story about the football star Johnny Unitas. Randall also went on a credit-card-fueled flying binge and “tipped a waitress with a $1,500 check” (Pritchard 292). At some point he asked Mary for a divorce; Lowell later told Taylor that Randall had become “involved with a girl at Goucher” College in Maryland (McAlexander 170).

In early 1965 Randall was sent to a North Carolina hospital; he was taken off Elavil immediately and briefly given Thorazine. Unsurprisingly, his elation ceased; depression—perhaps a withdrawal symptom—followed. In April the New York Times published a viciously condescending review of The Lost World. Soon afterwards, Jarrell slashed a wrist and returned to the hospital. His brief, contrite letters to Mary, to Peter Taylor, and to others written during these months are some of the most moving documents of his life. After a summer with Mary, Randall began teaching his Greensboro classes; he returned to the hospital in October for rehabilitative work on his hand. (The last poem he wrote, an uncharacteristic and haunting near-sonnet, portrays the hospital’s “Hand House” [“Previously” 196].)

On the evening of October 11, 1965, Jarrell was sideswiped by a car while walking along a road; he died of the resulting injuries. Mary, the police, the coroner, and ultimately the state of North Carolina judged his death accidental, a verdict made credible by his apparent improvements in health, his rapprochement with her, and the odd, sidelong manner of the collision; medical professionals judged the injuries consistent with an accident and not with suicide. Because initial news reports were ambiguous, because Jarrell had earlier slashed his wrist, and because other poets (such as Sylvia Plath) had ended their lives, some of Jarrell’s literary acquaintances had trouble accepting the coroners’ report. Taylor seems to have thought the event deliberate; even he, though, wrote to Robert Fitzgerald, “I don’t know whether or not his death was suicide … Probably no one will ever know” (McAlexander 170).¹¹

Jarrell’s friends reacted to his sudden death with grief—and with public events. Lowell, Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren organized a day of tributes at Yale, with contributions from (among others) Arendt, Berryman, Bishop, Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Ransom, Rich, Tate, and Mary Jarrell herself. These and other essays, poems, and images comprised the memorial volume, Randall Jarrell 1914–1965, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1967. A Complete Poems, including much (though not all) of the unpublished work, appeared to broad notice in 1969, followed by several critical books on the poetry; two books of uncollected essays (1969 and 1980); Faust, Part I (1976); a volume of Letters, with Mary’s annotations (1985; revised, 2002); a new selection of essays, No Other Book, prepared by Brad Leithauser (1999); and a volume of Mary’s own recollections, Remembering Randall (1999).

Jarrell has latterly become a popular subject for American poets’ elegies: Berryman, Lowell, Shapiro, Phillip Booth, Robert Hass, Richard Howard, Eleanor Ross Taylor, and the critic Eve Kosofky Sedgwick (among others) have all published poems about Jarrell’s work or his life. Howard imagines Jarrell as a modern Tiresias—man, woman, and wise elder in one; Booth’s quiet poem seeks help from “Saint Jarrell” (6, 159). Berryman’s “Op. posth. no. 13” imagines a posthumous meeting where

Essayists and reviewers (among them Susan Sontag and Adam Gopnik) continue to admire Jarrell’s prose. Gopnik describes “the feeling that his work … wasn’t just yours but you, the you that you had always intended to be” (92–93). Yet critics have not always known what to make of Jarrell. William Pritchard, whose biography of Jarrell appeared in 1990, was surprised to find himself less than “totally sympathetic” to Jarrell the man: “I have become aware,” Pritchard wrote, “of just how strange a phenomenon he was” (6–7). Other academic readers reacted to Pritchard’s biography by emphasizing strange aspects Pritchard had neglected, among them Jarrell’s difficult mother, his desire to write in the voices of women, and his frequent rejections of adult, academic, and masculine norms.

These debates risk obscuring the virtues to which the memoirs, and the poems, attest. All accounts of the man paint him as immune to social conventions, free of ressentiment, and always ready to say what he thought and felt. The first of his several reviews of B. H. Haggin reads like a hopeful self-portrait: Haggin, Jarrell decided, “is more interested in saying precisely what he thinks about a composer or a performer … than he is in anything else whatsoever; consequently he is a sort of exemplary monster of independence, of honesty, of scrupulous and merciless frankness” (KA 154). Jarrell defined himself by successive enthusiasms—from Ariadne auf Naxos to auto racing, from Kafka to Kitten to Kipling—which he did not stint to share. With those enthusiasms, and those wishes, came a deliberate childlikeness, evidenced in his freedom from adult vices and in the affectionate preference for G-rated slang—“Gee,” “Gosh,” “Baby doll!”—which Berryman lampooned in an unpublished poem (“Roethke’s”). He found off-color language and gossip distasteful; Berryman believed Jarrell did not drink, though Mary records his later interest in quality beers (Remembering 37). A colleague and friend at Greensboro, Robert Watson, recalls that Jarrell “identified with children and the cozy world of the child. When we asked callers what they would have to drink, he was the only guest who would call for ‘milk and cookies’” (RJ 264). Jarrell himself wrote to Eisler in 1948: “I am childish in many ways, but this is as much good as bad” (Letters 205).

Though Jarrell scared or puzzled some acquaintances, he clearly inspired remarkable loyalty and gratitude, not only from his wife but from his friends. “His voice could express more affection and welcome than anyone,” Eleanor Ross Taylor recalled; “His honesty was related to his generosity to students, to me, and … to [dead or neglected writers] like Christina Stead and [Tristan] Corbière” (RJ 234, 237). “To Randall’s friends,” Peter Taylor wrote, “there was always the feeling that he was their teacher. To Randall’s students, there was always the feeling that he was their friend. And with good reason in both cases” (RJ 246). To Lowell, “Randall was the only man … who could make other writers feel that their work was more important to him than his own. … I have never known anyone” (Lowell continued) “who so connected what his friends wrote with their lives, or their lives with what they wrote” (RJ 106).

These connections may be a key to his character. He clearly enjoyed sharing a house with the Taylors, and his happy second marriage meant that he and Mary were never apart. At the same time he complained that Peter Taylor—an inveterate host—“likes too many people” (McAlexander 174). Jarrell retreated from cocktail parties into smaller conversations or fled upstairs to play with the hosts’ young children. Though he disliked large social gatherings, he seems to have been perpetually in need of close companionship and emotional alliance—from his four important romantic partners (Amy Breyer, Mackie, Elisabeth Eisler, and Mary); from friends like Arendt, Lowell, the Taylors, and Warren; and in another sense from his favorite books and musical works, on which so much depended. In his months apart from each of his wives, and in his few months of romance with Eisler, he depended as few people could on an intimacy conducted through the mail.

The creatures in his children’s books, too—the gingerbread rabbit in flight, the estranged bat-poet, the lonely hunter, stranded mermaid, and orphan boy of The Animal Family—are seeking reliable, intimate companions. The bat-poet finds it, or almost does, in the earnest chipmunk, to whom Mary compared herself. For Robert Fitzgerald, Jarrell’s “interest in tennis represented an attachment to common life, as later on sports cars did and later still professional football, and … he placed a peculiar value on these hobbies”; “he must have known,” Fitzgerald continued, “that at times he was not only lonely, but faintly monstrous,” and “he wished not to be” (RJ 73).¹²

The life displays, then, the virtues Lowell singled out—“wit, pathos and brilliance of intelligence” (RJ 103). It suggests, too, a tremendous, needy loneliness and a consequent, constant need for human intimacy and belonging. Jarrell wanted to connect himself with the rest of the human world, partly because he sometimes found it hard to do so. There followed a desire to separate intimacy from anything that might challenge or destroy it: here, perhaps, lies the source of Jarrell’s sometimes gleeful, innnocent undecorousness. “I’m a thoroughly dependent person,” he confessed to Peter Taylor in 1965, adding that he was “so afraid of being bored and surrounded by empty time” (12 May 1965; Taylor letters).

“The biggest permanent consolation for anything,” he wrote Amy twenty-one years earlier, “is that the world’s so interesting” (Letters 154, 116). Randall Jarrell’s poems projected his own needs and the needs he imagined into characters whose lives offered causes, figures, and languages for them. His lifelong preoccupations with loneliness and its remedies, with the self and how it might be changed, gave him his emotional repertoire: expectation, disappointment, pathos, sympathy, nostalgia, half-believed fantasy, mourning and melancholia. It lent him, too, a set of subjects: soldiers, airmen, lonely children, children as readers, girls and girlhood, fairy-tales, the postal service, housewives, hospitals, office workers, illness and old age. The same preoccupations, I argue in chapter 1, gave him a distinctive and valuable style.