It has become commonplace to claim that mid-century literature owed much to Freud. The social theorist Eli Zaretsky explains that “For many [fifties intellectuals] Freud was at the center of [an] antirationalizing return to the personal” (“Charisma” 347).1 Helen Vendler suggests that “the most inclusive rubric, perhaps” for “the lyric poetry written in America immediately after World War II is ‘Freudian lyric’” (Given 31). Alan Williamson calls Jarrell, rightly, “the most consciously psychoanalytic even of the poets of the ‘confessional’ generation” (“Märchen” 283). Jarrell’s interests in psychoanalysis differed from those of his poetic contemporaries (Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, Schwartz) not just in degree but in kind. These interests can help reveal his poetic powers; the poems, in turn, anticipate recent directions for psychoanalytic thought.
Where other professions and disciplines seemed to him to threaten private life, Jarrell found in psychology, and especially in psychoanalysis, ideas that inform his interpersonal style. Jarrell’s handwritten notes for a talk about his own poems include the directions, “Gestalt psychology for form of art, Freud for content (and form as well)”; his manuscripts include attempts at very technical psychoanalytic criticism (UNC-Greensboro).2 He later told an interviewer, “I would rather be wrong with Freud than right with most other people” (“Interview” 10).3 Nancy Chodorow writes that psychoanalysis shows how selfhood, while always shaped by culture, “is equally shaped and constituted from inner life” (Power 5). This process finds examples and forms in Jarrell’s poems, which rely on concepts of the unconscious; on gestalt theories of perception; on the pre-oedipal dyad of baby and mother; on Freudian eros and thanatos; and especially on dream work. If some of his poems rely on familiar models of pre-oedipal and oedipal sexuality, others anticipate feminist revisions of Freud, focusing on transference and the analytic process to depict their interpersonally needy selves.
Of Jarrell’s many uses of psychoanalysis, the earliest—and the easiest to spot—are his interest in the unconscious and in the death wish. Jarrell’s critical prose likes to insist on unconscious desires, not (as in Freud) as motives to artistic creation but as the chief sources of literary value.4 His first long essay on Auden, published in 1941, asks, “How conscious, rational, controlled is poetry? can poetry afford to be?” Jarrell answered (alluding to Wordsworth), “The sources of poetry—which I, like you, don’t know much about, except that they are delicate and inexplicable, and open or close for no reason we can see—are not merely checked, but dried up, by too rigorous supervision” (Third 148–149). Jarrell’s critiques of the later Auden argue repeatedly that Auden has moved too far from the unconscious roots of his best, and of all the best, poetry.5 The argument grows explicit in unpublished lectures:
Many of the early poems give the reader the impression that they have been produced by Auden’s whole being, are as much unconscious as conscious. … Wherever we look, from the Iliad to [Thomas Hardy’s] “During Wind and Rain,” we can see that the rational intelligence guides and selects, but that it does not produce and impose: we make our poetry, but we make it what we can, not what we wish.
During Jarrell’s student days, he spent a month on a South Carolina island with Hanns Sachs, “Freud’s friend and disciple” (as Jarrell called him), who edited the psychoanalytic journal American Imago; Sachs later became a model for Gottfried Rosenbaum in Pictures (Letters 392). Jarrell’s ideas about the unconscious revise ideas in Sachs’ 1942 book The Creative Unconscious, much of which appeared in psychoanalytic journals during the late thirties. “The Unconscious” for Sachs, as for Freud, “underl[ies] dreams, daydreams, and poetic creation; but it works in a different way with each of them” (13). Sachs elaborates on Freud’s explanation (from “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”) of why “high art” seems to avoid direct wish fulfillment: it conceals traces of unconscious wishes more thoroughly than popular art can. This concealment, for Sachs, proves that the desires behind works of high art must be our deepest and most hidden.
This argument that the best art retains the deepest unconscious traces became in Jarrell’s criticism an argument that the best art has to leave those traces visible: it must address a reader’s own unconscious. Inexplicable, noncognitive responses are the best and highest responses (he sometimes implies). They are, at least, not instrumentalizing responses—they do not serve any visible, external end. The opposite of a psychoanalytic poetics would thus be for Jarrell a rhetoric, a way of consciously using poems to get people to do something, as Auden did in “Spain 1937”:
The inevitable increase in the chances of death sounds like an insurance company’s remark on the change in the climate, not a bit like “You’ve got a good chance of getting killed if you enlist with the Loyalists.” … How much better off Auden would have been if he’d said he-knew-not-quite-what to an audience that couldn’t quite make out what he meant.
(Berg Collection; underscore in original)
Jarrell stuck with this position for as long as he kept reviewing poetry. For all the merit of The Shield of Achilles, he decided in 1955, Auden would never write “quite so well as he was writing at the beginning of the thirties. … When old men, dying in their beds, mumble something unintelligible to the nurse, it is some of those lines that they will be repeating” (KA 230).
Jarrell’s later judgments of other authors also made the detectable presence of the unconscious one, even the, source of value in poetry. “Poems begin in the unconscious,” he declared in 1956 (KA 268). In writing about his own poem “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” Jarrell explains,
I tried to give a fairly good idea of the objective process of writing the poem. You may say, “But isn’t a poem a kind of subjective process, like a dream? Doesn’t it come out of unconscious wishes of yours, childhood memories, parts of your own private emotional life?” It certainly does: part of them I don’t know about and the rest I didn’t write about. … If after reading this essay the reader should say: “You did all that you could to the things, but the things just came,” he would feel about it as I do.
(KA 319)
The general idea that real poetry, or good art, had to draw on “the unconscious” obviously leaves room for many programs, depending on what the unconscious is and what it wants. In poems of the thirties and forties, writing out of the unconscious often meant writing about the death wish, the thanatos that emerged in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and came to prominence in Freud’s later work. When Jarrell’s earliest poems are more than simply derivative (of Auden), it is often because they contain arguments about thanatos. “The Refugees” (1942) sticks closely to current events until its last stanza:
What else are their lives but a journey to the vacant
Satisfaction of death? And the mask
They wear tonight through their waste
Is death’s rehearsal. Is it really extravagant
To read in their faces: What is there that we possessed
That we were unwilling to trade for this?
(CP 370–371)
A never-completed poem about Amy Breyer’s work in pediatric intensive care (entitled in drafts “A 12 Year Old” and “An Intern in Pediatrics”) decides that “Our rejection of the world, “the wish for death,” is “Not really a wish, only the absurd / And touching response of our unhappiness, our helplessness” (Berg Collection.
Sachs had argued that true art must acknowledge “the influence of the death instinct” (238). Freud’s own thanatos, “the assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction,” makes its most famous appearance in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929–30), where it turns outward and becomes aggression (21:119). But the death instincts Jarrell prefers to depict are those in Freud’s essays of the teens and twenties, which sometimes wonder if “the aim of all life is death” (18:38). As several critics have noticed, Jarrell could follow Freud in identifying a wish to die with an “oceanic feeling” and a return to the womb.7 One of the aphorisms in the early “Sayings of the Bloksberg Post” reads, “Some of us want to return to the womb and some of us want to be God; but everybody wants to die” (4). According to “The Difficult Resolution” (1941), all of us
learn to think,
“My wish unsatisfied, my need unknown;
My intent, and the world’s, incommensurable;
And happiness, if there is happiness, inaccessible—
Let me sleep, let me perish!” In the warm darkness
The sleeper whispers at last: “The grave is my mother.”8
(CP 399)
Later notes on Eliot continue the interest in thanatos, asking “Freud? What is it that is the satisfaction of the oldest wish of all, the really archaic (?) sleep, then death; those satisfy it” (Berg Collection).9
In the fifties and sixties, Jarrell’s interest in depicting a putative death wish became an interest in potential absorption into a mother, or into an inescapable, enveloping family. This way of thinking derives from Melanie Klein, for whom, in Joseph Smith’s summary, “the ultimate desires … are the desire for remerger with the mother, on the one hand, and the desire for individuation and separateness, on the other. … Whatever goes in the direction of remerger with the mother goes in the direction of regressive loss of subjecthood; whatever goes in the direction of separateness portends finitude and death” (114). As Alan Williamson has demonstrated, this is how some of Jarrell’s later poems proceed. The virtually suicidal protagonists of poems such as “Sleeping Beauty: Variation on the Prince” and “Windows” wish to enter a pair bond or a family unit so tight that it leaves them neither the need nor the possibility for self-consciousness. Reunion with the ideal mother becomes, in these poems, a source of dread but also a goal.10
Other poems seek new, more compact forms appropriate to thanatos. One such poem is “A Prayer at Morning,” a moving, uncanny lyric whose year of composition remains unknown:
Cold, slow, silent, but returning after so many hours.
The sight of something outside me, the day is breaking.
May salt, this one day, be sharp upon my tongue;
May I sleep, this one night, without waking.
(CP 490)
The poet seems to pray at once for an exciting (“sharp”) life and for permanent relief from it. Its single quatrain holds ideas about the engulfing, comforting womb, with its salt water, and contrasting ideas about adventure and fortitude. Does the last line ask for relief from insomnia or for irreversible unconsciousness? Its strikingly counterpointed wish for tranquility may or may not be a wish for death.
Jarrell’s interest in the death wish found common ground with his interest in child psychology. The much-glossed “A Quilt-Pattern” explores the Oedipal dreams, fears and fantasies of a sick American child: he dreams of a threatening gingerbread house, like the one in Hansel and Gretel, and realizes (though he cannot quite admit it) that the house tastes like his mother.11 Jarrell’s most formally satisfying poem about Freudian versions of children’s dreams is not “A Quilt Pattern,” but “A Hunt in the Black Forest,” published (as “The King’s Hunt”) in 1948 and revised much later for The Lost World.12 “A Hunt in the Black Forest” begins with a frightened boy curled up in bed. He has been reading Grimms’ tales, or else they have been read to him:
After the door shuts and the footsteps die,
He calls out: “Mother?”
The wind roars in the leaves: his cold hands, curled
Within his curled, cold body, his blurred head
Are warmed and tremble; and the red leaves flow
Like cells across the spectral, veined
Whorled darkness of his vision.
(CP 319)
Like The Taming of the Shrew, “A Hunt in the Black Forest” has a prologue but no epilogue—the rest of the poem constitutes the boy’s dream. In the dream a hunter—the king in disguise—finds a forest cottage whose residents are a mute and a dwarf. The mute has had his tongue cut out as punishment for some crime and has been branded with a crown to show it. The king asks for food and “ladles from the pot / Into a wooden bowl” the mute’s “shining stew.” Meanwhile “the mute / Counts spoonfuls on his fingers. Come to ten, / The last finger, he laughs out in joy”; the stew is poisoned or magicked and kills the king quickly and painfully. By this time the mute has gone outdoors in order to help the dwarf see the dead king:
A little voice
Says, “Let me! Let me!” The mute
Puts his arms around the dwarf and raises him.
The pane is clouded with their soft slow breaths,
The mute’s arms tire; but they gaze on and on,
Like children watching something wrong.
Their blurred faces, caught up in one wish,
Are blurred into one face: a child’s set face.
What is impressive about “A Hunt in the Black Forest” (besides the accomplished fluency of its narration) is how thoroughly, comprehensively, even reductively Freudian and oedipal Jarrell has managed to make it. For Sister Bernetta Quinn, “The murder in the dream … is equivalent to the child’s passionate wish to destroy some part of the grown-up world” (RJ 148). To Suzanne Ferguson the poem “represents the child’s desire for revenge on authority” and the dwarf and the mute are the child’s good and bad sides (Poetry 198). If anything both critics understate the oedipal allegory.13 The father appears as a king, the mother as a house and a nourishing pot. The talking dwarf (the child’s conscious mind; his ego; his immature phallus) cannot get into the house (mother), where food (nurture, sex) is kept in a fiery pot, in order to take revenge on the king (father), who feeds from the pot with his ladle. The mute (the child’s unconscious or his id) feels the wound the father has inflicted and enacts a long-sought revenge. (The mark of the crown, and the loss of the tongue, suggest that the mute is a secret heir to the throne; he is in some sense the king’s son.) When the mute can count to ten (when the child grows old enough), his father dies. After the murder of the father, the parts of the child can come together: watching the dead father/king they have the same face (since they are really the same person). Moreover the pair of them look “like children watching something wrong”; the ending suggests Freud’s myth from Totem and Taboo about the origin of culture in a plot by brothers against a father.
“A Hunt” comprehends so many aspects of classical Freudianism that it may seem predictable to contemporary readers (though Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which made popular in America the psychoanalytic interpretation of fairy tales, only appeared eleven years after Jarrell’s death). The poem shows how thoroughly and programmatically Freudian Jarrell could be when he wanted to be: it authorizes us to read divergences and omissions in other psychoanalytic poems as conscious differences from Freudian accounts—if not quarrels with the founder, then attempts to explore other aspects of psychology and psychoanalysis.
We will return to Freud with other poems about dreams—few of them so unambiguous, or so strongly narrative, as “A Hunt.” First, though, it will help to see how Jarrell used the experimental psychology he learned at Vanderbilt. A 1939 letter to Allen Tate explains: “Before I quit [psychology as a discipline] the psychology I was much the most interested in was Gestalt psychology, which is all mixed up with philosophy and very non-positivistic in attitude” (Letters 19). Known today for their research into perception, the gestalt psychologists (notably Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka) also undertook more abstract projects. Jarrell’s adjective “antipositivistic” probably refers to Köhler’s 1938 The Place of Value in a World of Facts. Köhler’s volume sets out to show, in secular, scientific terms, the reality of the self: “the ‘subjective’ part of the phenomenal field, including the emotional life, the kinaesthetic and the visual components of the self, represents under normal conditions a unit which as such has commerce with the ‘objective’ world” (354). Köhler aimed to resolve the supposed conflict between scientific and subjective, or phenomenological, views of human life. “It is a bad habit,” Köhler concluded, “to believe that in the nature of the psychophysical problem there is contained a threat to the characteristics of our mental processes” (410). Whenever—as in “The School of Summer”—Jarrell finds himself showing (as if to scientists) that subjective experience is not nothing, or that “the emotional life” can affect the outside world, he is drawing on what he learned from gestalt psychologists.14
Jarrell also used Köhler’s and Koffka’s work on perception. He remarked in 1953, reviewing Malraux’s The Voices of Silence, “Of the quasi-aesthetic organization of visual perception itself—an organization that is at the root of aesthetic organization—Malraux is ignorant: for him Koffka, Köhler, Gombrich and the rest might never have existed” (KA 187). In his 1942 lecture “Levels and Opposites,” Jarrell had explained:
Figure and ground, all the perceptual forces which fight to produce the strongest organization, the best possible gestalt out of the weaker organizations of the actual stimuli, should remind anyone of the structural forces that operate in poetry. (Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the organization of poetry.)
(700)
The cumulative perception Jarrell describes is explained in the 1935 textbook he recommends. The same textbook shows how gestalt rules apply to aural and temporal art forms, like music (or, by extension, poetry):
A melody is a whole organized in time. … The earlier notes of the melody have an effect upon the later ones, because they have started a process which demands a definite continuation. A melody, a rhythm, a spoken sentence, are not analogous to beads on a string … but they are continuous processes … very soon these events have their own shape, which demands a proper continuation.
(437)
Koffka’s law of “good continuation” in turn generates his “law of reproduction,” by which “a part of a trace tends to establish the whole process that gave rise to the whole trace” (568). (“CDE,” for example, brings to mind the rest of the alphabet, especially “AB” and “FGH.”) These ideas of traces, unities, and completions may have helped Jarrell develop his speechlike style, which so often gives suggestions, fragments, and parts of utterances, leaving us to infer their proper completion. Koffka’s perceptual laws even anticipate Jarrell’s later themes of autobiographical memory, since those laws may apply to our own pasts (which also come to us in perceptual “traces”) as much as they do to a symphony or a drawing.
Gestalt terms and Freudian theories together gave Jarrell a critical vocabulary in which he could discuss at once perception and desire, form and feeling, as he did in the essays on Auden: “In Auden’s work the elements of anxiety, guilt, isolation, sexuality and authority make up a true Gestalt, a connected and meaningful whole” (Third 162). Auden’s pairings of abstract adjective with concrete noun “depend on … the fact that the context of the poem (ground in relation to the expression’s figure) is still concrete” (Third 136). Köhler and Freud join hands in an essay on Robert Graves: “living with” a particular poem by Graves “is like being haunted by a Gestalt diagram, changing from figure to ground, ground to figure, there in the silent darkness, until we get up and turn on the light and look at it, and go back to sleep with it ringing—high, hollow, sinister, yet somehow lyric and living—in our dream-enlarged ears” (Third 85–86). Here as elsewhere Jarrell merges gestalt terms with dreams; together, he suggests, they can explain both the form of a poem and the wishes and motives the poem contains.
“The originality of The Interpretation of Dreams,” John Hollander has written, “lay not so much in its … enabling of criticism to treat poems as if they were as personal … as dreams—but in its discovery that dreams were as powerfully and obsessively organized, and as serious in their mimesis, as poems” (Work 201). Neither Jarrell nor Freud was the first to liken dreams and poems.15 But the dream analogy did far more work, and more kinds of work, for Jarrell than for most other poets, in part because his gestalt psychology let him think about the kind of formal unity dreams could attain, and in part because his other psychological and psychoanalytic interests lent themselves well to oneiric modes.16 Jarrell wrote to Peter Taylor in 1958 that he had “plans for a book showing dreams and poems have same structure, roots, etc” (Collection of Mary Jarrell). Jarrellian characters who must choose between the privacies of sleep and dreaming and the harsh, impersonal world of the army (or even of the consumer) face exactly the choice between isolation and social immersion to which Jarrell’s interpersonal style reacts and from which it seeks to imagine a refuge.17
The contrast between dream and the world we wake to, the wish we construct and the world that refutes the wish, gave many of Jarrell’s poems their emotional centers. The tormented insomniac in the posthumously published “City, City!” is invited to “Still, dream,” since “all these somethings” in the world he wakes to “add to nothing” (CP 475). The Rilkean speaker of another late unpublished poem, “Dreams,” wants to join the beloved he calls “sister” in a mutual dream (CP 477). And the wry, pathetic, “one-armed, one-legged and one-headed” veteran in “Terms,” waiting for his pension checks and killing time in his yard, finds that his dreams express both his wish for a new life and his wish to die. He wakes from an extravagant dream in which he is crucified and resurrected, sees “the toaster / on its rack over the waffle-iron,” and tells himself “‘It’s all a dream … I am a grave dreaming / That it is a living man’” (CP 210–211).
To borrow another distinction from Hollander, Jarrell’s poetry appropriates dreams both as trope and as scheme.18 Sometimes the poems have the sorts of meanings we find in dreams (encapsulating secret wishes, for example, or manifesting the child within the adult). Sometimes the poems try to work structurally and perceptually as dreams do (making abstractions concrete, jumping among scenes, perspectives, and people, or blurring them together).19 And sometimes, as in “Terms,” one poem uses dreams in all these ways. Dream as trope and dream as scheme both drive Jarrell’s most famous poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
(CP 144)
Barrels of printer’s ink have been used on this poem, and thousands of undergraduates have memorized it. Its popularity owes something to the violence that makes it memorable, something to its verbal economy (not usually one of Jarrell’s special strengths), something to the unheimlich tone of its posthumous speaker, and something to its ease of interpretation: it can be quickly decoded to yield many symbols, “meanings,” and “themes.”20 The poem describes the fracture under fire of “a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24,” as Jarrell’s note put it (CP 8). It also describes the familiar concept of birth trauma (elaborated by Freud’s former ally Otto Rank).21 “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” takes literally two further dicta from the Interpretation of Dreams the first, that the dream’s condensation produces “no more than fragments of reproductions (of waking experience)”, the second that “dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition,” a return not only to the child’s state but to the infant’s (54, 587; italics in original).22
The poem’s genuine cruxes—matters of contradictory or unresolvable literal meanings rather than of polyvalent symbols—occur where it invokes oneiric processes. “Dream of life” (as Leven Dawson notes) is a phrase from Shelley’s “Adonais” (CE 238). Is the gunner’s “dream of life” a Shelleyan flight to pantheistic peace? Is it a dream of civilian life? Or does he dream of life in the womb, “loosed” from it to wake and die in the bomber? Are the “nightmare fighters” monsters, persons, or the fighter escorts (“little friends”) that accompany bombers? Do they fight against nightmares, emerge from, or resemble them? The poem becomes at once an attempt to encapsulate some basic wishes dreams can reprise and an attempt to replicate in a very short poem the particular overdetermination and unresolvable ambiguities we take to characterize both dreams and accounts of them.23
If (like a Freudian dream) the poem conflates and equates symbolic fragments of experience, it also conflates and equates disparate ways of regarding and marking time.24 We can imagine minutes of aerial combat and minutes of hosing out afterwards; bad dreams that might last all night; the gestation and birth, or abortion, of a fetus (nine months or less); the gestation, birth, and death of a human being old enough to serve in a war; and even (if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) the (painful or futile) evolution of the human species. The poem’s techniques of condensation and displacement allow it to contain all those time scales within what could be either an elegy or a description of a dream.
Dreams as schemes and as tropes inform many of Jarrell’s war poems, among them his best known, his longest, and his most formally elegant. “A Field Hospital” keeps its three stanzas focused on a single wounded soldier:
He stirs, beginning to awake.
A kind of ache
Of knowing troubles his blind warmth; he moans,
And the high hammering drone
Of the first crossing fighters shakes
His sleep to pieces, rakes
The darkness with its skidding bursts, is done.
All that he has known
Floods in upon him …
(CP 199)
In the two eight-line stanzas that follow, the soldier remembers the dream he has had, receives an injection, and “then, alone, / He neither knows, remembers—but instead / Sleeps, comforted.”25 Describing a dream, the poem seeks formal, aural devices for the ambiguous status of dreamt experience in a half-awake dreamer. One such device is the intricate rhyme scheme: Jarrell’s twenty-four lines use only three, loud, monosyllabic rhymes—-ake, -own, -ead—and restrict themselves further to two per stanza. The result is an unusually intense sense of one soldier’s consciousness and a remarkably blurred, ambiguous view of the real states of his body and of the battlefield. “Blind warmth” sounds like a description of prenatal sleep. But this soldier with a bandage over his eyes may also be literally blind: he cannot know (yet), and so neither can we.
As with the ball-turret gunner, the bloody war constitutes both an unwelcome maturation and a recapitulation of birth trauma. Yet the middle of the poem explores not the womb but a peacetime memory. The guns overhead enter his dream as sounds of American hunters:
“The great drake
Flutters to the icy lake—
The shotguns stammer in my head.
I lie in my own bed,”
He whispers, “dreaming”; and he thinks to wake.
The old mistake.
For dangerous gunshots, the dreamer substitutes the familiar, comforting shots he heard at home; for air-to-ground fire from enemy airplanes, the dreamer substitutes ground-to-air shots that kill only wildfowl. The dream machinery negotiates between wish and fact, the place the dreamer wants to occupy and the sensory inputs around him, until the two collide (at the word “mistake”). The secondary elaboration, recasting the noise of the external world, has failed to keep the dreamer asleep: he will need pharmaceutical help instead.
Jarrell expanded his use of dreams in postwar poems that focused on children’s experience. Mary Kinzie has written that Jarrell’s “main business is dream-work, which translates the experience of the childhood self into the language of the adult” (70). This combining or shuttling into and out of dream life delineates spaces of interiority, since it cannot take place in a social or external world. Such transitions govern “The Black Swan,” one of Jarrell’s most appealing poems about dreams and one of his most shapely. Its semantic and formal ambiguities mimic the operation of the dream work; they also help the poem embody concerns about loneliness and companionship. Here is the whole poem:
When the swans turned my sister into a swan
I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
A swan’s red beak; and the beak would open
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon.
Out on the lake a girl would laugh.
“Sister, here is your porridge, sister,”
I would call; and the reeds would whisper,
“Go to sleep, go to sleep, little swan.”
My legs were all hard and webbed, and the silky
Hairs of my wings sank away like stars
In the ripples that ran in and out of the reeds:
I heard through the lap and hiss of water
Someone’s “Sister … sister,” far away on the shore,
And then as I opened my beak to answer
I heard my harsh laugh go out to the shore
And saw—saw at last, swimming up from the green
Low mounds of the lake—the white stone swans:
The white, named swans … “It is all a dream,”
I whispered, and reached from the down of the pallet
To the lap and hiss of the floor.
And “Sleep, little sister,” the swans all sang
From the moon and stars and frogs of the floor.
But the swan my sister called “Sleep at last, little sister,”
And stroked all night, with a black wing, my wings.
(CP 54)
The poem never leaves the girl’s voice nor the girl’s fantasy: we are even farther inside her consciousness than we were with the soldier of “A Field Hospital.” The girl’s food, house, and work—“porridge,” a “pallet,” “milking”—identify her with the villagers of Northern European fairy tales.26 Attentive readers figure out that the girl’s sister has died, and Jarrell’s one-sentence note confirms that the “sister is buried under the white stones of the green churchyard” (CP 6). The “black swan” envisioned at the lake embodies the girl’s fantasies that she can rejoin her sister, first by becoming a swan herself and then simply by refusing to wake from her dream.27
“The Black Swan” is not quite a fairy tale, but its narrator speaks with the voice of a fairy tale; it sounds almost as if a girl from a European folktale had walked into an analyst’s office to narrate her dream. Yet the wish at the center of this intricate dream is not the programmatically oedipal wish of “A Hunt” nor the infantile merging of other poems. Instead it is a bereaved child’s wish for intimate companionship. The great comfort the dream provides in its various manifestations, stanza by stanza, is not just that of bringing the dead sister back but that of bringing the two sisters into some relation where they can care for each other. The speaker brings the sister/swan her porridge, then becomes a swan herself, and finally accepts comfort from the black-winged swan.
The girl’s dream thus fits a Freudian model of how dreams work without restricting itself to an orthodox reading of what they ultimately mean. A dream is the fulfillment of a wish but disguised and transformed, with abstractions turned into symbols. When the dream threatens to become so implausible as to wake the girl up, the secondary elaboration revises it in the direction of plausibility, bringing the dreamer in from the “green mounds of the lake” to the house where she lies on her pallet. In the second stanza the girl enters the swan’s beak and becomes a swan. But the dream obeys a sort of law of conservation of girls: if the figure of a girl simply vanished, the dream would have to admit that a girl had disappeared, letting death into a dream meant to keep it away. Jarrell’s (that is, the girl’s, the dream work’s) solution is to retain a girl in the poem but to disidentify her with this girl, the “I” of the poem, who is now a swan. Thus the personae in the poem seem to switch places:
Out on the lake a girl would laugh.
“Sister, here is your porridge, sister,”
I would call; and the reeds would whisper,
“Go to sleep, go to sleep, little swan.”
My legs were all hard and webbed …
The girl wishes to join her sister: the wish is granted through a general blurring of people with one another and with swans.
Unusual verbal effects bring those blurs about. The poem comprises many interlaced patterns of repetition (sonic, grammatical, and imagistic), almost none of them perfectly synchronized: a gap in one pattern is filled in smoothly by others. Except for the first and (inevitably) the last, none of the stanza-ends coincides with a sentence-end. Where repetitions in other poems give the effect of conversation and interruption, these are arranged instead for an effect of seamlessness, even perhaps of a rocking lullaby. Such effects grow more audible the more one considers the rhythms: the poem begins in anapestic tetrameter, ends in pentameter, and shuttles smoothly between the two meters throughout. Even more important are repeated single words—whisper, sister, wing, beak, hiss, swan. Their patterns approximate the chain-linking effects of terza rima, as when “swan” and “shore” and “floor” recur in aba patterns.
Other repeated noun phrases weave together lines and stanzas. The reeds “whisper, / ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep’”; “the lap and hiss of water” reappears two stanzas later as “the lap and hiss of the floor.” Swans sing “Sleep, little sister”; two lines later “the swan my sister called ‘Sleep at last, little sister,’ / And stroked all night, with a black wing, my wings.” These beautiful concluding lines also mark the first place in the poem where sister swan and speaker swan actually touch. The process of rereading “The Black Swan” is a process of discovering these and other repetitions, of finding patterns in what sounds at first like smooth improvisation, of taking apart narratives about metamorphosis, of finding secret needs in a naive and sympathetic speaker’s account of irrational action. In other words, reading this poem is like interpreting dreams.
The later dream poem “Field and Forest” brings Jarrell’s thinking about psychoanalysis together with his thought about social roles and professions.28 Jarrell explained in a letter to Sister Bernetta Quinn that the poem is “about the unconscious and conscious in man—I use the fields to stand for the conscious and the forest to stand for the unconscious” (Berg Collection). A reader of Jarrell’s essays might add that the fields are also professional “fields,” “lines” of work that can harden into “ruts”:
When you look down from the airplane you see lines,
Roads, ruts, braided into a net or web—
Where people go, what people do: the ways of life.
Heaven says to the farmer: “What’s your field?”
And he answers: “Farming,” with a field,
Or “Dairy-farming,” with a herd of cows.
(CP 334)
“Dairy-farming” is a “field” in the sense that “Romanticism” or “crystallography” is a field: “Seen from on high / The fields have a terrible monotony.” “Fields” in this sense had also turned up in Pictures, where President Robbins espoused a “Field Theory of Conversation”: “He always found out what your field was … and then talked to you about it” (43).29
What makes us distinct from others who share our “fields” are the differing forms and wishes in each person’s unconscious. The unconscious (since we all have one) thus both guarantees individuality and gives us our sturdiest form of human commonality: in the terms of the allegory,
A farmer is separated from a farmer
By what farmers have in common: forests,
Those dark things—what the fields were to begin with.
At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens.
At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.
The unconscious (forest) harbors destructive impulses but also contains our childhood. The representative “farmer” can ignore or contain it, but cannot obliterate it:
If he could he’d make farm out of all the forest,
But it isn’t worth it: some of it’s marsh, some rocks,
There are things there you couldn’t get rid of
With a bulldozer, even—not with dynamite.
Besides, he likes it. He had a cave there, as a boy;
He hunts there now. It’s a waste of land,
But it would be a waste of time, a waste of money,
To make it into anything but what it is.
The unconscious, on this reading, not only differentiates people from one another and prevents us from becoming our professional roles; it is also the preserve of our past identities and the source of gratuity, impulse, play. And the “waste” here is exactly the “waste” invoked earlier by “A Girl in a Library,” where “The soul has no assignments, neither cooks / Nor referees; it wastes its time” (CP 16).
“The unconscious” for the Jarrell of “Field and Forest” looks in fact very like a soul; it is what remains of the farmer when at night he removes, first his artificial accoutrements—clothes, “false teeth,” “spectacles”—and then the physical and mental features we might otherwise think define him. At night, in bed,
he’s taken out his tongue: he doesn’t talk.
His arms and legs: at least, he doesn’t move them.
They are knotted together, curled up, like a child’s.
And after he has taken off the thoughts
It has taken him his life to learn
He takes off, last of all, the world.
(CP 335)
Jarrell here adapts some sentences of Freud’s; Meredith Skura identifies these same sentences both as central to Freudian dream theory and as a barrier to theories of literature as dream. I quote Skura, who in turn quotes (and translates) Freud:
The contrast between waking and dreaming, Freud says, is the contrast between our mature, civilized selves and our infantile selves. The dreamer, Freud explains, removes his civilized extensions one by one, like a man taking out his false teeth and removing his eyeglasses before he goes to bed, and regresses to his infantile wishes and his infantile forms of expression, visual hallucinations and concrete thinking.30
(136)
Jarrell makes this passage describe not the dream work, exactly, nor the creation of a work of art but the service both dreams and (the right sorts of) art can perform for dreamers and for readers. Stripping off our “civilized extensions,” reverting to the nighttime dark of the forest, dreams and (certain) art works can reveal the human subject as a subject. And if the unconscious is the feature that distinguishes our real selves from our mere social roles, and if “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,” then we can look forward in the rest of “Field and Forest” to a dream that tells us in general (paradoxically) what individuality is.
When you take off everything what’s left? A wish,
A blind wish; and yet the wish isn’t blind,
What the wish wants to see, it sees.
There in the middle of the forest is the cave
And there, curled up inside it, is the fox.
He stands looking at it.
Around him the fields are sleeping: the fields dream.
At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.
At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest.
The boy stands looking at the fox
As if, if he looked long enough—
he looks at it.
Or is it the fox that’s looking at the boy?
The trees can’t tell the two of them apart.
These final lines allegorize a metapsychology, one that animates all of Jarrell’s style. “Who we are,” the self distinct from social roles, (a) concerns hidden desire and its potential fulfillment; (b) emerges from childhood; and (c) seems relational—it involves being able to look at something that looks back at you. Jarrell may be remembering Frost’s “The Most of It,” whose intruding buck stands for the animate unknowable (338). Yet where Frost keeps his buck utterly alien, Jarrell makes the fox almost boylike, the boy almost foxlike: communication is neither insisted on nor ruled out. The fox boy the final lines create is a merger of identities, like the merger in “The Black Swan.” This picture of “what the wish wants to see” is a picture of interchange, mutuality, as what the unconscious wants. It is also a picture of the unconscious as a boy old enough to explore a wood and not (though it might be better to say not only) as a murderous mute or an infant.
In “Field and Forest,” then, adult desires emerge from a creative child who is a source of interest and individuality, not from the predictably oedipal child of “A Hunt” nor from the pre-oedipal (Kleinian) infant of other poems. “Inside” the professional with his instruments is a boy who wants mutuality, discovery, and play: not only is his destructiveness attenuated, but his sexual desire seems not to be there at all. We might say that this boy here is a boy of the latency phase; we might say that Jarrell softens the harsh truths of Freudian doctrine. But we might say instead that the poem, alternating anxiety and ease and combining sociological worries with notions of child development, has found a delicately credible version of childhood, dream life, and the unconscious, a version more open-ended and more attuned to other people than the version most frequent in Freud. The boy in “Field and Forest” has as much to do with Wordsworth as with Freud; he is the child described, within psychology, most fully by object-relations models.
This chapter has shown the special depth and breadth of Jarrell’s interest in psychoanalysis; his special interest in perceptual psychology; and his various uses of dreams. Chapter 1 suggested that Jarrell’s poems fit models of intersubjectivity drawn from object-relations theory. Yet Jarrell did not make frequent reference to object-relations theorists: some began writing only after his death. (Winnicott’s foundational “Transitional Objects” paper only appeared in 1953.) One could maintain, with Alan Williamson, that Jarrell simply “intuited much that object-relations theory” would later grasp or that Jarrell’s early life predisposed him to represent object loss (285).31 But Jarrell’s conscious involvement with psychoanalysis can provide a link to his intersubjective concerns. We can find this link in clinical practice—in the relations between analyst and patient and in the mutable bonds that develop between them. Jarrell could attend to these aspects because—unlike his peers—he considered psychoanalysis both from the position of the patient and from the position of the analyst.
Though many mid-century writers identified poetry with psychoanalysis, few identified personally, as Jarrell did, with psychoanalysts. Mary Jarrell recalls that “psychoanalysts interested Randall. We met about one a year wherever we were and got to know them from Cincinnati to San Diego to Amsterdam. … Many times he wished aloud he could be an analyst” (Remembering 33). “Poets, Critics and Readers” had instructed “real readers” to behave like psychoanalysts:
Freud talks of the “free-floating” or “evenly-hovering” attention with which the analyst must listen to the patient. Concentration, note-taking, listening with a set—a set of pigeonholes—makes it difficult or impossible for the analyst’s unconscious to respond to the patient’s; takes away from the analyst the possibility of learning from the patient what the analyst doesn’t already know; takes away from him all those random guesses or intuitions or inspirations which come out of nowhere—and come, too, out of the truth of the patient’s being. But this is quite as true of critics and the poems that are their patients.32
(SH 96)
Listening like a psychoanalyst—for Jarrell—means treating people humanely; listening to poems is identified with both.33
Jarrell’s identification with analysts helps solve the recurrent problem of how to imagine the listener or putative interlocutor for those of his poems that are (or are like) dramatic monologues. Charlotte Beck distinguishes Jarrell’s persona poems from the Browning monologue: they “are not, like Browning’s, said aloud to a listener”; as “utterances of a mind looking inward,” they instead “resemble Shakespearean soliloquies, wherein the speaker puts into words those unutterable truths he or she would tell no one” (“Personae” 69). Poems such as “Seele im Raum,” “Next Day,” “The Orient Express,” “Hohensalzburg,” and even “The Truth” imagine more precisely what their characters would say if there were some speech situation in which they could tell, were expected to tell—expected, even, to help someone else interpret—what Beck calls their “unutterable truths.”
One such situation is that of psychoanalysis. Associating, remembering, and drawing fragmentary, swift conclusions, Jarrell’s speakers seem to obey what psychoanalysts call the Fundamental Rule, by which analysands must speak all their thoughts. To whom do Jarrell’s lonely people speak? If one answer is to themselves (since the poems work like soliloquies), other answers include to their future selves (who will understand them better), to their past selves (whose hopes they address), and finally to an analyst. Jarrell’s poems imagine listeners who behave like psychoanalysts; these listeners are identified at once with the poet (who creates a character and transcribes his or her speech) and with the reader (who listens and interprets). Psychoanalysis thus becomes one name for “the realism which pursues ‘unreal’ experience” that Hammer finds in “Seele im Raum”: where but in psychoanalysis would we expect to hear someone say, “Shall I make sense or shall I tell the truth? / Choose either—I cannot do both” (“Who” 404; CP 39).
The poems’ imaginations of speaking and listening thus recall analysts’ transcripts and case studies. “The written case-study,” Carolyn Steedman explains, “allows … the dream, the wish or the fantasy of the past to shape current time, and treats them as evidence in their own right”—as we are encouraged to do in Jarrell’s poems, from “90 North” on (Landscape 20–21). The tentativeness of Jarrell’s mature style, with its hesitations and repetitions and deliberately vague passages, also finds analogues in what psychoanalysts do. The analyst, Roy Schafer writes, must “tolerate ambiguity or incomplete closure over extended periods of time … and bear and contain … experiences of helplessness, confusion and aloneness” (7).
Analysands’ complaints can also be famously vague: Freud describes “a woman patient who introduced herself with these words: ‘I have a sort of feeling as though I had injured or wanted to injure some living creature—a child?—no, more like a dog—as though I may have thrown it off a bridge, or something else’” (15:85). Two sorts of vagueness emerge in such a statement. One is a periphrastic approach to some eventually disclosed content. Another is vagueness about the content itself (which indicates its unconscious origins). Jarrell’s mature style appropriates both sorts of vagueness. In “The One Who Was Different,” a man attending a funeral decides,
This is the sort of thing that could happen to anyone
Except—
except—
Just now, behind the not-yet-drawn
Curtain (the curtain that in a moment will disclose
The immediate family sitting there in chairs)
I made out—off-stage looking on-stage,
Black under a white hat from Best’s—
A pair of eyes. Too young to have learned yet
What’s seen and what’s obscene, they look in eagerly
For this secret that the grown-ups have, the secret
That, shared, makes one a grown-up.
They look without sympathy or empathy,
With interest.
Without me.
It is as if in a moment,
In the twinkling of an eye,
I were old enough to have made up my mind
What not to look at, ever …
(CP 317–318)
“What not to look at” (what the hidden child wants to see) is the corpse that waits at the end of every life: the rambling, associating speaker uses the vagueness of analytic speech to testify to his own difficulties in comprehending his own adulthood and death. (Richard Flynn notes that drafts read “except—except Randall” [Lost 125].) These difficulties emerge through the poem’s anxious pauses. Readers are asked to participate in a sort of dialogue, to solve the riddles the speaker’s evasions present.
What goes on in the analytic hour thus resembles, in its manner of proceeding, what we hear in a Jarrell poem, whether or not the poem seems psychoanalytic in content. Meredith Skura has likened the analytic process to literary interpretation in general: a “study of the minute changes which take place during the analytic hour,” she writes, “can not only suggest new meanings for texts but can also suggest how any meaning is created within and between people” (202). Skura offers prescriptions for critics, not for poets. And yet Jarrell’s mature poetics adopt those features of analysis that Skura recommends. In temporally unfolding, pieced together monologues and dialogues, their characters move from problems about defining the self (the “where am I?” of “The Venetian Blind”; the sick child’s “Think of me!”) to problems about reliance on others’ presence (“and yet when it was, I was” from “Seele im Raum”) to problems of “exchange” that are both at once.
A key poem here is the funny, profound “A Game at Salzburg,” in which an existential affirmation of selfhood becomes an affirmation of (always frustrating, never quite discursive) “exchanges.”34 The poem describes a game German-speaking adults play with small children: “a girl of three … says to me, softly: Hier bin’i. / I answer: Da bist du.”35 Later,
the sun comes out, and the sky
Is for an instant the first rain-washed blue
Of becoming: and my look falls
Through falling leaves, through the statues’
Broken, encircling arms
To the lives of the withered grass,
To the drops the sun drinks up like dew.
In anguish, in expectant acceptance,
The world whispers: Hier bin’i.
(CP 68)
The children’s game here constitutes phatic communication, establishing preconditions for later exchange by establishing that an “I” can speak to a “you.” Such phatic communication amounts to a search for acknowledgement, one the breathless daring of the close seems ready to attribute to all life and all art, from the neglected statues of postwar Austria to its “ragged” children and “withered” grass. All these objects, and the people who view them “have in common,” as Kinzie has put it, “their compatible need of the other in order to be” (85). To return from Salzburg to the consulting room, and from this poem to Jarrell’s work in general: if psychoanalysis resembles the reading, and also resembles the writing, of literature, both may be special cases of more general truths about intersubjectivity, intimacy, and selfhood. These general truths are the truths to which Jarrell’s poems attend: that we know and recognize our own interiorities only in imaginatively intimate relations.
Jarrell’s poems can embody those truths because they imagine both patient and analyst, and (therefore) the space between them. Jarrell’s identification with analysts in general (and thus with Freud in particular) controls the strange short poem “The Sphinx’s Riddle to Oedipus.” With its Rilkeanisms and faux antiquity, the poem would be unintelligible as a comment on Sophocles: it has to be, since it is, in fact, a comment on Freud. Lionel Trilling’s summary of the relevant anecdote cannot be improved:
As a student [Freud] stood in the great Aula of the University of Vienna, where were set up the busts of the famous men of the University, and he dreamed of the day when he should be similarly honored. He knew exactly what inscription he wanted on the pedestal, a line from Oedipus Tyrannus, “Who divined the riddle of the Sphinx and was a man most mighty”—the story is told by his biographer that he turned pale, as if he had seen a ghost, when, on his fiftieth birthday, he was presented by his friends and admirers with a medallion on which these very words were inscribed.
(31)
Here is Jarrell’s poem:
Not to have guessed is better: what is, ends,
But among fellows, with reluctance,
Clasped by the Woman-Breasted, Lion-Pawed.
To have clasped in one’s own arms a mother,
To have killed with one’s own hands a father
—Is not this, Lame One, to have been alone?
The seer is doomed for seeing; and to understand
Is to pluck out one’s own eyes with one’s own hands.
But speak: what has a woman’s breasts, a lion’s paws?
You stand at midday in the marketplace
Before your life: to see is to have spoken.
—Yet to see, Blind One, is to be alone.
(CP 270)
Certainly the “Oedipus” here is Freud, “discoverer” of the Oedipus complex, of the death drive, and (in the poem) of the self-alienation that Jarrell’s poems try to diagnose, if not to cure.36 The “fellows” are the male inhabitants of an academic common room, the members of a psychoanalytic institute. And the Sphinx is both an id and a potent, ancient mother figure. Declamatory in tone, yet semantically evasive, the poem seems uneasily stuck between couplets and terza rima, unable to end satisfactorily in either. It is a poem about anxiety, about not being able to stop working, and about the ambiguous “satisfactions” that cap a successful career.
In The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960) “The Sphinx’s Riddle” is placed just before—and thus serves to introduce—a longer, more hopeful consideration of poets and psychoanalysts, “Jerome.” The eponymous protagonist in “Jerome” is a psychoanalyst who sees patients all day. At night he dreams of the saint who shares his name; the next morning he visits the felids at the Washington Zoo. Mary Jarrell regards Jerome as Randall’s representative (Remembering 33). Exploring the fissures between dreaming and waking life, and the professional role of analyst and analysand, “Jerome” also becomes an ars poetica: the psychoanalyst who dreams of the saint considers what the secular poet can do.37
“Jerome” begins by identifying the wishes, instincts, dream creatures the patients present and those the analyst sees in himself: “Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon.”38 Throughout the day the psychoanalyst-saint
Listens, listens. All the long, soft, summer day
Dreams affright his couch, the deep boils like a pot.
As the sun sets, the last patient rises,
Says to him, Father; trembles, turns away.
(CP 271)
After dinner, the analyst-poet-saint-interpreter will be analyzed by his own dream visions:39
The old man boils an egg. When he has eaten
He listens a while. The patients have not stopped.
At midnight, he lies down where his patients lay.
All night the old man whispers to the night.
It listens evenly. The great armored paws
Of its forelegs put together in reflection,
It thinks: Where Ego was, there Id shall be.
The “old man” (Jerome) dreams of telling his own dreams to a nocturnal sphinx-lion-dragon (in drafts, an angel) who behaves like a training analyst and whose thought consists of torqued, reversible Freudian slogans. It makes sense that in this ars poetica the analyst-poet should undergo a dream that is also an analysis; it makes sense also that the dream should be one about transference. But the dragon-lion-father-interpreter also becomes an aspect of Jerome himself, and the dream recognizes this transformation by describing one of Jerome’s imagined selves, the saint, from the viewpoint of another, the companion-lion. As in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, the human protagonist speaks and thinks in pentameters, his supernatural counterpart in longer lines:
The dragon
Listens as the old man says, at dawn: I see
—There is an old man, naked, in a desert, by a cliff.
He has set out his books, his hat, his ink, his shears
Among scorpions, toads, the wild beasts of the desert.
I lie beside him—I am a lion.
At this point in the poem a reader may lose track of who speaks to whom, of which of the speakers and alternate selves “is” Jerome. But this confusion—itself a kind of transference—is (as in “The Black Swan”) part of the point. For Jarrell our relations to others, when they are intimate enough, actually constitute our relations to ourselves.
A dream that has this truth among its themes will of course mix up speaker and listener, self and other, the speaking subject and its internalized “objects.” And this secular truth about the human psyche comes to replace the divine truths dictated to the first, saintly Jerome. This latter-day psychiatrist-Jerome wishes to be divinely inspired (hence influential and unerring) in his interpretive work, as was the Saint Jerome who wrote the Vulgate; he too wants to take dictation from an angel.40 But the angel who arrives refuses to bring any heavenly dicta, leaving Jerome instead to seek earthly help: the psychoanalyst
kneels listening. He holds in his left hand
The stone with which he beats his breast, and holds
In his right hand, the pen with which he puts
Into his book, the words of the angel:
The angel up into whose face he looks.
But the angel does not speak. He looks into the face
Of the night, and the night says—but the night is gone.
He has slept. … At morning, when man’s flesh is young
And man’s soul thankful for it knows not what,
The air is washed and smells of boiling coffee,
And the sun lights it. The old man walks placidly
To the grocer’s; walks on, under leaves, in light,
To a lynx, a leopard—he has come:
The man holds out a lump of liver to the lion,
And the lion licks the man’s hand with his tongue.
(CP 271–272)
The poem sounds (though the worksheets show otherwise) as though Jarrell had set out to write a sestina, then changed his mind. Its formal armature has been, for five six-line stanzas, its repeated words: “listens,” “lion,” “patient,” “night,” “old man.” But the repetitions recede at the end of the night. After the analyst’s dream ends, in the morning, rhyme and assonance become as important as repetition to the poem’s aural patterning. “Young” rhymes with “tongue,” “placidly” half rhymes with “coffee,” and a final pattern of l’s and n’s suggests that the activity of “listening” with which the poem began has diffused through the rest of Jerome’s life. It is as if Jerome has worked through some pattern of frustration and can again enjoy (secular) company. The intimacy between Jerome and his lion, and the work Jerome can do with his patients, together replace the sacred relation the saint may have had to the angel.41
The lion seems to know Jerome, just as the fox of “Field and Forest” knew his boy. The lion also recalls the companion animals in other poems—the housecat in “Moving,” for example, and the MGM lion, Tawny, in “The Lost World,” to whom the young Jarrell says, “You’re my real friend” (CP 94, 288). What do these gentle animals have to do with the analytic process, and why are they usually felids? Cats in Jarrell—whether lions or kittens—return human affections: they lick our hands or consent to be held. At the same time, as Katharine Rogers points out, cats make no “attempt to conform to our standards. … Seeing them as essentially different from ourselves, we … idealize them for the self-assured independence and the freedom from inhibitions that we feel we should restrain in ourselves” (3).
Jarrell folded such sentiments into a 1941 poem that ends by asking a domestic cat: “Men aren’t happy: why are you?” (CP 468). Companion animals, and especially cats, seem to have given Jarrell—in his life as in some of his poems—models or standards for human care. As the psychologist Gail Melson points out, “caring for pets, unlike caring for babies, young children, or other people, is free of the gender-role associations that typecast nurture as … essentially feminine” (55). Companion animals (as Melson also argues) offer both “unthreatening intimacy” and a “distinct subjectivity,” one we cannot mistake for part of ourselves; “psychological separation from one’s pet,” moreover, “is never a prerequisite for maturity” (17, 49). Cats, in particular, seem both to want or need us and to have a psychic life that is not parasitic on ours—they seem neither helpless nor predatory but, rather, adapted for coexistence. In this sense we might even say that psychoanalysis aims to make its patients more like cats! This line of thought, of course, describes a serious overinvestment in cats. Jarrell nourished just such an investment—memorial essays, the letters, and the biography all offer tales of Kitten, “the Persian cat responsible for all the cats in my poems” (Letters 158).42 His poems find ways to link cats to his other concerns. If “Jerome” is the poem that most fully represents the way Jarrell saw his work as an adult poet, it is no wonder the poem ends with a surprisingly gentle lion, a big cat.43
Even without its leopard, lynx, and lion, “Jerome” pursues the analogy between the unfolding of selfhood in a poem and the “analytic process” (as Skura would put it) about as far as Jarrell can make it go. If poetry can be a profession in any good sense, it would have to be a profession whose ideal of itself is like that of psychoanalysis, a profession oriented toward private life. But if this is to say that the analyst’s professional role redeems the idea of poetry as a profession, it should not be said without qualification. The analyst’s happiness comes not in his consulting hours but in his morning without patients. The lion, the lynx could not want the analyst’s professional services: they want the lump of liver and the chance to nuzzle Jerome’s hand. Even the poet as analyst, in other words, has to escape (the poem shows how he escapes) from too narrowly professional, technical versions of his own activity.
“Jerome” (like “The Wild Birds”) grew from drafts of “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.” Jerome’s friendly offer of liver to lion and lynx derives from the Jarrells’ own visits to the National Zoo, where “We had made friends with a lynx that was very like our cat that had died in the spring before” (KA 323). Mary quotes Randall’s worksheets from his essay on “The Woman at the Washington Zoo”:
What was coming to me was the ending of another poem a poem that was a kind of opposite/other side obverse of this poem/ By the time I finished “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” I had the first line of a new poem: Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon. … I said to my wife I’m going to write a poem about St. Jerome now, he’s a psychoanalyst—His lion is at the zoo.
(Jerome 9)
Just as Jerome is both poet and psychoanalyst, the Woman at the Zoo is both a modern reader and an analyst’s patient. Beside the Woman’s plea—“You know what I was, you see what I am: change me! change me!”—we can set (for example) Freud’s conclusion: “At the end of an analytic treatment the transference must itself be cleared away; and if success is then obtained or continues, it rests … on the internal change that has been brought about in the patient” (26:453).44 Such exchanges are at the same time felt as work between people and as searches inside, stripping off inessential roles to reveal some previously invisible core.
Such a search becomes visible in “The Woman” when we divide the poem up into sections: each one, compared to the former, moves further (as it seems to the woman) “inside.” The first section concerns clothes—in contrast to the colorful garments elsewhere, the woman’s own outfit presents only a “dull, null / Navy,” one that attracts “no / Complaints, no comment,” not much of anything (as the break on “no” confirms).45 The woman appeals from external to internal, which means, in the second part of the poem, her body. This “serviceable / Body” seems drab and unsatisfactory too: she has kept it from contacts with others, inside her drab clothes (“no sunlight dyes” it); worse yet, it is sexually inexperienced (“no hand suffuses” it either). Worst of all, it is destined to age and die: “Oh bars of my own body, open, open!”
The third part of the poem must evoke some aspect of the woman that would stand to her body as her body stands to her clothes: a more interior, less contingent, harder to see aspect, something like a “soul.” Like Jerome, and like “Jerome,” she can do so only by reference to the imaginary others, the anthropomorphized animals at the end of the poem, who humanize first one another (“The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn”) and then the woman herself. Even such hallucinated interchange beats being left alone. And this is what makes “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” such an important example both of Jarrell’s interpersonal style (as I have shown in chapter 1) and of his particular debts to analysis. Christopher Bollas writes of many adults’ “search for an object that is identified with the metamorphosis of the self” (15–16).46 The woman’s utterance “Change me!”; characters’ hopes in “The Märchen” “to change, to change!”; and Jarrell’s own declaration, “I’ve always had a passion for changing myself as much as I can” all seem like examples of the transformational quests Bollas describes, quests that are always also searches for other subjects (CP 85; Letters 154). The interaction and “change” the woman seeks, the fantasy she describes, and even the verbal unfolding of that fantasy—sometimes rapid, sometimes hesitant, tracked by repetitions—arrive in the manner of a patient describing a dream.
How do Jarrell’s psychoanalytic poems diverge from those of his contemporaries? The best-known Freudian poems from the era of “Freudian lyric” are those of Jarrell’s close friend Robert Lowell, in particular the poems in Lowell’s Life Studies (1959).47 We can say that the differences between the analytic poetics of Life Studies and the analytic poetics of Jarrell in the fifties and sixties reflect the differences between thinking about undergoing analysis and thinking about how one might conduct it. Lawrence Kramer has considered how Lowell’s “apostrophes set beloved, intimate others in the place of the silent, anonymous Other”—the oedipal mother—“to whom the poetry of Life Studies is really addressed” (84). Kramer describes Lowell’s consistent occupation of the place of the patient, offering up the memories from which Life Studies arose.48 We see in Life Studies Lowell’s interest in the emotional life of the analysand, with its overlays of defenses and shames. And we do not see in Lowell the technical and cognitive interests that distinguish Jarrell’s best uses of psychoanalysis. We do not see in Lowell, in other words, the wishful or hopeful attention to a present interlocutor that characterizes “Seele im Raum.” Nor do we see the self-consciousness about transference and dream work that distinguishes poems as different as “The Dead Wingman,” “Field and Forest,” “The Black Swan,” and “Jerome.” Lowell’s “I” always seems to address his own past; in Jarrell some listener (whether present or merely yearned for) affects how the poem unfolds.
One pair of poems might show these differences. In “Dunbarton” (1956–58) Lowell examines his younger self, his odd behaviors and his hidden (masochistic, identificatory, homoerotic, vaguely oedipal) motives:
I borrowed Grandfather’s cane
carved with the names and altitudes
of Norwegian mountains he had scaled—
more a weapon than a crutch.
I lanced it in the fauve ooze for newts. […]
I saw myself as a young newt,
neurasthenic, scarlet,
and wild in the wild coffee-colored water.
In the mornings I cuddled like a paramour
in my Grandfather’s bed
while he scouted about the chattering greenwood stove.
(LS/FUD 65–66)
Only one person is speaking, and he speaks both to and about a real person who is not there: he is absorbed in the work of memory almost to the exclusion of anything else. Jarrell’s “The End of the Rainbow” (1954), by contrast, presents a landscape painter named Content, raised in New England and living in California, who sometimes blames her Puritan mores for her social and sexual dissatisfaction. She, or Jarrell’s narrator, describes herself as
set upon the path, a detour of the path
Of righteousness; her unaccommodating eyes’
Flat blue, matt blue
Or grey, depending on the point of view—
On whether one looks from here or from New England—
All these go unobserved, are unobservable:
She is old enough to be invisible.
Opening the belled door
She turns once more to her new-framed, new-glassed
Landscape of a tree beside the sea.
It is light-struck.
If you look at a picture the wrong way
You see yourself instead.
—The wrong way?
(CP 222–223)
Here and in the lines that follow we see the woman as she sees herself, as her friend could have seen her, as an analyst might see her, and as she might see one of her paintings.49 We also “see” how and why she feels suppressed, unseen. We see hypotheses, both Jarrell’s and hers, about what or whom to blame (New England “puritanism”? “frigidity”? shyness? ill luck?). Moreover we hear both her attitude (bewildered but sometimes defiant) and Jarrell’s own (regretful and perhaps superior) toward the ways in which her life has worked out.
For Lowell the poem’s center will be “I saw myself”—the finding of forms for the analysand’s own recovery of material about his life. (Grandfather exists always as the young Lowell saw him.) But the accomplishment of lines like Jarrell’s emerges from the ways in which they accommodate movements in and out of a single consciousness. Opening up metrically and grammatically to admit contrasting tones and perspectives on the subject (“Content”) whom they barely contain, Jarrell’s lines are like the glassed-over picture in which a viewer can see someone else or “yourself instead.” To be influenced by the psychoanalytic goals of Jarrell’s poems—as few writers (Frank Bidart, perhaps) have been—is not to invent a poetics appropriate to one’s particular traumas, or life history, but to seek instead a poetics of psychoanalytic process—one appropriate to the step-by-step disclosure of a self with help from an imagined listener.
We can say now that Jarrell has at least two “psychoanalytic” programs for poetry. The first program is one Jarrell shares with the other Freudian poets of his era—with Lowell and Berryman and Delmore Schwartz; it relies on enactments of basic Freudian doctrines, doctrines more important to the literature of the fifties than to poetry or fiction since.50 These doctrines include, for Jarrell, oedipal desire and hostility, repression, the idea that libido explains most if not all of our hidden motives, and the idea that the interesting differences between men and women are biological. Though we now have an easy time calling these axioms sexist, they informed poetry as good as Berryman’s Dream Songs, along with honorable cultural criticism: Trilling even considered Freud’s biologizing tendencies a guarantor of human freedom.51
This program, however, almost demanded that poems acknowledge and portray (heterosexual) male desire, either in its originary sexual form or as aggression. Lowell’s succession of styles has been seen as a series of forms for depicting such aggressions, directed, in the course of his poetry, first at the cosmos and at society, then at the family, then at Lowell himself.52 Lowell found, also, a language appropriate to the energies and frustrations of heterosexual, adult masculinity over decades during which those energies ceased to seem natural or inevitable analogues for poetic power. Similar arguments could be made about Berryman’s poetry of the 1960s. Jarrell, by contrast, almost never depicts aggressive, or consciously sexual, adult men: readers (their tastes formed in part by Lowell) who want psychoanalytic poems to depict libidinal energies usually come away from Jarrell disappointed.53
We might identify this libidinal absence with Jarrell’s frequent occupation of the position of analyst, listening to the speakers he imagines. At least for heterosexual men in Anglo-American cultures, part of being a good analyst—and part of being a sympathetic listener—has involved refusing to acknowledge sexual desires, which would disrupt established channels of confidence and wreck the analytic process.54 Such refusals both aid Jarrell’s identification with such a listener and constitute part (though only part) of what Hammer calls Jarrell’s choice not to “write like a man” (“Who” 403). The sexual feelings, and the anger, of the adult poet, have in this reading the same status as the counter-transference, whose promptings the analyst ought not to obey.
The choices and interests that made it impossible for Jarrell to write well about adult anger and libidinal energy were the choices and interests that created Jarrell’s poetics of speaking and listening and gave him the second of his two psychoanalytic programs. This second program takes up the interpersonal aspects of analysis; the ways in which it is a process of speaking and listening; and the positions of both patient and analyst. Readers may ask whether this program—which emphasizes intersubjective exchange rather than libidinal energy—can be called psychoanalytic at all. An important answer here is that Jarrell’s analytic poetics—in what I have called their second program—anticipate what many practicing analysts, and some Anglo-American feminists, have done with Freud. Writing in 1983, Ethel Person described
a growing consensus that libido theory, taken alone, provides an inadequate explanation of human development. While the basic constructs of psychoanalysis (motivations, the importance of childhood experiences, unconscious mental processes, and so forth) are still viable and are almost universally accepted, some tenets of metapsychology have been challenged. … Sexuality is considered one independent variable among others, although it is still regarded as the leading one by some theorists. Object relations theory attempts to formulate those ways in which the experience of the external world is internalized, not just in the organization of perception and affective relationships, but in the very creation of subjectivity.
(86)
The paradigm shift Person outlines both countered certain kinds of sexism and helped psychoanalytic traditions develop better accounts of how adults come to be who they are. And the contrast Person describes between libidinal and object-relations models is precisely the contrast between what I have called the first and the second psychoanalytic programs in Jarrell. Object-relations models’ gaps and failures—the parts of psychic life they avoid—even resemble Jarrell’s gaps and omissions: as Jane Flax attests, an “emphasis on object-relatedness entails … an obscuring of the non-object related aspects of sexuality and desire” (110). Jarrell’s love poems, with their “dream of a wholly nonsexual tenderness” (as Vendler has put it) leave just these aspects out (Part 112).
These first and second psychoanalytic programs can exist in entire separation: both, moreover, lend themselves well to poems about dreams. The first program dictates “A Hunt in the Black Forest”; the second suffuses “The Black Swan.” The programs can also compete inside a poem. It seems to me that the intricacies of “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” are best heard if we take the male vulture-buzzard as above all a companion, the woman’s problem as above all isolation. But the poem can also be taken in overtly sexual ways: perhaps it depicts a kind of “frigidity” which cries out for extreme, even violent, “cure.” (Someone who read the poem in that way now would be debunking it; someone who read it that way in 1960 might claim to appreciate its sympathy.)
The two programs can also collide, as they do in the late poem “Gleaning.”55 Its speaker remembers “Coming home from Sunday picnics in the canyons,” “when I was a girl in Los Angeles”:
Driving through orange groves, we would stop at fields
Of lima beans, already harvested, and glean.
We children would pick a few lima beans in play,
But the old ones, bending to them, gleaned seriously
Like a picture in my Bible story book.
(CP 343)
Now she gleans figuratively instead, sifting her past for moments like that one. The rapid triple rhythms of the beginning reverberate like isolated memories through the slower succeeding lines.
At the poem’s emotional center is the woman’s admission that something has been lost—and perhaps nothing gained—in the transition from playful to serious “gleaning.” Experience, age, adulthood, have brought her no real rewards: “If my heart is heavy, / It is with the weight of all I’ve held.” She is willing to embarrass herself (as if following the Fundamental Rule) before her reader-auditor by admitting that her memories of “play” still feed her hopeful fantasies: she wants to be like Ruth, and if being like Ruth means finding a new husband, a “lord,” it means, too, hoping for new, exciting experience. In her fantasy,
At noon the lord of the field has spread his skirt
Over me, his handmaid. “What else do you want?”
I ask myself, exasperated at myself.
But inside me something hopeful and insatiable—
A girl, a grown-up, giggling, gray-haired girl—
Gasps: “More, more!”
Thus far she resembles the men and women of other poems we have seen, evoking—with gasps, periphrases, pauses—a “something inside me” to be heard and sought. Like the speaker of “Next Day,” this woman wants to be noticed, to be desired, to find a younger self inside her, and to discover further intimacy. Exclaiming “more! more!” as its rhythms speed up again, “Gleaning” arranges different formal indicators around the same psychic need.
Specifically libidinal wishes then take over the poem. The man whom the gleaning “gray-haired girl” seeks conforms not to biblical types of husbands and redeemers but to American stereotypes about African American male potency:
I can’t help expecting
A last man, black, gleaning,
To come to me, at sunset, in the field.
In the last light we lie there alone:
My hands spill the last things they hold,
The days are crushed beneath my dying body
By the body crushing me. As I bend
To my soup spoon, here at the fireside, I can feel
And not feel the body crushing me, as I go gleaning.
This rough sex, which had seemed to her like “more” life, may really be a kind of “dying,” a wish for a final severance between the self and its weight of “things” and “days”: sex, for her, might be indistinguishable from death. “Gleaning” combines two modes of “confessional” poetry, one focused on shocking (libidinal, aggressive) desire, the other on retrospect and self-discovery. Its uneasy, perhaps unsatisfactory, task is to accommodate both modes of turning psychoanalytic insights into poetic forms.
“Gleaning” raises obvious questions about gender, questions that must wait for chapter 6. If the poem makes a good terminus for a discussion of Jarrell’s two psychoanalytic programs, it also introduces a third program that informs Jarrell’s poems—a program variously indebted to psychoanalysis, to Wordsworth, and to Proust. That program concerns not hidden desires, nor “the unconscious” as such, nor dreams, but the persistence of the self through time: it lets Jarrell’s characters ask why and whether they are the same people they were. Such questions and their formal correlates inform his style as well; they deserve a chapter—the next one—all to themselves.