Randall Jarrell and His Age

Recent years have seen an impassioned debate about academic institutions and the profession of letters. Bruce Robbins has shown how some literary intellectuals “manufacture vocations for themselves … in speaking in public, of the public, to the public, and to some extent for the public” (21). Stanley Fish, however, has argued that “literary criticism is only, today, an academic discipline [whose] specialized language … is the mark of its distinctiveness” (Professional 43). Responding to Robbins, to Fish, and to David Simpson, Timothy Peltason asks that contemporary critics learn from Victorian thinkers how to make “complex characterizations of the experiences … offered by written texts”; to do so, we must “believ[e] that literary experience is a distinct and valuable kind” (985). These debates might benefit from attention to Jarrell, whose famously entertaining essays, along with his comic novel, reject both professional and public concerns, professional and public institutions, in favor of other kinds of experience. They do so in order to resist what Jarrell saw as a mid-century trend toward the erasure of private life—a trend his prose goes out of its way to resist.

Recent critics have focused—as I have in chapter 1—on Jarrell’s interaction with his poetic colleagues. He also, however, reacted—and contributed—to mid-century social criticism. During the years of Jarrell’s artistic maturity, thinkers as disparate as Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, R. P. Blackmur, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Leslie Fiedler, Leo Lowenthal, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, David Riesman, Bernard Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, Ernest van den Haag, and William H. Whyte described with dismay societies, schools, and universities dominated by “scientific management,” by markets, and by a conformist social life. They feared the reduction of vocation and avocation to institution and discipline; they feared, also, the eclipse of aesthetic experience, even of private life.

The most important social theorist for thinking about Jarrell must be his close friend Hannah Arendt. Jarrell met Arendt during 1946, when he lived in New York City and edited the book reviews in the Nation. He called Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950) “one of the best historical books I’ve ever read” and told Arendt she was his closest possible ally¹ (Letters 245). She seems to have returned the compliment. Arendt wrote after his death, “Whatever I know of English poetry, and perhaps of the genius of the language, I owe to him” (RJ 4). Though their personal friendship is well known, critics have thus far failed to connect his works to hers.²

Such connections may be found in broad fears about modern society. That “society,” Arendt argued, “introduces between the private and the public a social sphere in which the private is made public and vice versa” (Between 188). Origins attacks the “perversion of equality from a political into a social concept”: this perversion risks creating a society where “every individual … is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different” (54). Jarrell shared Arendt’s fear of the social, a fear that inspired the political theorist Hanna Pitkin’s recent monograph. Pitkin (who distrusts the concept) explains, “‘Society’ [to Arendt] means a leveling of people into uniformity, the destruction of individuality. … Arendt insists explicitly that the social threatens and ultimately destroys privacy, just as much as it threatens and ultimately destroys public life”(14).³

Arendt explored these ideas before Origins, in essays Jarrell would have read: her brief piece on “French Existentialism” ran in the Nation in February 1946, a few months before Jarrell took charge of its book reviews. In Arendt’s thumbnail sketch, French existentialism aims to disentangle people from institutions: it opposes the esprit sérieux, the attitude that leads a man to “think of himself as president of his business, as a member of the Legion of Honor, as a member of the faculty, but also as father, as husband, or as any other half-natural, half-social function” (172).⁴ Individual taste became, for Arendt, a way of resisting, not only conformism but instrumentalization, the conversion of people into their social functions: “We can rise above specialization and philistinism of all sorts,” she later wrote, “to the extent that we learn how to exercise our taste freely” (Between 225).

Arguments about, and against, conformity also pervaded David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950). Riesman and his coauthors Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney describe “other-direction,” a character type newly prevalent in America. A child growing up “other-directed” “learns … that nothing in his character, no possession he owns, no inheritance of name or talent, no work he has done is valued for itself, but only for its effect on others” (49). Though Riesman is careful not to condemn other-direction per se, he ends with a grave warning: “The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different: they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other” (373).⁵ Other-directed adults may create a bland, purposeless society, one that seeks cohesion at the expense of all other virtues. The sociologist Dennis Wrong recalls the “ubiquitous anathematizations of conformity in the 1950s to which Riesman’s diagnosis of the changing American character was so readily assimilated” (167).⁶ Arguments modeled on Riesman’s and on Arendt’s suffused the social criticism of the fifties, producing a stream of essays in such journals as Partisan Review, and such well-known later books as William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1957).

These conceptions of public and private, taste and conformity and individuality, pervade Jarrell’s literary essays. He complained in “The Obscurity of the Poet” (1951) that in modern America, “The truth that all men are politically equal, the recognition of the injustice of fictitious differences, becomes a belief in the fictitiousness of differences, a conviction that it is reaction or snobbishness or Fascism to believe that any individual differences of real importance can exist” (Age 17). Both Riesman and Jarrell would contrast Eisenhower, a mass-marketed product and hence a successful candidate, to Adlai Stevenson, a bad candidate but an individual.⁷ Jarrell struck a paragraph on this theme from a late draft of his essay “The Taste of the Age”:

Ike is the supreme product of Riesman’s new America, where “the product now in demand is neither a staple nor a machine: it is a personality” (italics in original) (Lonely 46). Jarrell shared Arendt’s tendency to conflate (in Pitkin’s words), “disciplinary normalization, oppressive conformity to mainstream values, [and] the obliteration of individuality” (17). As Arendt sought to save public life, what she termed (honorifically) “politics,” from its bleak counterpart in the social, and as Riesman examined “other-direction,” Jarrell’s poetry, criticism and fiction tried to imagine ways to save private life, individual experience.⁸ Jarrell’s defenses of individuality against institutional or professional interests thus cast themselves as defenses of taste.

How can mere reading, mere taste, combat other-direction? The coming society, Jarrell complains in a notebook, is “trying to reach [a] situation where everybody doing anything is archetypical—stands for everybody”; its enemy, and Jarrell’s hope, is a “17 year old sitting alone reading George Herb Wordsworth” (Berg Collection; strikethrough in original). He outlined, in 1955, his fears about a well-managed, conformist future:

“Silent reading,” Sven Birkerts has claimed, “is the very signature—the emblem of subjectivity”: Jarrell here puts its emblematic aspects to use (Readings 105). That reader of Bishop, and his seventeen-year-old cousin immersed in Wordsworth, are enjoying a kind of intimacy with the authors of The Prelude and of A Cold Spring, though it is intimacy mediated by print. Such intimacy often seemed to Jarrell the only way to retain an inner life.⁹

Like many mid-century thinkers, Jarrell derived his concerns about postwar conformity from his experience of the Second World War. Paul Fussell writes that to many observers the army “boys turned by training into quasi-interchangeable parts … seemed even more anonymous and bereft of significant individual personality than their counterparts in the Great War” (66). Jarrell’s wartime poems and prose registered those effects. He wrote in one review that “when one considers the mechanisms of the contemporary states—from the advertising agencies that turn out their principles to the aircraft factories that turn out their practice,” one despairs: “it is we who wither away, not the state” (Age 157). A wartime letter to Lowell decides that “most of the soldiers are, if not completely, at least virtually, ignorant of the nature and conditions of the choices they make; besides this, they are pretty well determined in the passive sense” (Letters 150–151). Nonliterary observers described, and decried, the same passivity: according to the historian Ellen Herman, psychological researchers “discovered that U.S. soldiers had no meaningful understanding of why they were fighting or what the war was actually about. Worse, they did not seem to care” (69).

Jarrell’s wartime letters confirm such alarming findings; his war poems dramatize them. The people in them are his first victims of the hypostatized social: the army and the war have made them, to quote Pitkin, “product[s] or victim[s] of historical forces” rather than “free autonomous agent[s]” (20). (Several of the denser, more abstract poems experiment with Marxist explanations for those forces.)¹⁰ Even those who “determine / Men’s last obedience,” who hold powers of life and death, seem themselves “determined” (CP 183). In “Prisoners,” the laboring captives, each with a “white P on their backs,” “Go on all day being punished,” “loading, unloading”; they

The poem grew from a scene Jarrell observed at Chanute Field in Illinois: he wrote to Mackie about “two prisoners who load on the [garbage] cans and an MP who does nothing but guard the prisoners—the MP always looks much more criminal than the prisoners, who are dressed in conspicuous blue clothes, are in, generally, for minor offenses, and have no possible way of getting out of the field, and need guarding about as much as I do” (Berg Collection). In the poem, the ungainly, half-rhymed hexameters (anapestic with spondaic substitutions) mimic the prisoners’ rhythm as they work; the same meter works to set the prisoners’ labor against earlier, heroic wars, since it resembles the dactylic hexameter (with spondaic substitutions) of the Iliad. Standing at the end of the history of Western individuals (as Achilles stood at its beginning) prisoners and guard make literal the collective coercion that will soon be “our” fate.

A spectacle of power without agency, in which everyone seemed under compulsion and nobody seemed in charge, was exactly what many soldiers saw in the Army and the war.¹¹ Arendt feared a similar fate for the whole postwar world. The foreword to Origins explained that the globe, in the late 1940s, looked “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of our lives” (vii). That experience of powerlessness unites almost all the people in Jarrell’s war poems: the orphans, the gunners, MPs, POWs, refugees.

Arendt considered totalitarian societies the final and worst symbol and. in certain senses the result, of human loneliness. Old tyrannies destroyed public life; totalitarianism, however, “destroys private life as well,” since it “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man” (Origins 475). Totalitarianism thus amounts to “organized loneliness,” “a principle destructive for all human living-together” (Origins 478). The loneliness on which totalitarian modes of social reorganization rely, and which they exacerbate, is the isolation Jarrell’s poems evoke, the isolation described in the previous chapter: it is the state of affairs (confronted by the Dead Wingman and the Woman at the Washington Zoo) in which no other person confirms my identity.

Loss of individuality, for Arendt, meant the reduction of people not only to lonely isolates but also to predictable, interchangeable machines, so that behaviorist accounts of them become true. Jarrell thought he saw just that phenomenon taking place in the army; so did the sociologists Maurice Stein and Arthur Vidich, who argued that after the Second World War the military became a “model for … the ‘social system’ as a whole,” and for “the pervasive manipulation of identity that suffuses mass society” (493, 27). Karl Shapiro’s eulogy for Jarrell put the same finding in more dramatic terms: “our army never melted away. … Our poetry, from the forties on, records the helplessness we felt in the face of the impersonal character of the age” (RJ 222). Jarrell’s prose not only records that sense but tries to counteract it.

Jarrell’s defenses of individuality begin with his war poems and extend into the later poems’ lonely lives. The same defenses shape his essays, which draw on the ideas of his peers and teachers, some of whom were the writers we now call New Critics. Sentence by sentence, however, Jarrell rarely sounds much like the peers he admired. His distinctive prose style goes out of its way to reject the professional, disciplinary conventions upon which most literary critics (then and now) relied; these conventions, Jarrell implies, might be part of “the social,” enemies of private life and of art.

Whatever its subjects, Jarrell’s critical prose consistently makes, through its style, two arguments about literature in general. The first of these overarching arguments concerns the status of words and speech acts in poems. As against Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and others, Jarrell liked to insist that we regard poems not as heterocosms but as troped speech among and about persons. This view let Jarrell use his reviews to offer general truths, not about the poems under discussion but about the human affairs they describe. Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry “understands … that the wickedness and confusion of the age can explain and extenuate other people’s wickedness and confusion, but not, for you, your own” (Age 235). A very long reading of Robert Frost’s “Home Burial” gave Jarrell occasion to suggest that “there are no long peacemaking speeches in a quarrel: after a few sentences the speaker always has begun to blame the other again” (Third 206). John Guillory has claimed provocatively that Cleanth Brooks’s description of good poems as “paradoctrinal” nondiscursive objects served to empower professional critics, to whom readers appealed for explanations (166). Jarrell liked to insist instead that poems presented persons and their lives; words in poems therefore had the same status as words in fiction, prose, and conversation.¹²

This insistence is not simply a direction for reading poems. It is also, in Langdon Hammer’s phrase, another of Jarrell’s “attacks on the professionalism of the literary culture at large” (“Who” 392). The problem of poets’ entry into universities, like the problem of critics captured by disciplines, struck Jarrell as a specially salient case of a general dilemma: the capture of aesthetic and private experience by institutions, interests, and rules. For “many young poets,” Jarrell quipped in 1955, “poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets—one they learned at college—and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence. … Wasn’t it one of these poets who said, the other day, ‘I accept the university’? And wasn’t it a Professor of Poetry who replied ‘By God, he’d better!’?” (KA 231) Jarrell rewrites Emerson’s famous exchange with Margaret Fuller by replacing “universe” with “university.” His problem is not that the poets are too scholarly but that they have become servants of institutions.

The parallel with the esprit sérieux is exact. To the extent that critics judge literature as specialists, they are not reading it as literature at all. “A critical method can help us neither to read nor to judge; still, it is sometimes useful in pointing out to the reader a few gross discrete reasons for thinking a good poem good—and it is invaluable, almost indispensable, in convincing a reader that a good poem is bad, or a bad one good” (Age 88). This sentence and dozens of others like it position Jarrell as a reader like other readers, but one so familiar with the techniques and impostures of merely professional criticism that he can convince readers to trust their own tastes.

Such appeals to intuition against method prove themselves by sounding as little as possible like value-neutral or “academic” writing. They sound more often like the language of journalism and “reviewing.” Jarrell is, however, careful to avoid the representative or unobtrusively general voice common to journalistic reviewing. A brace of tactics—from extravagant similes and emblems to exceptionally lengthy sentences and exclamations—makes Jarrell’s critical prose more recognizable, more idiosyncratic, and more personal than the prose of the other journalistic or essayistic critics of his era.¹³ Through “rhetorical devices not usually found in literary criticism,” as Keith Monroe has put it, “Jarrell attempted to create a personal criticism,” analogous to “conversation among friends” (262).¹⁴ His elaborately unmannerly sentences work to describe complex reactions to single poems but also record the affective power of more abstract arguments, as in this peroration from “The Obscurity of the Poet”:

Akin to such demonstrations of personal feeling are Jarrell’s refusals to offer long, overt, step-by-step arguments. (His early collection of aphorisms includes the simple, gloomy warning “Don’t argue” [7].) Figurative passages disguise their nature as arguments by seeming to be (mere) metaphors or impressions. Describing, in 1945, Auden’s changing ideas of Original Sin, Jarrell writes:

These sentences offer a compact account of Auden’s development. Yet, Jarrell’s method of disguising, or leaving implicit, the arguments his sentences contain has led some readers to conclude that Jarrell does not make arguments at all. One recent reviewer complains that “excellent turns of phrase do not make a good critic” and that “Jarrell’s writing” fails to be “real criticism.” Jarrell’s figurative and synthetic language contains precisely what this reviewer says it lacks, new insights for “an audience already interested and somewhat knowledgeable” about the writers in question (Kirsch 24). What it does not contain are explicit, connected, literal, discursive, arguments: we are invited to furnish those for ourselves, by interpreting the figurative language.

Jarrell’s stance and its verbal correlates set themselves against the course of criticism during his lifetime—developments that seemed to him to collude with the threat of the social. While Jarrell was developing his critical practice, eminent mid-century critics such as Ransom, I. A. Richards, Northrop Frye, and Kenneth Burke hoped, each in his own way, to systematize criticism, to provide “principles,” “anatomies,” “grammars,” “rhetorics,” or prolegomenas for the near future’s literary analysts.¹⁵ Ransom in The World’s Body (1938) famously called for a “Criticism, Inc. or Criticism, Ltd.,” which might “become more scientific, or precise and systematic” when “taken in hand by professionals” (329). Later system-building critics even warned against personal involvement: Frye, for example, began his Anatomy of Criticism (1957) by asking that criticism achieve “some measure of independence” from its literary objects (10–11).

T. S. Eliot declared, in words Jarrell later quoted, “There is no method except to be very intelligent” (Age 87).¹⁶ But (as Hammer has shown at length) the author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” presented to advocates like Tate “a view of the ‘literary’ that rigorously and categorically excludes ‘the personal values’ (moral, social, religious) of poet and critic alike,” conceiving of literature as “an autonomous—and an oddly corporate—entity” (Janus-Faced 69). Seeking a demesne distinct from that of the sciences, Eliot-inspired “orthodoxy” looks to acknowledge and sometimes to imitate the impersonal, received authority of nonscientific institutions—in particular (as Guillory has argued) of religious institutions.¹⁷ Ransom appears to say outright that his brand of professional analysis aims to create a secular priesthood. He declared in his 1951 preface to The Kenyon Critics, “the one authority which is still universally reputable is literature. But literature is cryptic … the greater our faith in its authority, the more hidden is likely to be its rule of life and way of salvation. … It is the critic who must teach us to find the thing truly authoritative but hidden” (ix).

To such authoritative aspirations, Jarrell (though he admired Ransom’s poems) objected with humor and force. In Jarrell’s way of thinking—the one his prose implies—particular works may indeed be authoritative, as for him Wordsworth and Rilke and Proust surely were. Yet their authority exists only in private, proved on the pulse of the reader. As literature, the Prelude and the Sonnets to Orpheus do not and cannot have the kind of authority that can be socially enforced or embodied in an institution. Their power depends on psychology rather than on exegesis—on sympathy rather than on interpretation. Jarrell wrote to Robert Penn Warren as early as 1935, “the majority of my tendencies are not at all Eliot-ish and didactic” (Letters 5). “Eliot-ish” aspirations and attitudes, no less than social-scientific ones, represented for Jarrell a subordination of unpredictable individual response to institutional or disciplinary canons of value.

Jarrell’s divergence from his mentors can be overstated: as early as 1940 Allen Tate, in “The Present Function of Criticism,” warned that “professional ‘educationists’ and … sociologists … have taught the present generation that … the greatest thing is adjustment to Society (not to a good society)” (Essays 199). Tate and Jarrell both posit literature as a force against “social adjustment.”¹⁸ Yet Tate is defending an intellectual and a moral elite, as well as a specific (ultimately religious) ideal of a “good society,” and doing so with a moralized hauteur. For Tate and for Ransom, as for their utilitarian enemies, that good society is to be imagined by a cadre of professionals—the difference is simply that for Tate and Ransom the right professionals are experts in literature.¹⁹ Though his teachers worried about specialization, Jarrell attended more carefully than they could to its workings within the postwar world and within the demesne of literature: he concludes “The Age of Criticism” in hope that “a few people … pay no attention to what the most systematic and definitive critic says against some work of art they love” (Age 95).²⁰

The project Jarrell’s critical essays share, the project his “undisciplined” sentences demonstrate, is thus not simply, as William Pritchard writes, “to put criticism in its proper, subordinate place” (213). We can say more specifically that Jarrell’s tactics in his critical prose seek to subordinate criticism as an institution, as a profession requiring specialist training, to a prior experience of private reading. One of Jarrell’s unpublished lectures on Auden drew explicitly the distinction so much of his published prose implies:

What makes literature worthwhile, Jarrell implies here—what we care about in literature—may be susceptible to cognitive analysis but is never reducible to that analysis. The reasons we read literary books, and the reactions that lead us to want to call some books good and other books bad, cannot be reduced to the reasons nor to the evidence professional critics can use in discursive arguments.²¹ “The best critic who ever lived could not prove that the Iliad is better than Trees: the critic can only state his belief persuasively, and hope that the reader of the poem will agree—but persuasively covers everything from a sneer to statistics” (Age 88).

These most basic, most difficult to describe reactions, which motivate the rhetoric of persuasion but cannot accommodate objective evidence, are the reactions that establish the possibility of human interiority and intersubjective relations, even amid intrusive institutions. Charles Altieri calls such reactions “first-person commitments” and contrasts them with attempts at impersonal analyses: “when the ‘I’ [considers] the singular ‘you,’ it seeks a relationship defined not by general rules but by specific conditions … ranging from intimate companionship to internalized tribunals” (Canons 305, 306). A “real critic” Jarrell wrote, speaks from just such conditions: he “can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses—and yet he must regard that self as no more than the instrument through which the work of art is seen” (Age 90).

Such a declaration transforms Eliot’s famous impersonality into a vehicle for first-person commitments, commitments on the part of one naked self (the critic’s) to another (that embodied in the work of art). Allen Grossman has argued that poetry “is … the kind of utterance that makes the person present” to the reader, in the [philosophical] sense of “person” as a “value-bearing” entity “which has rights” (20). It is the aim of all poetry, for Grossman, to make value-bearing, honored “persons” from what were initially dishonored “selves”: “The disposition to honor selves, awakened by poetry, must be responded to if poetry can be said to be truly read” (19–20). Jarrell’s program for critical feeling (it might be better to say readerly feeling) works out, in its tone, assumptions, and attitudes, precisely this disposition, which might also be called a willingness to enter into first-person commitments or (following Stanley Cavell) a readiness to acknowledge.²²

Jarrell’s largest distinction as a critic does not lie in the idea that acknowledgements of persons underlie literary experience. That idea existed before him and has been pursued since without reference to him. Jarrell’s distinction as a critic, rather, is that he made the process of acknowledging persons in poems, of being personally affected by what one reads, continually manifest in his prose style. That style—along with the arguments it encodes—resists demands that criticism be “systematic,” demands that it produce objective knowledge rather than acknowledgement, because such demands turn what would otherwise be ends (readings, reactions, literary experience) into means for the production of more criticism. Such demands thus convert readers into mere instruments, into machines of sorts, as “The Age of Criticism” implies:

Stanley Edgar Hyman described mid-century critics in his 1948 study The Armed Vision (1948): Hyman’s ideal critic, Jarrell quipped, would “resemble one of those robots you meet in science-fiction stories, with a microscope for one eye, a telescope for the other, and the mechanical brain at Harvard for a heart” (Age 89). Mechanical, professional, powerful, insensitive, institution-bound critics deserve professional, powerful, insensitive, institutional-bound poets. They get what they deserve in the Auden of the forties and fifties, as one Princeton lecture imagined:

The Age of Anxiety struck Jarrell not only as a bad poem by a great poet but also as a stimulus to his fears about “technique,” about the dominance of methods and groups.²⁴ The menace includes “the social” in all its forms, from institutional role-playing to behaviorist predictability to economic efficiency; it recalls Jarrell’s earlier verdict that “Auden … has bureaucratized his method about as completely—and consequently as disastrously—as any efficiency expert could wish” (Third 143).

When New Critical thought was newer, Jarrell defended it against both commercial book reviewing and historical scholarship. He wrote in 1941 that “Universities … produce good criticism … at best … only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money—a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations” (KA 62). The jargon of bad mid-century critics, Jarrell explained in “The Age of Criticism,” developed in “fifteen or twenty years”; as New Critical practice came to dominate the academy, its reduction to replicable method moved some of its practitioners to protest (Age 83). Gerald Graff calls “The Age of Criticism” “the most celebrated” among several such protests (228). Graff’s Professing Literature views such alarms over “routinization” as a recurring phenomenon in the history of critical methods. He blames, in part, the structure of universities, whose “institutional arrangements do not require [competing] discourses to confront one another” (240, 243). Each new critical school can thus denounce its predecessor as routinized; later the same school, if its adherents acquire enough power, will harden into routine itself. Allen Tate’s “Miss Emily and the Bibliographer” (attacking biographical and philological scholarship) thus occupies the same position for one stage in the history of English departments as “The Age of Criticism” occupies for the next.²⁵

Declaring “New critic is but old scholar writ large,” “The Age of Criticism” anticipates Graff’s argument. But rather than suggesting, as Graff does, different institutional arrangements, Jarrell views institutions themselves as the problem. If Graff’s problem is with the ways in which literary studies have been constructed as a discipline, Jarrell’s problem seems to be that they have been too completely constructed as one—that not enough energy, time, or resources remain (in or outside the academy) for the enjoyment of literature in ways that do not produce measurable (critical) results. Conscious that institutions, methods, techniques in some form will always be with us, Jarrell attacks particular institutions and methods when the threat they pose to individual, unprofessional activity becomes especially great.

For Jarrell, both Bauerlein and his opponents have mistaken means for ends: criticism should never be entirely “systematic” or “repeatable,” since it requires subjective, one-of-a-kind personal elements in order to construe its object of study at all. The criticism that dominates the Age of Criticism (Jarrell believed) might squeeze out just those crucial aspects. Its faults resemble the faults Jarrell found in André Malraux’s art criticism, which also relied too much on general models: “If the methods of some discipline deal only with, say, what is quantitatively measurable, and something is not quantitatively measurable, then the thing does not exist for that discipline—after a while the lower right-hand corner of the inscription gets broken off, and it reads does not exist” (KA 181).

“The Age of Criticism” is no more a call to abolish academic literary criticism (and the review of Malraux no more a call to abolish art history) than a predecessor such as Tate’s “Miss Emily and the Bibliographer” is a call to abolish scholarship. It is instead (to adapt Bauerlein’s terms) a warning against mistaking the disciplinary object construed by one or another kind of criticism for the more complex, more unpredictable, and emotionally richer literary object as it is available to a range of (initially) amateur readers, the object from which “disciplinary objects” must then be derived.²⁶ Jarrell’s antidisciplinary position and idiosyncratic critical practice thus support, perhaps unexpectedly, Geoffrey Hartman’s famous argument that criticism when it is worthy of itself is always also a genre of imaginative literature.²⁷ Hartman warns that the impulse to defend individual creativity against “institutional or commercial forces” can bolster “the prejudice that separates the creative from the interpretive”—a prejudice (Hartman writes) we ought to resist, since “a critical essay, a legal opinion, an interpretation of Scripture, a biography can be as inspiring and nurturing as poem, novel or painting” (Journey 43).

To be useful to literary reading (in Jarrell’s model) criticism must be subjective, hence creative. “The work of criticism is rooted in the unconscious of the critic, just as the poem is rooted in the unconscious of the poet,” he concluded in “Poets, Critics and Readers” (KA 314). Critical creativity will, though, have to manifest itself in a special and self-subordinating relation to other creative work. As against the work products of a professional discipline, which an attorney or chemist sets out to produce (and to which life outside the laboratory may be irrelevant) “true criticism … must always be, in some sense, a by-product … of a private poetry-workshop or a private reading-room” (SH 103). Jarrell appeals self-consciously (as his frequent rhetorical questions suggest) to his readers’ feelings. It is precisely such feelings that we bracket when we are trying to interpret a culture from outside, to consider cultural forms as “third-person,” disciplinary objects.

Jarrell’s prose thus begins in an abreaction to careerism and ends as a (Wordsworthian) ethics of reading.²⁸ The peroration to “Poets, Critics and Readers” describes “an unusually humane and intelligent critic” who has declared “‘All the reading I do is in order to write or teach’”—all, that is, with one exception: a yearly rereading of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (KA 317). It is in that rereading of Kim, and not in reading “in order to” do something else, that Jarrell locates the value of literature. When he reads Kim that anonymous critic

This Kantian vocabulary is Jarrell’s usual one for moral judgments. The malevolent Sam, in The Man Who Loved Children, “has made the beings of this world, who are the ends of this world, means” (Third 41). The same vocabulary marks Jarrell’s asides on how to read: “When one reads as a linguist, a scholar, a New or Old or High or Low critic, when one reads the poem as a means to an end, one is no longer a pure reader but an applied one” (KA 307). A reader who can’t treat a work of art as an end may be unable to treat a person as an end, especially when neither seems important. This analogy between the treatment of poems and the treatment of persons emerges near the end of “The Obscurity of the Poet”:

Implicit here, as in “The Age of Criticism,” are two different (but not contradictory) theses about the relation of aesthetic goodness in literature and the other arts to ethical goodness in human action. In the first model, the aesthetic and the ethical are linked by analogy: both are served when the objects in their domain (works of art; persons) are treated as ends, traduced when those objects are treated as means. As David Haney puts it (following Emmanuel Lévinas), “the structure of the reader’s relationship to a literary text has affinities with a person’s ethical relationships to others”: “Because the art work unites means and ends … one’s relation to it resembles an ethical relation to another person” (38, 39). Jarrell thus sees something not only depressing but dangerous about the sort of reader who “knows what he likes, but is uncomfortable when other people do not read it or do not like it—for what people read and like is good: that is what good means” (Age 71). Someone who cannot distinguish artistic goodness from popular success may not be able to tell good from evil.

In the second idea about art and ethics, our potentially shared or similar responses to good works of art reveal the shared basis of our moral personhood. As we are obliged, for Jarrell, to treat works of art first of all as ends, so are we obliged to consider everyone as potentially receptive to art. Jarrell told an audience at Harvard that “Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke … demand to be shared: if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference on those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can” (Age 22). That which “demands to be shared,” the noncognitive remainder in literary experience, the knowledge-of potentially available to anyone (in contrast to technical, specialized knowledge-about), makes such a demand felt by anyone who can share it. The aesthetic in general, in Jarrell’s account, does some of the same work Wordsworth proposes for his own poetry in his 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads: it “binds together … the vast empire of human society,” drawing on “sympathies” that may exist in all of us “without any other discipline than that of our daily life” (258–259).

Guillory’s influential Cultural Capital shows (drawing on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) how literary works and doctrines about them function as sources of social power and thus of class distinction. If we identify (as Jarrell often did) disciplinary, specialized reading and writing with the professional practice of literary criticism and with the socioeconomic rewards of that practice, we can see that the unprofessional, potentially universal grounds for aesthetic experience Jarrell believes liberals are obliged to imagine resemble not only Wordsworth’s goal for his poems but also Guillory’s idea of “remainder.” Guillory asks, “Is it possible to translate the (false) philosophical problem of ‘aesthetic value’ into the sociological problem of ‘cultural capital’?” He answers, finally, that it is possible—“with the qualification that the translation always has a remainder, which is nothing other than aesthetic experience” (327).

“From the sociological point of view,” Guillory continues, “the experience of any ‘pure’ aesthetic pleasure is of no interest at all”; “aesthetic pleasure simply falls outside the sociological field … incapable of articulation in the game of distinction, except as the pretext of the game.” But “it is only by taking the articulation of aesthetic discourse as identical to aesthetic experience” that Bourdieu and others can ascribe formal innovation to high culture and haut bourgeois discourse alone (333). Through the idiosyncrasies of his prose style, and through the argument it entails, Jarrell seeks to highlight just that “remainder,” the part of reading that would be left if there were no consideration of “cultural capital,” of social position, professional reward, and social difference, involved in reading (especially in reading poetry). Jarrell’s style of criticism thus seeks to rescue his own and our experience of works of literary art from those works’ status as both disciplinary objects and repositories of cultural capital.

The threat Bourdieuian sociology poses, in theory, to the possibility of aesthetic experience, in theory, duplicates the threat the Age of Criticism posed to aesthetic experience in practice: the threat that it might be a deceptive name for material interests.²⁹ One way to demonstrate that aesthetic experience is not simply a pretext for demonstrations of mastery, that we can treat art works as ends and not means, might be to describe one’s own experience of particular texts while stretching or flouting the conventions by which high-status disciplines “articulate” that experience. Such demonstrations are, as I hope I have already shown, exactly what Jarrell’s prose style aims to provide.³⁰ A critic with such goals would take care to advocate supposedly minor or unimportant works, works without potential for cultural prominence. Jarrell did exactly that, over and over, furnishing a long list of such works in “The Age of Criticism” (Age 79). When discussing a canonical author, a critic with these goals would remind readers that any canonical poem was enjoyed before it entered syllabi and textbooks and that all works of art, even overwhelmingly powerful ones, were once unknown. Jarrell begins a long essay on Stevens with exactly these reminders.³¹ Finally, such a critic would bring up—as we have seen Jarrell do—the (alterable, though not alterable at will) social position of the works discussed and the doctrines about them, in order to distinguish (in principle) social position and fact from personal reactions—though they may never, in practice, be entirely disentangled.³²

Jarrell’s prose thus shows us critical reading vanishing asymptotically into personal experience and vice versa: the personal seems to emerge in Jarrell’s writing exactly in so far as the text under discussion calls it forth. We will see this mode of reaction, personal yet impersonal, described and defended at the end of Jarrell’s campus novel. That novel finds among its characters the virtue his essays imagined: it—and they—imagine a space where works of art produce not disciplinary knowledge but individuating acknowledgement. This space allows us, in turn, to recognize persons distinct from the institutions, professions, social roles, and public controversies among which they—and we—will always live.

Jarrell did not restrict his engagement with postwar social thought to his essays and poems. The same concerns about art, individuals, and “the social” inform Jarrell’s one work of prose fiction for adults, the comic novel Pictures from an Institution. Pictures describes an academic year at Benton College, a progressive women’s college modeled on Sarah Lawrence, where Jarrell taught in 1946–47. The narrator spends the year there as a visiting professor; another visiting teacher is Gertrude Johnson, a successful, witty, malevolent novelist. As Jarrell’s narrator gathers information for his book on Benton, Gertrude gathers material for her novel based on life at the college. For all its comedy, Pictures from an Institution may be called the most Arendtian of Jarrell’s productions, both because it is most fully occupied by Arendtian concerns about “the social” and because it dates from Jarrell and Arendt’s closest association. Jarrell even kept the successive drafts of his novel in a binder Arendt had given him, left over from the production of Origins of Totalitarianism.³³ Benton and its characters contain almost every aspect of “the social” as Jarrell’s essays and poems up to 1952 imagined it: readers encounter bureaucracy, “adjustment,” narrowly economic thinking, conformism, and norm-worship, reductionist accounts of human behavior, subservience to institutional interests, narrowly disciplinary approaches, false public-spiritedness, snobbery, inverse snobbery, falsely democratic attacks on taste, and hostility to individuation. Gertrude’s novel, Pictures supposes, will illuminate Benton’s faults mercilessly, as if it were a totally predictable, self-enclosed socio-cultural system. Jarrell’s own novel, however, shows not only the bad aspects of Benton’s institutions but also the ways in which even the most predictable of its individuals, and the least promising of its works of art, can escape their sway.

Benton’s President Robbins identifies his own interests entirely with those of Benton College: “President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins” (10–11). He attends not to people but to social formations: “There was a part of Gatsby that his bank, the company that insured him, and other institutions knew—a part that was in love not with Daisy but with the bank; and this part of Gatsby President Robbins shared with Gatsby” (17). President Robbins, in love with institutions, acts out what Whyte would later dub the “social ethic,” which promises “an equilibrium in which society’s needs and the needs of the individual are one and the same” (7). Though Robbins heads a relatively innocuous institution, his traits remind Jarrell’s narrator of other, more dangerous ones—President Robbins “had the morals of a State; had, almost, the morals of an Army” (72). Robbins fits almost perfectly into a social system, in Parsons’s sense of that term: the sociologist Chris Jenks writes that in a “social system the social norms … diminish the potential distinction between the self and the collectivity by engendering a coinciding set of interests for both” (16).

Each of Jarrell’s unflattering “pictures” functions on the one hand to caricature such “social” behavior as Robbins’s, and on the other to undercut reductively sociological accounts of human life. The people of Benton come close to being explicable in the terms those accounts offer but are never wholly so: “Had it not been for Mrs. Robbins, President Robbins’ life would have been explicable down to the last detail. … But why had he married Mrs. Robbins? It was a question to which there could not be an answer” (11). The most venomous attacks on Benton’s predictable behavior are consistently shunted to Gertrude, who believes that everyone (not just President Robbins) obeys material interests and social scripts all the time (whereas, in truth, not even the Robbinses do).

Gertrude’s style of explanation does not even account for all of Gertrude: in her rare moments of self-doubt, she is entitled (as the characters in Jarrell’s poems are entitled) to repetitions, rhetorical questions, grammatical breakdown: “away from their laughter, their held breath, their widening repudiating eyes, Gertrude felt: Am I—was she what? She felt: Am I? Am I?” (255). Gertrude even displays, without an ulterior motive, real affection for her husband, Sidney, bringing him lemonade when he is sick. Normally she is surprised that “people, ordinary people, could take themselves seriously. … But as she watched Sidney drink the lemonade she did not see how ridiculous he was, but watched seriously and with interest, taking him on his own terms” (207). “Sidney was what Gertrude could be good to”; as for everyone else, Gertrude really believes that “People just aren’t loveable” (207; italics in original).

The steel-armored, tanklike Gertrude, defended by her theories of human motivation and human depravity, resembles the invulnerable, mechanical reader of “The Age of Criticism,” with his armed vision and computerized heart. And the nearly mechanical Gertrude, who can be humanized and softened by exactly one person, Sidney, resembles the harassed, overprogrammed professor in “Poets, Critics and Readers,” who can be a human being, rather than a professional interpreter, with exactly one book, Kim.

Whether or not we see McCarthy in Gertrude, the president of Sarah Lawrence in President Robbins, or the professional anthologist Oscar Williams in the professional anthologist Charles Daudier, we believe the novel Gertrude is writing will resemble Groves more than it resembles the one we are reading. When Gertrude complains about Benton, she is usually right; she does not see how her complaints (about systematization, predictability, interests) apply also to her, nor does she see how the same complaints can only be mostly or usually true of any individual, even the most conformist—even herself. “Gertrude said about Benton, in the voice of a digital computer nagging at cash-registers: ‘Americans are so conformist that even their dissident groups exhibit the most abject conformity. … There was some truth in what she said; I had felt its truth, I know, At Home On Bleecker Street,” where Gertrude lives (104–105). Jarrell’s narrator, in a rare peroration, tells Gertrude flatly, “People aren’t like anything, there are too many of them” (98). Later in the novel,

This passage has an exact antecedent in Virginia Woolf’s famous 1924 lecture, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Seeing a Mrs. Brown in a train, Woolf writes, Arnold Bennett would notice “how Mrs. Brown wore a brooch which had cost three-and-ten-three at Whitworth’s bazaar; and had mended both gloves … and … had been left a little copyhold, not freehold, property at Datchet” (106–107). Woolf argued that modern art had to extricate character as such from external, social facts like those Bennett’s novels gathered.

If Bennett believed that he could illuminate character by describing such things, Gertrude does not believe in character at all—instead, “know[ing] why everything is as it is,” she believes in a kind of social determinism. Those who offer deterministic social explanations, however, are unpredictable persons themselves, and Jarrell emphasizes their eccentricities. Jerrold Whittaker, for example, is “every inch a sociologist”: “Everything, to Jerrold, was the illustration of a principle” (49, 57). Jerrold and his wife, Flo, believe that they are entirely rational, committed to criteria of utility and public good. In fact, they are the strangest, most purely amusing people in the novel. Visiting their house is “like going to the zoo”: they

The Whittakers also collect craft objects and folk art—this (the descriptions suggest) is how the human need for art, for useless experience, expresses itself in people who believe they are rational calculators of utility: “Jeremy Bentham’s stuffed body would not have been ill at ease in their house,” though he would have had to share it with “pepper-mills, needle-point footstools, barometers, chess-tables, candle-molds” (53).

Jerrold explains everything in the too-rational terms of academic social science. Flo combines her belief in social analysis with a commitment to public virtue: “she … dealt with primroses in lots of a hundred thousand, and remained on macroscropic or molar terms with her universe—she oversaw it with systematic benevolence” (58). “Almost everything that happened to Flo and her family and friends was, after all, only private; and to her real life was public, what you voted at or gave for or read about in the Nation. Life seemed to Flo so petty, compared to real life”³⁷ (58–59). Jarrell refuses to make Flo a Mrs. Jellyby; she is ridiculous, and unpleasant, but neither hypocritical nor deluded: “if I were a town, there is no one I should rather have by me in a disaster” (58). Flo represents the dominance of public interest, of political interpretation, over private life—and she represents that dominance at its least harmful and most sincere; she has to, since Jarrell’s point is to critique exclusively political thinking as such, rather than any particular political outlook.

The Whittakers’ artlessly public rationality thus becomes the most benign possible version of the theories for which President Robbins’s life is the practice—theories that account for all human choices in terms of groups and interests. Gertrude’s novels are in turn the art form that corresponds to the theory and practice of Benton, since she chronicles sociological people, giving them plots by manipulating them: “she looked at [the narrator’s wife] the way you’d look at a chessman if it made its own move” (36). A novel that took sociological, or interest-based, explanations for all behavior as seriously as Gertrude, or Jerrold, or Flo took them, but more thoroughly and consistently, would indeed resemble a chess game, denying its characters even the semblance of agency. Such a novel would refuse to produce, in Woolf’s sense of the word, “characters” and would therefore disaffiliate itself from psychology, allying its explanatory methods instead to anthropology and sociology and interpreting what seem to be human decisions as workings-out of cultural rules.

Christopher Herbert has claimed that Anthony Trollope wrote just such novels. In Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, Herbert writes, “personality is presented … as a sociological phenomenon through and through,” “a nexus of institutional forces,” and “the unconscious … produced in effect by a calculus of institutions” (293). For Herbert this is a demonstration made again and again, rather anxiously, by social theory from the late nineteenth century on, a demonstration whose force post-Romantic literature struggles to escape. The antipsychological implications of such thinking, Herbert explains, rule out not only character but plot, in any strong sense of either word: “To incorporate into fiction in any concerted, explicit way the ethnographic thesis that individual personality is parasitic upon standardized or stereotyped cultural patterns … would undo at its root the vital principle of novelistic imagination.” Should that thesis “come into ascendancy in a novel, it could only do so … in an anomalous fictional type”—like Trollope’s—“marked not only by dramatic inertia and by shallowness, but by … affective privation” (259, 260).

At Benton the “ethnographic thesis” almost explains how people behave. It is for this reason, Jarrell suggests, that Benton could not host the plot of a conventional novel: “it was a world in which almost nothing happened, a kind of steady state” (221; italics in original). Gertrude nevertheless gives her book a “Real Plot. It could have happened anywhere—anywhere except, perhaps, Benton” (214). Jarrell remarked by contrast in an unpublished lecture that his own “book has no plot” (Berg Collection).³⁸ Flo and Jerrold and the rest of Benton conform closely enough to systematizing ideas of social behavior, make up such a nearly predictable system, as to rule out a plot, which would require them to act on one another with cumulative unpredictability. As individuals, though, each has a saving oddity, which rules out the “affective privation” Herbert describes, replacing it with humor. A book about Benton has anecdotes, but no plot, because it has persons, but none of them is in charge:

Against the institutions and the disciplines of the Age of Criticism, Jarrell’s essays demonstrated his own, wilfully personal, reading practice. In the same way, against its Bentonian caricatures, Pictures sets a range of admirable minor characters devoted to private life and, always, to art. All of them, and only they, appreciate (what is now called) classical music. Flo and Jerrold Whittaker “loved folk ballads,” though “they knew that they should like Classical Music” (67). Gertrude’s insistence on seeing people socially, as congeries of interests, prevents her from understanding music at all; instead she appreciates architecture (67–68). The latter is the most public of art forms; the former the least reducible to discursive meaning and instrumental use.⁴⁰ By contrast, the most sympathetic characters in Pictures are a composer and a singer, Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum.

Jarrell manages to associate Gottfried with everything in art that individualizes or acknowledges, not so much in Gottfried’s own compositions as in his responses to others’ work. A former student remarks that Gottfried “goes over your piece as if he were you, and the next girls’ piece as if he were her—she” (137). Gottfried’s status as an ideal listener is guaranteed by his unpredictability—a feature Jarrell cherished in literary reading: “You say, after you have listened to someone talking for a while about music, or painting, or literature, ‘I see the line you’re taking.’ It was impossible to say this about Gottfried … where music was concerned” (137). “To say that someone is typically anything,” Pictures declares, “is an unfavorable judgment”; “when Gottfried was least his kind he was most Gottfried” (175, 173). Gottfried’s hard-won freedom from public demands, his sensitivity to individuality in people, his alertness to individuality in music, and his own freedom from confinement to type make up not four virtues but one. As the ideal (music) critic, he is the ideally individuated, encyclopedically knowledgeable but un-professional listener Jarrell’s literary criticism envisions for novels and poems.

Refugees from Nazi Europe, the Rosenbaums are models not only of right relations to art but of domestic life, “like Baucis and Philemon” (125). Both have chosen private life over the public world; their disillusion with the latter seems complete. (Here, of course, as Jarrell told Arendt, neither one seems anything like her [Letters 392].) Gottfried Rosenbaum’s “speech was a pilgrimage toward some lingua franca of the far future—‘vot ve all speak ven de Shtate hass viderdt away,’ as he would have put it” (13). “Ven de Shtate hass videredt avay was one of his favorite phrases—he seemed to find it inexhaustibly humorous” (137). Repeating that phrase, Rosenbaum dismisses the failed hopes of European radicals; he also enacts a dream of private life freed from political demands. He has the personal and moral advantages of statelessness—advantages this refugee composer has achieved at incalculable costs.

Questions of public life and conduct, brought improperly into the sphere of private aesthetic response, become not political but “social” questions, encouraging not debate but conformist sectarianism. The Rosenbaums, like “The Pound Affair,” identify the aesthetic, the private, and the authentic; their admirable lives suggest that authentic individuals, authentic response, can be found only in private life—the public sphere seems, for these speakers, at this moment, irrevocably compromised. If the aesthetic is the private (as against the reductively public), it is also the interpersonal (as against the social): the art works Jarrell most admires, in Pictures as everywhere else, let individuals recognize one another. Irene Rosenbaum had been an opera singer, but her voice now suits only small-scale performance. When she sings lieder, her failures become virtues, since they lend “importance” to private lives: “of all the singers I have ever heard she was the most essentially dramatic: she could not have sung a scale without making it seem a part of someone’s life, a thing of human importance” (164).

Such a virtue is certainly not incompatible with the novel as a genre, but it seems incompatible with the kind of novel Pictures most resembles, which is a satire of types. How can a satirical novel attack people’s tendency to treat one another as self-interested predictable groups—that is, as satires of its own sort treat them? One solution is to build in a satirist (Gertrude) who remains unsparing and unforgiving and then show how her views (satire’s views) cannot account for all of human behavior (thus satirizing her). Another solution is to write sentences in which the narrator turns on himself, as when he remarks that Flo

Jarrell’s satire (unlike Gertrude’s) seems designed not only to justify his readers in their individual likings but also to humble them as Flo humbles the narrator. Flo reminds him of “the limits of the human being”; Gertrude “did not know—or rather did not believe—what it was like to be a human being” (189). Reminded that groups, institutional interests, and caricatures cannot entirely predict human behavior, we (and the novel) are recalled to the humanity of the people we are likely to caricature.⁴¹

Pictures from an Institution, then, explores the limits of institutional, social, and professional explanations for human behavior, as well as the challenges “the social” poses to private life and aesthetic experience. Its fears and denials that sociology might really explain human conduct allow it to address the fears about mechanical people that later commentators have described in 1950s movies.⁴² The fortunately imperfect likeness between Bentonians and machines, between persons and the roles into which they fit, takes its own science-fictional turn in Jarrell’s last chapter.⁴³ The narrator has been conversing with John Whittaker, the son of Flo and Jerrold, “who has read science-fiction since he was seven” (271). John asks, apropos of all the adults at Benton,

The specialized critics, institutional poets, and utilitarian educators in Jarrell’s essays all seem depressingly close to machines, their function divided between the public and the professional. Being not quite predictable, not quite programmable, the people of Benton seem to a reader of science fiction not quite androids. It becomes Jarrell’s task, in the last scene of the novel, to drive home that not quite, to demonstrate for good the interior life of some nearly robotic Bentonian. As we might expect, that demonstration comes through a work of art.

The version of aesthetic experience at the end of Pictures thus gives an ethical dimension and an emotional weight to often-caricatured New Critical theories of impersonality. Here, again, Jarrell seems to enact a hypothesis Allen Grossman describes. For Grossman “poetic reading … is a case of the inscription of the value of the person … the willing of the presence of a person.” He adds that “the possibility of the assertion of the presence of the person is established only if the natural author of the poem, the author in history,” can be distinguished from the person in the poem: “No merely natural person is perceptible” (344; italics in original). For Sona Rasmussen’s East Wind, the work as manifestation of a person, to a particular, responsive, viewer or reader, can and should occlude the circumstances, institutions, and “natural persons” through which the work came into being. Sona’s disappearance into her East Wind is just the same as Jarrell’s recognition of personhood in the East Wind and, by extension, in Sona herself. This recognition takes place when and because he looks at the sculpture and not at Sona, nor at her aesthetic theories, nor at Benton itself.

Such contemplation is what Jarrell’s critical essays promote and what “the social” by definition threatens. To acknowledge the (fictive) person manifest in the East Wind, the passage suggests, after knowing Sona Rasmussen, is to contemplate Guillory’s “remainder,” the part of a work not predictable from any theory of making, knowledge of the maker, or knowledge about the potential audience. “Criticism’s dependence on institutions,” Altieri reminds us, “does not entail devotion to analyzing those dependencies” (Canons 44). Jarrell, in Pictures as in his reviews and essays, indeed analyzes institutions—but he does so mostly in order to help readers see past those institutions into the persons imagined in works of art. In doing so Jarrell suggests that readers and critics (even academic critics) can examine art with goals neither public nor professional, goals derived instead from personal and unpredictable reactions to individual works.

John Burt has described recognitions of personhood as they emerge from persuasion: “if we take anyone seriously,” Burt writes, “we recognize in that person the power to become” (14). To learn to see or hear art is to learn to recognize persons in a certain way: it is “to become,” to be changed by them. If the narrator’s discovery of the East Wind is one instance of such change, another is his discovery, thanks to the youthful character, Constance, of twelve-tone music he once dismissed: “so far as the Lyric Suite is concerned, we had been foolish and young and Constance old and clever; and we were grateful to her for that best of gifts, a change in one’s own self” (151). Such changes, which also prove that one has a self to change, are the sort Jarrell’s critical essays seek to produce; “institutions,” “professions,” and “the social” are finally names for what blocks their way.

Jarrell’s last prose forays into social criticism were his most overt and his least thoughtful. While he continued to write about literature, after 1955 he became more concerned about the mass media, which he dubbed the Medium: “The Medium is half life and half art, and competes with both life and art. It spoils its audience for both; spoils both for its audience” (SH 81). This composite Medium attacked in Jarrell’s late essays encompasses celebrities and photo-heavy magazines, television programs of all sorts, popular music, and especially advertising. Though it appears to exempt escapist genre fiction, it certainly includes the popular fiction Jarrell dubbed “Instant Literature: the words are short, easy, instantly recognizable words, the thoughts are easy, familiar, instantly recognizable thoughts” (KA 295). This Medium destroys the individuated tastes, and thus the deeper individuality, real art nourishes and preserves; instead it supposedly makes us less sensitive, more passive, and more alike. “The Medium shows its people what life is, what people are, and its people believe it: expect people to be that, try themselves to be that … and if what you see in Life is different from what you see in life, which of the two are you to believe?” (SH 78).

Jarrell announced his campaign against popular culture in a 1958 speech at the National Book Awards and carried it out in the essays of A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962). In doing so he was far from alone: his stylishly presented theses against “the Medium” continue arguments against “mass culture” and the mass media advanced before the Second World War by (among others) Wordsworth, Arnold, Eliot, Adorno, Lionel Trilling, and Dwight Macdonald. Late-fifties and early-sixties intellectuals found it hard to avoid “the mass culture debate” (as two anthologies named it); Karl Shapiro recalled that “Jarrell’s generation, my generation, inherited the question of Culture—Mass Culture versus True Culture. It is our pons asinorum and we all had to cross it” (RJ 206).⁴⁴

The critiques of advertising, pop music, and television in A Sad Heart rely explicitly on the psychoanalyst and social critic Ernest van den Haag, who saw in the rise of “mass culture” the end of individuality. According to van den Haag, “Producers and consumers [of mass-produced cultural objects] go through the mass production mill to come out homogenized and de-characterized”; in a passage Jarrell liked to quote, “the production of standardized things by persons demands also the production of standardized persons” (MC 513). Those arguments seem to emerge from the rule that governed Jarrell’s earlier prose: advocate whatever might hinder “the social”—whatever might mitigate the taste of “this age in which each is like his sibling” and in which everything must have a use (Third 71). Such a rule stands behind his defenses of taste as such, his defense of privacy, his interest in nineteenth-century education, his devotion to folktales and to the folk culture of the past, even his attraction to the pure and nonconformist escapes provided by science fiction and by sports.

The same confidence in his own emotive responses that energizes Jarrell’s literary criticism can make his vivid essays about mass culture seem, now, insensitive, dated, or shallow. Rather than attacking particular aspects of institutions, mistaken ideas about professions and disciplines, or counterproductive approaches to reading and teaching, these essays attack whole sectors of culture, as if nothing good could ever come from them. Rejecting so many popular cultural forms, Jarrell also gave up a powerful argument he might have used (one Leslie Fiedler did use) in defending poems, novels, and plays from professionalization: if we seek aesthetic experience that cannot become cultural capital, wouldn’t comic books make a good place to look?

Some of the poems linked to Jarrell’s mass-culture critique (notably “Next Day”) entered anthologies. Others, such as “The Wild Birds,” remain nearly unknown. In that poem “our” complicity with advertisements, our comfort in the world, represents our deeper willingness to tolerate what we are given, our inability to imagine change. The poem breaks cleanly into two halves. The first, which examines the comforts the Medium offers, breaks up into easily parsed short lines:

The relentless abstractions of these opening sentences suggest the abstract, general “interests” of the advertisers, who seem to rob us of particularities. The advertisements are always “darkly there” for all of us because they have nothing to do with the (unique) truths that distinguish us from one another: their satisfactions remain the same from place to place, “year after year”—“Regardless of life, regardless of death, / Regardless.”

The rest of the poem introduces the advertisers’ opposites, the “wild birds” of the title, who come to us “from the atmosphere, dream-cleared, dream-darkened, / In which they live their dark lives.” These “others” must represent both genuine art and truth, since they “call death death, life life, / The unendurable what we endure”; but what can they offer that advertisements cannot? These “wild birds” become at last

From one perspective, the wild birds’ true art offers us cognitive and affective freedom, a chance to learn and to be surprised. But this freedom can also look like death, because we have accustomed ourselves to the ads’ promises of caged happiness. The caged birds—as the analogy works itself out—are not advertisers but us, their audience: the choice art offers us—the escape from the cage—may destroy the selves we know as ours. In Pictures and in Jarrell’s essays art brings change, change growth, and both imply pleasure. This poem prompted by the pleasure of advertising confronts another hypothesis: what if the “change” art offers will ruin our lives? The poem draws on Jarrell’s other obsessions—on his interest in Rilkean abstractions, on his late desire to try out wildly varying line lengths, and Freud’s idea of the death wish. At the same time the poem could not exist had Jarrell not written A Sad Heart.

This chapter has examined the concerns—often thoughtful, sometimes merely reflexive—about conformity, about institutional systems and roles, and latterly about the rise of “mass culture” that informed Jarrell’s most characteristic prose and some of his best poems. The same concerns have occupied some psychoanalysts. Christopher Bollas, for example, diagnoses in some contemporary patients a “particular drive to be normal, one that is typified by the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity in favor of a self that is conceived as a material object among other man-made products in the object world” (135). In one of Bollas’s examples, a “female patient wanders from one store to another. … She might find herself in a supermarket for an hour or more, not because she is in particular need of any food or other items but because the material aesthetic of the supermarket, resplendent with its vegetables, cereals, and canned goods, is soothing” (139). The patient moves, we might say, joylessly from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All.

Devised in the early 1980s, Bollas’s category of “normosis” would not have been available to Jarrell. Its surprising congruence with his work shows instead that Jarrell’s cultural and historical interests cannot be fully separated from his own engagements with psychoanalysis. Jarrell made a conscious study of psychoanalysis and of other branches and kinds of psychology; these modes of thought ramify throughout Jarrell’s work and it is to them that chapter 3 will turn.