Randall Jarrell and His Age

A “person’s self,” Christopher Bollas writes, “is the history of many internal relations”: “infant, child, adolescent and adult” (9). These relations link us to our pasts but also to the classes in which others place us—to ideas about youth and adulthood, men and women, parents and children. Richard Flynn writes that Jarrell “fused his theory of child development with a theory of poetic development” (Lost 102). Childhood becomes for Jarrell a symbol of the kinds of value he found in the self: those kinds of value can appear as “play,” as creativity, and as ways of resisting fixed institutions and roles. Jarrell’s once well-known poem “A Girl in a Library” considers the new, and threatening, category of teenagers. Other poems—in particular the underrated long poem “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas”—show how the values Jarrell found in childhood led him to identify his literary projects with adolescence, a self-conscious state between childhood and maturity. Flynn has painted Jarrell as a defender of childhood innocence and of the nuclear family: these views are there, but they are not the whole story. This chapter shows what other values Jarrell found in childhood and in adolescence; the next will show how his imagined families, with their adults and their young people, fail or succeed.

William Empson famously traced to the Romantic period “the doubt as to whether this man or that was ‘grown-up,’ which has ever since occupied so deeply the minds of those interested in their friends” (Seven 21). Jarrell encouraged his readers and his friends to ask that question about him and about his work.¹ We have seen already how Jarrell’s mannerisms—his abstemiousness, his physical enthusiasms, his enthusiastic disregard of social norms—encouraged his acquaintances to consider him childlike; Maurice Sendak, Jarrell’s collaborator on The Bat-Poet and two other children’s books, called the poet he knew in the sixties “not a grown-up in the conventional sense” (quoted in Remembering 114). Detractors called Jarrell’s poems puerile.² David Kalstone, an admirer, saw in the poetry “baffled American innocents who refuse to become adults” and detected in Jarrell’s prose “the child’s privilege to be tactlessly true” (“Critic” 32).

How did these ideas serve Jarrell’s work? Peter Coveney’s 1957 study of literary children explains how, for Wordsworth, Blake, and their heirs, “the child could become the symbol of Imagination and Sensibility, a symbol of Nature set against the forces abroad in society actively de-naturing humanity” (xi–xii). We have already seen the tormented child of “The Elementary Scene,” the timid, reflective child of “Moving,” and the phantasmal boy of “Field and Forest,” who represents an adult’s deepest being. Hints of all three children flit through Rilke’s “Childhood,” which Jarrell translated. Rilke’s child sees himself as helpless and useless: “The time of school drags by with waiting. And dread, with nothing but dreary things. / O loneliness …” (CP 242). Nonetheless the adult whom that child became sees the child as a lost hope, a “Face that shone up from the water, sinking: / O childhood, O images gliding from us / Somewhere. But where? But where?” (CP 243) The children in Jarrell’s own poems incorporate both halves of Rilke’s binary: they are self-conscious, anxious individuals, but they are also figures in the minds of nostalgic adults.³

Carolyn Steedman has explored the rise of the child as cultural symbol, showing how grown-up writers came to “embody … what is lost and gone in the shape and form of a child” (Strange viii). In the kind of account that Steedman labels “Wordsworthian,”

Just such a “child within” looks up at the adult in Rilke’s “Childhood,” and just such a child animates “The Grown-Up” in Rilke’s poem of that name, which Jarrell also translated: the poem’s symbolic veil offers its grown woman “one vague answer: / In thee, thou once a child, in thee” (CP 239).

Jarrell, James Atlas decided, “resented the necessity of becoming socialized,” which is to say of growing up (27). His poems and indeed his life set the concept—both Rilkean and Wordsworthian—of the child as (in Steedman’s phrase) “something inside: an interiority” against the concept of “the social” (Strange 20). Arendt, too, thought “the social” the enemy of children: “The more completely modern society … introduces between the public and the private a social sphere in which the public is made private and vice versa, the harder it makes things for its children” (Between 188). The sociologist Chris Jenks explains how children might threaten “the social” in theory and practice. “Whenever a social world is assembled in theorizing,” she writes, “it is traditionally populated and articulated through ‘normal’ ‘natural’ and ‘rational’ models of human conduct”; such a model “personifies adulthood.” By definition, then, “childhood constitutes a way of conduct that cannot properly be evaluated and routinely incorporated within the grammar of existing social systems” (11–12). Any such “system is fed by the compliant personalities of its members and must, perforce, consume children” (19). The more grown-ups feel that they themselves (or adults in general) have been “socialized,” or “consumed” by a “social system,” the more attractive children’s relative freedom becomes.

Pictures from an Institution illustrates just this manner of thinking with President Robbins’ preschool-aged son, Derek. In contrast to his glad-handing father, Derek cannot talk to adults at all. Instead he growls, which makes him instantly likable:

If the young child Derek represents childhood as an antidote to “the social,” the youthful-seeming Constance—and the narrator’s memory of a younger Constance—evokes immaturity as potential. Constance’s “father had said to me, when she was twelve or thirteen, ‘She doesn’t want to grow up’; and had concluded, after a pause, soberly, ‘But she’ll have to.’ I felt that she didn’t have to—many people don’t; but I was surprised that he knew she didn’t want to” (142). Though she has already finished college, Constance still seems strikingly young: she “was growing up—no, not growing up, she was about to be ready to grow up” (37). Constance seems, moreover, to know that she represents potential and even to represent it visually: “Constance’s face was a question mark that you looked at and did not want to find an answer for” (146).⁵ An answer, of course, would be an adulthood; and an adult, in the world of Jarrell’s novel, is someone who has a social place, a known status in the small society of Benton. By contrast, “Constance was of no importance, and people—usually without meaning to—showed her that they knew this” (146).

Constance resembles other young women in Jarrell’s life and writing. She may have had a real-life model in Jarrell’s younger friend Sara Starr, who attended Sarah Lawrence and whom he regarded as a “niece” (Letters 250, 297).⁶ Christina Stead’s twelve-year-old Louie (an “ugly duckling”) also represents, for Jarrell, both interiority and potential: “Louie is a potentiality still sure that what awaits it in the world is potentiality, not actuality” (Third 26). Reading about her (Jarrell continued), we are reminded of our own youth, and such “memories are deeply humiliating in two ways: they remind the adult that he once was more ignorant and gullible than he is; and they remind him that he once was, potentially, far more than he is” (Third 19).

If young people such as Louie represent both interiority and “potentiality,” they also represent the grim chance that interiority and potentiality might be the same thing—that whatever constitutes our inner lives might simply be used up as we get older, “become socialized,” become less than we could have been. Jarrell’s 1946 review of Walter de la Mare showed deep ambivalence about the “unreality” in de la Mare’s verse. And yet when we read the whole review it is hard not to see in de la Mare’s literary children the poems Jarrell himself would write. De la Mare, Jarrell wrote in the Nation, “grieves … over Man and the Present and what Is, these terrible crippling actualizations of the Child and the Past and what Might Have Been. This world of potentiality that he loves and needs is the world of the child as it seems to the grown-up” (Age 151). A later essay portrays “the country of [John Crowe] Ransom’s poems”; here, too, children stand for potential and for the aesthetic, as against the practical, adult, and actual:

If Jarrell’s children have poetic ancestors, they also have cousins in fifties social criticism, where “play” became a key term. Riesman declared that “play may prove to be the sphere in which there is still some room left for the would-be autonomous man to reclaim his individual character from the demands of his social character” (Lonely 325, 327). Erik Erikson opined that “To the working adult, play … permits a periodical stepping out from those forms of defined limitation which are his social reality” (Childhood 213). For these and other social thinkers, “play” became the opposite at once of other-direction and of alienated labor. The word retained all these meanings for Jarrell, in “The Player Piano” and in many other poems. Content, the painter in “The End of the Rainbow,” envisions two kinds of human activity. One is the child’s play she has left behind, valuable in itself but perhaps restricted to children. The other is the grown-up “work” her art becomes when viewed as a job or a craft. Play (and the presence of children) seem to her to be life, work (and adulthood) to invite Death:

Content resembles the women Jarrell saw in Eleanor Ross Taylor’s poetry, where “everything is work for mortal stakes, and harder because of the memory of play, now that nothing is play” (SH 197). It can be hard to tell, from “The End of the Rainbow,” whether (or when) Content wishes she had become a mother or whether she wishes she were again a child. In either case, her problem is that she feels too completely grown-up, too far from childhood—stranded without “play” in a world of “work.”

If children—in particular children playing—give adults proof of human interiority, grown-ups might confirm their own interiority by showing what they have in common with children. Jarrell likes to show just that about certain authors. “One of the most obvious things about [ordinary] grownups, to a child,” he wrote, “is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.” Christina Stead, by contrast, understands how “any grownup” is an “ordinary monster … to you if you weight thirty or forty pounds and have your eyes two feet from the floor” (Third 31). Robert Graves “has never forgotten the child’s incommensurable joys; nor has he forgotten the child’s and the man’s incommensurable, irreducible agonies” (Third 81).

Jarrell’s own poems also seek similarities between children and adults. In “The Orient Express,” “One looks from the train / Almost as one looked as a child”; in “The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln,” “We are all children to the past” (CP 65, 78). David Walker writes that “Many of Jarrell’s adults are perpetually moving from innocence to experience. … The result, particularly in the late poems, is that the distinction between childhood and adulthood dissolves, both as a dramatic element in the poem and in the reading experience” (64). Readers who have explored Jarrell’s themes of childhood have rarely seen how these affect his style. Jarrell praised Stead’s knowledge of “Children’s speech-ways—their senseless iteration, joyous nonsense, incremental variation, entreaties and insults, family games, rhymes, rituals, proverbs with the force of law, magical mistakes, occasional uncannily penetrating descriptive phrases” (Third 29). Some of those speechways animate “Deutsch Durch Freud,” a digressive scherzo of a poem that describes Jarrell’s childlike nonmastery of German:

The different “incremental variation,” heavy rhyme, and obtrusive repetition in poems such as “Variations” and “Hope” (indebted to Auden and to Mac-Neice) attempt to impart to their grown-up subjects the energy of children’s songs and games. Parodying lines from Pope’s “Essay on Man,” “Hope” (the earlier of two poems by that name) contrasts the frustrations of adult life with the unlimited potential (like that of childhood) symbolized by unopened letters:

Jarrell glossed the poem, in a letter by remarking, “I can never see a mailman without thinking he’s mine, or an envelope without thinking ‘Maybe it’s addressed to me’” (Letters 215). “A Sick Child” has similar hopes for his postman and expresses them in a winsomely limited diction, in lines marked as “childish” by identical rhyme:

Jarrell expressed similar sentiments to Eleanor Ross Taylor: “I’d like nothing better than for some creature from outer space to come and make me its pet!” (RJ 236)⁷ What the child seeks, what imaginative literature (insofar as it recalls childhood) might promise, is a new form of life miraculously continuous with his old one. Imagination seeks to overcome the limits of experience—the limits that keep a child in his house, a sick child in bed, human beings trapped on Earth, or a poet confined to his one adult life.⁸

Jarrell’s most disturbing use of children’s speechways shapes the haunting 1965 poem placed last in the Complete Poems, “What’s the Riddle …”:

The question is perhaps What is life for? or What’s it good for? or the Wordsworthian question, Was it for this? The poem returns to the existential situation of “A Game at Salzburg,” where all feeling and all discourse take the primordial form of a dialogue between the young and the old. Helplessness before death, verbal gamesmanship, and a need to speak to and for someone—to ask and be answered—appear in this brief poem as Jarrell’s last word on what grown-ups and children can share.

One way to demonstrate what adults share with children is simply to write sensitively about childhood. Another might be to incorporate children’s linguistic habits into (adult) verse style. We have just seen how Jarrell did both. A firmer demonstration that adults and children can share experiences might be to write for an audience both of children and of adults, a project U. C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers call “cross-writing.” Knoepflmacher and Myers (whose own examples come from Victorian magazines) explain that in “cross-writing” “a dialogic mix of older and younger [authorial] voices … occurs.… Authors who write for children inevitably create a colloquy between past and present selves [in which] we stress creative cooperation” (vii). Successful cross-writing becomes of itself a proof that adults and young readers can share particular tastes.

Some of Jarrell’s more surprising recommendations among modern authors amount to praise for their cross-writing. The Irish poet James Stephens, Jarrell told readers of the New York Times Book Review, writes “poems in which a child or an angel speaks easily enough for children and hard enough for grown-ups” (KA 193). If adults ought to enjoy work aimed at children, young readers deserve access to grown-up books. Jarrell’s essay “The Schools of Yesteryear” reminds us that nineteenth-century fifth graders read Milton and Goethe (SH 49–52). A 1955 essay decides that “articles written for those dead children who read the [mid-nineteenth-century] Youth’s Companion were usually more thoughtful and demanding, and of more literary merit, than the articles written for the grown-ups who read the [Saturday Evening] Post today” (KA 212). Jarrell wrote more pointedly in a 1957 letter that

Jarrell did not simply praise cross-writing; he practiced it, most notably in the best-known of his four children’s books, The Bat-Poet. In the story the book tells, a young bat begins flying in the daytime, while other bats sleep. He begins making up poems about what he sees and tries to recite them to a suitable audience. The bat-poet encounters other animals in the woods—the predatory owl, the friendly chipmunk, the haughty mockingbird—and makes up poems about them. Finally he makes up a poem about bats; returning to his cave to recite the poem, he forgets it and goes back to sleep:

Jerome Griswold has noticed the book’s “diverse constituencies”: “struggling artists,” “critics,” “literary gossips,” and the sixth graders who once encountered it in a “Junior Great Books” program (52). Jarrell explained in a radio interview that he wrote The Bat-Poet “half for children, half for grown-ups.… And a couple of the poems were pretty much like grown-up poems. Anyway, The New Yorker printed them” (quoted in Remembering 101, 124 and Griswold 61). Even as it appeals to the New Yorker, The Bat-Poet advertises its suitability for reading aloud, with formulae children might expect or demand: “Once upon a time there was a bat” (1). All its images remain both carefully homely, and carefully explicit: “Sometimes one of [the bats] would wake up for a minute and get in a more comfortable position, and then the others would wriggle around in their sleep till they’d got more comfortable too; when they all moved it looked as if a fur wave went over them” (1).

Mary Jarrell explains (in terms other critics have echoed) that “this book ‘half for children and half for grown-ups’ is really for artists: that is, the book tells the rest of the world what it is like for a tiny percentage to want to be part of the whole—not isolated” (Remembering 102). Poets and poems, the plot suggests—like children and adults and humanized bats—want company, and cannot go on creating in isolation: poets with poems want “somebody to say them to” (25). Since “The End of the Line” Jarrell had been wondering how a postmodern poet—and himself in particular—might come closer to “other people.” The Bat-Poet seems to answer that he cannot. Though there is the occasional friendly listener (the chipmunk), to rejoin the wider society is to give up one’s chance to make art.¹⁰ The bat-poet, in fact, faces the choice Alan Williamson finds in many of Jarrell’s poems for adults: isolation or engulfment, articulate loneliness or wordless maternal absorption.¹¹

But this is the “adult” reading of the book. Perry Nodelman has read the book instead as a way to introduce children to the ideas “poem” and “poet”: for Nodelman, the volume demonstrates that poetry “depends on the hard work of finding the right words” rather than on innate inspiration (470). And if The Bat-Poet describes not a grown-up poet but a child venturing out of the home, its point becomes not that poetry is nearly impossible but that one can leave home and safely return: it bears, in fact, the theme—familiar from object-relations psychology—that a life alternating between risk and safety, venture and return, is not only rewarding but natural. “Ordinary experiences of separation and reunion, anger and resolution,” writes Jessica Benjamin, “go with the territory of infancy and childhood; working these experiences through is vastly more productive than never experiencing them at all” (Bonds 212). In this reading, the bat goes back to sleep among his relatives not because his projects have failed but simply because all bats hibernate and because children must go to sleep at night.

To read The Bat-Poet with attention to its cross-writing is thus to see how a not quite allegorical layer of meanings for adults coexists with the story and style of a book for young children. This effect of cross-writing extends to portraits of individual animals. Jarrell’s Mockingbird is a “peremptory, authoritative,” and conceited figure who recites magnificent poems about himself. Most commentators recognize the Mockingbird as a version of Robert Frost, a resemblance Jarrell certainly intended: “On his good days he didn’t pay so much attention to the world, but just sang” (8–9).¹² If he is Frost, he is also any Bloomian “Strong Poet” whose power reduces others to spectators: “When the mockingbird had finished, the bat thought: ‘No, I just can’t say him mine. Still, though—’ He said to the mockingbird: ‘It’s wonderful to get to hear you. I could listen to you forever’” (10). But though the mockingbird represents kinds of poets, he is also a personality type not confined to the world of poetry: children may recognize a gifted, arrogant classmate or sibling, or even a teacher who shows off his own talents rather than helping his students build theirs.

Another exchange introduces young readers to more abstract problems. The book’s owl preys on small mammals such as chipmunks: after the bat recites a poem about him,

This is of course a traditional problem of philosophical aesthetics: why can representations of pain and danger give pleasure?¹³ If one strand of The Bat-Poet remembers how adults such as Frost could be “childish,” another strand reminds adults how many sophisticated “grown-up” topics children might understand. And these conjunctions of meanings carry their own point, or metapoint. The actual similarity Jarrell’s prose demonstrates between the feelings a sixth grader might have about a teacher, and the feelings grown-up poets did have about Frost, suggests the more general affective congruences between children and adults.

We have seen the importance Jarrell assigned to the category called “childhood”; we will see more of it when we consider families. What of the related category called youth? The American historian John Demos writes of an early-twentieth-century “broad-gauge standardization of youthful experience” and of “the appearance of a true ‘youth subculture’” “around the turn of the century” (105–106).¹⁴ By the 1920s, when Jarrell himself entered his teens, “to be an adolescent was to share with others of a similar age not only a developmental position but also a social status … young people began to claim certain things because they were young” (106; italics Demos’s). Lucy Rollin finds in the twenties an “increasing involvement of teens in their own social sphere, where adults were neither invited nor welcome” (45). Jarrell’s lifetime, in other words, saw the evolution of a category of young persons distinct from “child” and “childhood,” like it in some ways and unlike it in others. This category, too, informs much of his work.

The soldiers in Jarrell’s war poems are among his first portrayals of adolescence: their immaturity, as many readers have noticed, contributes to the pathos of the most successful poems. For Paul Fussell, “a notable feature of the Second World War is the youth of most who fought it. The soldiers played not just at being killers but at being grown-ups” (51). One of Jarrell’s first army jobs involved testing and classifying new soldiers: he remarked in a letter to Mackie that “about 1 in 20” of the men he classified was older than twenty-one (Berg Collection). Wounded young soldiers in Jarrell, cry out for, or dream of, their childhood lives and homes; the dying soldier in “The Dream of Waking” even envisions a schoolteacher, cat, and nurse (CP 395). In “Losses,” the American airmen “died like aunts or pets or foreigners. / (When we left high school nothing else had died / For us to figure we had died like)” (CP 145). In “Second Air Force,” a mother who visits an air base “thinks heavily: My son is grown,” though neither her son nor his colleagues nor even their Flying Fortress bombers seem fully grown: “their Fortresses, all tail, / Stand wrong and flimsy on their skinny legs, /And the crews climb toward them clumsily as bears” (CP 177).¹⁵

Such soldiers are at once adults and children, which is to say they fit wholly in neither category: they represent adolescence. “Jarrell’s soldiers,” Flynn writes, “exist in a kind of developmental limbo between childhood and adulthood, and often act childishly in order to evade their adult fear of dying and their adult guilt over being murderers” (Lost 35). Their unease about responsibility, guilt, maturity, identity becomes an unease Jarrell shares; its essentially personal and pathetic character balances the public, political, moral gravity the war poems, because of their subjects, tend to seek. “Eighth Air Force” (as Flynn has seen) is the key poem here. Its speaker seems at first a sort of war reporter, an observer:

This first stanza introduces the first of the poem’s unanswerable questions: is Plautus’ famous Homo homini lupus a truth about “man,” or is it the truth?¹⁶ What is a “man”? Can “man” change over time—from the first to the fourth of Jarrell’s stanzas, from peacetime to wartime, from Roman times to ours? The poem continues:

Forms of “man” occur eight times, six in line endings: the word comes to mean, or suggest, scapegoat, “saviour,” observer, villain, Everyman, “wolf,” Pilate, and Christ. “Eighth Air Force” thus takes perhaps as far as it can go in one poem Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity, where undecidably clashing “opposite meanings … show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind” (Seven 192).¹⁷

The same ambiguities govern Jarrell’s biblical analogies (Matthew 27:19, 24–25). Jarrell’s own note tells us that his allusions “compare such criminals and scapegoats as these with that earlier criminal and scapegoat about whom the Gospels were written” (CP 8). The words in the final stanza could identify their speaker with Pontius Pilate, or with Pilate’s wife, or his audience with the crowd who demands Jesus’s death.¹⁸ The sergeant and his crew are Pilatelike, too, part of a system whose outcome is murder. But they are also Christlike, because they are victims a government chooses to sacrifice. No final judgment can be made of these soldiers, because the “I” who speaks the poem has, in wartime, no stable place or set of standards from which to make the judgment. And this is perhaps what the speaker shares with Pontius Pilate, whom Jarrell called in 1945 “the only regular subscriber to The Nation in all Palestine” (Third 161).¹⁹

Such interpretive cruxes attracted New Critical admiration. For Cleanth Brooks,

These mixed reactions resemble those Jarrell admired in Ernie Pyle: nobody but Pyle “makes you feel so intensely sorry” for the soldiers of the Second World War. “For Pyle, to the end, killing was murder; but he saw the murderers die themselves” (KA 116–117).²⁰ Writing from an army base in Tucson, Jarrell told Amy Breyer, “My two subjects are bombing Hamburg and bombing crews. I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them” (Letters 116). Jarrell wrote to Margaret Marshall that the American pilots “died for us just the sort of atoning death, a death not for their own sins but for ours (after all most of them were kids just out of high schools … too young to vote) that Christ is supposed to have died” (Letters 134). To exculpate them is to lie, to condemn them is wrong, and to conclude simply that “man is a wolf to man” is to wrong the part of “man”—identified with childhood—that prefers not to kill but to play with a puppy.

We know why the airmen observed seem young, but why is Brooks sure the observer is young too? One reason might be that the poem’s unsettling, unanswered questions—“personalizing” questions about guilt and innocence—are questions we associate with adolescence. And what “Eighth Air Force” tries to do, and finds it cannot do, is exactly what later thinkers wanted adolescents to do: to protest against the impersonal, amoral, instrumental nature of any and all social systems by trying to live and explain life in personal terms. Winnicott explained that

As such, the poem may address the young, headstrong Robert Lowell. Aged twenty-six, Lowell—“a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.”—spent parts of 1943–44 in jail for refusing induction (LS/FUD 85). Lowell’s open letter to President Roosevelt denounced the bombing of European cities—the task the Eighth Air Force carried out. Jarrell wrote Lowell in 1945 describing

The same letter expresses Jarrell’s enthusiastic and partly “anthropological” interest in Lowell’s adopted religion. Though “Eighth Air Force” can be (with some strain) read as a Christian poem, it makes more sense if we imagine it mediating between the unsophisticated airmen and the angry, educated Lowell—all of whom seem in different ways too young, too committed to a single perspective, to be able to judge.²¹

Patricia Meyer Spacks opens her important study of adolescence in prose fiction by listing qualities adults ascribe to youth. Among these are “exploration, becoming, growth and pain”; authenticity or genuineness; choice and experiment; emotional extremes; awkwardness, enthusiasm, and volatility; and a focus on the changing self. Neither our era nor any other, Spacks stresses, “invented” adolescence ex nihilo. On the other hand, twentieth-century institutions, at least in the United States, have raised it to a new prominence: “The young person’s absorption with his or her own growth, discovery and pain are reason enough for proclaiming ours the century of the adolescent” (9).

Such proclamations reached new heights in the 1950s. The sociologist Reuel Denney credited Dwight Macdonald with observing “that the United States had been the first to develop the concept of the ‘teenager.’” America’s “subculture of youth,” Denney continued, has produced “agreement that American young people constitute something of a new social type, even while there is disagreement as to what that type is” (Youth 155–156). The sociologist Kaspar Naegele identified adolescence with the personal, adulthood with “the social”: “adults are expected to have a knowledge of the impersonal character of many important human arrangements.… In contrast, youth still stands for spontaneous, free and unselfconscious activities” (57). Surveying two centuries of novels, Spacks draws a similar, if qualified, conclusion: “What we now call ‘adolescent narcissism’ guarantees youthful attention to inner experience; it constitutes one of youth’s challenges to age” (18).

Jarrell’s tireless stress on “inner experience,” on the self and its capacity to change, and his opposition to impersonal institutions, are in Spacks’ terms (as in Naegele’s) characteristically “adolescent” preoccupations. A reader of Spacks (or of Erik Erikson) might say that adult life consists in losing, or recognizing as impossible, expectations acquired early in life about personal fulfillment, or power, or even aesthetic experience. Frost’s Oven Bird, who “says the leaves are old,” is in these terms the voice of adulthood: “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing” (119–120). Some of Jarrell’s poems embody his suspicions that such questions have no good answer: the “adolescent” project of self-definition can have no satisfying end. This is part of the point of the late poem “Aging,” which answers Frost’s query with cascades of Rilkean challenges:

As Jarrell loads down the last lines with consonant-heavy abstractions, the time the lines describe seems to slow down too. Our uncertainty as to the poem’s rhythms—as to its moment-by-moment uses of time—tracks the speaker’s uncertainty about the use he has made of his life. And the adult Jarrell the poem presents considers himself a “Grown One” with a “childish heart”: he seems to himself to contain all ages at once and to belong to none. Like Content in “The End of the Rainbow,” he finds himself unable to become what not only his culture but he himself considers grown-up.²²

Stanley Cavell asks (apropos the film Bringing Up Baby): “If adulthood is the price of sexual happiness, is the price fair? If the grown-ups we see around us represent the future in store for us, why should we ever leave childhood?” (Pursuits 124). These are questions Jarrell’s poems frequently raise: they are questions about liminal or transitional states, states whose inhabitants (like Katharine Hepburn with her leopards) locate themselves between childhood and adulthood, belonging to neither. This is to say they are questions about adolescence—but questions one asks, as it were, from within it: questions that characterize not social critics considering youth but young people describing themselves. Such questions enter some of Jarrell’s lyric poetry and all of his longest poems.

The same questions also explain why some of Jarrell’s closest friends liked to imagine him as an adolescent. The key texts here are Robert Lowell’s sonnets about him.²³ Adolescence in Lowell can mean many different things; often it means male oedipal violence. But Lowell imagined Jarrell as another sort of adolescent—compellingly personal, awkward, and given to ultimate questions. The first of Lowell’s three memorial sonnets runs the sequence of “Aging” in reverse, from Jarrell’s unachieved old age (“Sixty, seventy, eighty: I see you mellow …”) back to Jarrell’s and Lowell’s shared Kenyon years, as “Students waiting for Europe and spring term to end” (Notebook 50). The second sonnet portrays Jarrell as uniquely suspended in time, uniquely attuned to “our first intoxicating disenchantments”:

Lowell’s phrase “Child Randall” makes him a grownup with a “childish heart” but also a young knight or candidate for knighthood, like Childe Harold or Browning’s Childe Roland. Lowell then places him among images of time passing—a Heraclitean river, a series of wheels (like the “sick squirrel’s” wheel in “Well Water”), and a highway whose contours merge river and wheel with the road on which Jarrell died. “Child Randall’s” death seems, in Lowell’s poem, neither a suicide nor an accident but a fate—the metaphysically requisite outcome of a quest not to grow up.

We can find in Jarrell’s work, and in his private life, other characteristics Americans identify with youth. One thinks here of his attraction to fast cars: among the many photographs of Jarrell, those in which he looks happiest usually place him behind the wheel.²⁴ Other parts of Jarrell’s later work, however, attack the importance adolescence assumed within his lifetime. Jarrell complained in his notebooks for Sad Heart:

The notebooks cite Seventeen magazine’s advice that “Boys feel uncomfortable with anyone who is ultra, extra, super, hyper”; Jarrell quips, “Paris says to Helen, ‘You make me feel uncomfortable’” (Berg Collection; underscore in original). Encouraged by Seventeen, these teens substitute peer-group alikeness for families and for private experience.

Here as elsewhere Jarrell found the rise of mass culture inextricable from the rise of the teenager. A Sad Heart at the Supermarket complained that

“Knowledgeable consumers,” who buy Weimaraners instead of reading Goethe, are flat, predictable travesties of adults, and “teenage consumers” are travesties of children. Led by such passages, some critics have seen Jarrell opposed, or else oblivious, to the concerns of “youth.” For Mary Kinzie, Jarrell’s poems depict only “latency” and “maturity,” never adolescence, since in her (somewhat Freudian) framework, adolescence means overt sexuality or violence (70). To Richard Flynn, Content in “The End of the Rainbow” is “a grown-up who has not, in fact, grown up, but is an arrested adolescent” (Lost 93). But Content also resembles her creator. She feels, as many of his protagonists do, “old enough to be invisible” (CP 224). And she has thoughts that might have come from his essays: “Life, though, is not lived in trust? … True, true—but how few live!” (CP 226). What Flynn does see is that Content—never married, and having outlived four pet dogs—has not had a normative life course. She has not found a husband nor started a family, and part of her poem records her regrets about it. “There is no [musical] piece,” she decides, “just tuning”: her life seems to her, as Yeats’s once seemed to him, “a preparation for something that never happens” (70).²⁵

To understand these ideas and tropes of young people, we need to distinguish, as Rollin does, “teenagers” from “youth”: she writes,

Postwar social critics considered the rise of the teenager part of a general trend toward “other-direction.” Riesman had written that the “other-directed” child “never experiences adolescence, moving as he does uninterruptedly with the peer-group.… He does not face, as adolescent, the need to choose between his family’s world and that of his own generation or between his dreams and a world he never made” (Lonely 281). To Riesman as to other commentators, teens seemed to pose a growing threat to youth.

Jarrell’s vivid essays can present just such arguments. In his 1956 “Love and Poetry” what has gone wrong with modern teenagers in love is just what has gone wrong with modern adults:

Such happy teenagers (so ready to make new families) have made the genuine adolescent impossible: “And love, which is nourished on difficulties and prohibitions … how does love thrive on this bland, salt-free, even-caloried diet, the diet of a good invalid?” (KA 252) Complaints like these seem especially close to the once well-known ideas of Edgar Z. Friedenberg, who argued in The Vanishing Adolescent (1959) that

Though invented years before Friedenberg’s book, the Benton College of Pictures has the characteristics Friedenberg would attack. Encouraging group adjustment, Benton hinders the personal, unpredictable change that should be the special province of the young. Riesman, too, feared that contemporary schools, teaching “skills of getting along isolated from why and to what end,” would “produce … a sort of permanent prematurity” (Lonely 396).

That “prematurity” is the state Benton encourages: “the freshmen of Benton thought the President younger than they” (15). A college president who is like a freshman amounts to a parody of both and makes both learning and rebellion hard; the freshmen think they have nothing to learn, and the adults really have nothing to teach them. Because they are insecure in their adult roles, the teachers of Benton never admit that a student “might be right about something and [faculty] wrong” (82). As a result, Jarrell comments acidly, “the teachers of Benton were very grown-up” (86). Flynn decides that “Benton resists whatever threatens to disrupt its complacent, static and perpetual adolescence” (Lost 66–67). It would be more exact to say that in Pictures, as in the cultural criticism, two concepts of adolescence have come into conflict: Benton favors the wrong one.

Jarrell’s positive models of education are not schools or colleges but libraries—or simply young people with books. His unpublished talk for librarians explains: “I rarely feel happier than when I’m in a library—very rarely feel more soothed and calm and secure.… If people were like me, libraries and not religion would be the opium of the people” (Berg Collection). Jarrell identified with Christina Stead’s Louie, who “reads most of the time—reads, even, while taking a shower.… Her life is accompanied, ostinato, by always has her nose stuck in a book” (Third 22). Louie, the young Jarrell of the essay on libraries, and his relatives in poems such as “Children Selecting Books in a Library,” resemble the seventeen-year-old reader of Wordsworth whom we met in chapter 2. In each case the child or youth reading proves that people in general have intrinsic value and inner lives, lives apart from considerations of use.

Reviewing Poetry and the Age, R. W. Flint captured (perhaps without meaning to) the equations Jarrell made between real reading, aesthetic response, and youth: “no modern critic,” Flint wrote, “has a more lively respect for that dying species, the general reader. If you don’t enjoy this poem, [Jarrell] tells us, I know a very intelligent little girl who does” (703). A later essay, “Poets, Critics and Readers,” ends “Read at whim! Read at whim!” (KA 318; italics Jarrell’s) Reading “at whim,” deriving no material or social benefit, Jarrell’s child readers (whose tastes may or may not be ours) become his preeminent examples of interiority. For Jarrell, adults can understand literature if and only if they can imagine how children read. If we cannot, we have become like institutions and have made ourselves into means.²⁶

The worst things about teenagers, “mass culture” and practical education are therefore the mutually reinforcing threats they pose to private reading—to such reading as the library poems describe. Jarrell complained in “The Age of Criticism”:

Riesman, too, denounced schools and school arts programs that functioned as “agencies for the destruction of fantasy,” for “the socialization of taste and interest” (Lonely 62).²⁷ It is this “socialization,” at once utilitarian and other-directed, that Jarrell decried in colleges such as Benton, and in the grade schools later essays described. “The Taste of the Age” remembers meeting eighth-grade girls “who didn’t know who Charlemagne was” but who did know how “to conduct a meeting, to nominate, and to second nominations” and how “to bake a date pudding, to make a dirndl skirt, and from the remnants of the cloth to make a drawstring carryall” (KA 301). The trouble is not that the girls don’t know European history—they may never need to know it—but that their education does not encourage them to learn, or to read, anything they will not need or use.

Chapter 2 showed how Jarrell’s sense of the universal dignity of persons depended on his belief in a potentially universal, if often unused, faculty of taste. Partly as a result, Jarrell found himself deeply dismayed by people who appeared to have no need or desire for art: “These people who can’t read modern poetry because it’s so—this or that or the other—why can’t they read [Marianne Moore’s] “Propriety” or “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing” or “What Are Years?” or “The Steeple-Jack’?” (Age 188). Jarrell’s sense of adults’ personhood depended, as we have also seen, on appeals to ideas about childhood: grown-ups might lose their interior lives, but youth might be expected to retain them. The young reader thus became Jarrell’s preeminent example of human interiority. A young person—a teenager—who desires no art, no “‘private,’ ‘inner’ values” (in Spacks’s phrase), and who seems happy in her social world, thus challenges every value Jarrell imagines (18). What could he find to say to such a person? What if his job required him to teach her?²⁸

Such problems animate “A Girl in a Library” (1951), which Jarrell placed at the front of his 1955 Selected Poems. The poem addresses a student Jarrell finds asleep in a college library; late in the poem the character Tatyana Larina (from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin) joins Jarrell in contemplating the girl. The poem is one of his wittiest; his contemporaries admired it wholeheartedly—Lowell compared its “hesitating satire and sympathy” to Pope’s (RJ 117).²⁹ Their praise is understandable. “A Girl in A Library” holds some of Jarrell’s best aphoristic verse, memorable declarations that help us read the rest of his oeuvre: “The soul has no assignments, neither cooks / Nor referees: it wastes its time” (CP 16). “And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life. / Yet … yet … / to have one’s life add up to yet!” (CP 20). The poem includes allusively clever wordplay, much of it bound up with insults: “This is a waist the spirit breaks its arm on. / The gods themselves, against you, struggle in vain” (CP 15). Early in the poem come some rare admissions about how it feels to teach unreceptive students; later come glittering exchanges between Jarrell and Pushkin’s wise young Tatyana.

Yet “A Girl in a Library” no longer seems a surefire introduction to Jarrell’s poetry. The poem (like the Sad Heart prose) invites readers to stand with Jarrell above and against a hapless nonreader; current readers are as likely as not to refuse the invitation, objecting instead to the poem’s sense of superiority or to its complex but unmistakable sexism.³⁰ Suffused by its time’s ideas about art and youth, “A Girl in a Library” becomes Jarrell’s conflict-laden attempt to deal at once with the emerging idea of the teenager; with the anthropological perspectives explored in Pictures; with the troublesome fact that many people of all ages (and many students) do not read for fun; and (at last) with the sexualized human body.³¹

Sleeping, rather than reading, in a library, the girl has rejected literature and imagination and seems genuinely not to miss either. Rather than reading novels or poems or history, she learns (when awake) “Home Economics and Physical Education,” “Assignments, recipes, the Official Rulebook / Of Basketball” (CP 4, 16). When she dreams, she does so “with calm slow factuality,” imagining graduation. She wears or has worn a “pink strapless formal”; laughs a “laugh of greeting”; talks ignorantly or ungrammatically, in her own “strange speech”; and goes on (or at least speaks of) “blind dates.” Her world of blind dates and formals is, in other words, an early version of the emerging teenage culture—of the “younger, more adolescent” norm of the Sad Heart notebooks and of the rebellion-free adolescence Riesman labeled “a time of gregarious, consumption-oriented activity … sports, music, dancing, dating” (Abundance 118). She fits into her world of peer groups, facts, and practicality just as does the “exceptionally normal” dirndl-making eighth grader, of whom Jarrell sighed: “She was being given an education suitable for the world she was to use it in” (KA 303).

To imagine another kind of education would be to imagine other, fictive worlds—just the ability Jarrell associated with childhood and youth, as incarnated by Pushkin’s impulsive characters. “Adolescent fire,” the Onegin narrator declares, “cannot be secret or deceive”; Tatyana herself as a child preferred “imagination” and “fancies” to “games and sport” (2:19, 2:25–26).³² Entering Jarrell’s poem, Tatyana

Even certain animals seem less satisfied, more rebellious and curious, than she: “Many a beast has gnawn a leg off and got free, / Many a dolphin curved up from Necessity—/ The trap has closed about you, and you sleep” (CP 16).³³ A student of physical education, and an incarnation of the wrong kind of youth, the girl seems happy never to leave her social world nor to escape her physical body.

That body matters more as the poem goes on. The sleeping girl’s self-satisfaction and physicality let Jarrell associate her with animals: “She purrs, or laps, or runs, all in her sleep” (CP 17);

The poem ends up as (among other things) a somewhat contorted attempt on the poet’s own part to explain to himself why he finds the girl attractive despite his professed contempt for the unimaginative life she represents. Does her ignorance—reinterpreted as innocence—become sexually exciting? It is hard to judge what sort of “love” is meant—Jarrell himself seems not to know.

However mitigated by Tatyana Larina, the poem finally appeals to familiar gendered binarisms: man = culture = civilization = authority = experience = knowledge = mind; woman/girl = nature = wilderness = helplessness = innocence = ignorance = body. At the same time it searches for alternatives to these old and troubling pairings. One way to understand the girl—a way the poem considers and rejects—is as pure body, as a kind of animal. A more promising (though still problematic) line of thought comes from anthropology: the girl, and the teens for whom she stands, are really like ancient “peasants.” She has, they have, a milieu with its own values and rituals, even “a language of its own / (Different from the books’; worse than the books’)” (CP 16). And that milieu satisfies her completely.

Jarrell’s ending thus identifies the girl’s contemporary, practical “culture”—the culture of rule books, Home Ec, and blind dates—with culture as anthropologists understand it, as an “array” (in Christopher Herbert’s phrase) “of disparate-seeming elements of social life [which] composes a significant whole.” This whole can then fall under “an overriding principle of authenticity which one invokes to protest against interference by powerful outsiders in other peoples’ established social practices” (5, 2; italics Herbert’s). Such interference is what the poet refuses, and just such “invocations” end the poem:

Suzanne Ferguson explains that the girl (still asleep at the end of the poem) “will enact the timeless human ritual of love and suffering represented by the myths” (Poetry 140). Warming to her as he goes on, Jarrell also consigns her to an operatic and “timeless ritual” the poet can only watch.

The poem finally registers and explores Jarrell’s mixed feelings about the rise of the teenager, about bodies, and about the actual young people he encountered at the Woman’s College of North Carolina. All these effects come into sharper focus the more we follow their allusions. Jarrell’s own note explains that “the Corn King and the Spring Queen went by many names; in the beginning they were the man and woman who, after ruling for a time, were torn to pieces and scattered over the fields in order that the grain might grow” (CP 4). The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1930) is also a historical novel by Naomi Mitchison, which Jarrell had almost certainly read.³⁴ Mitchison’s novel follows Greek contact with the tribal community of Marob, in Scythia: the eponymous protagonists, Erif Der and Tarrik, leave Marob and learn to understand Greek values, among them self-consciousness and individualism. Mitchison’s character Hyperides explains in a letter to a Greek friend:

The girl in the Greensboro library is not so much like Mitchison’s anomalous, willful Spring Queen, Erif Der, as she is like the anonymous, unselfconscious spring queens who came before her. She combines, as they did, youth, sexual power, cultural practices outsiders cannot fathom, and organic belongingness in one community—in this case, perhaps, the community of teenagers, but also the larger community of Americans circa 1950, uninterested in poetry and the past, in Goethe and Pushkin and Wagner, in Europe and libraries. The sleeping girl, and all the young people like her, do not need Pushkin and Goethe (and Jarrell) for the same reason that Marob once needed no Greek: this contemporary teenager will not have the “adolescent” dilemmas of individual, changing selfhood that self-conscious art attempts to solve.

We have seen Jarrell’s resistance to “teen culture” and his insistence on the trapped, transitional states of young soldiers. We have also seen Jarrell’s own voice identified with qualities purportedly adolescent—with the personal and private, with naïveté, with extremes of guilt and of enthusiasm, and with an uneasy space between childhood and maturity. All these qualities come to the fore in Jarrell’s longest poem, “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas” (1948), whose protagonist is a fourteen-year-old girl. “The Night Before The Night Before Christmas” takes place in 1934 (when Jarrell himself turned twenty), over a few hours in the life of its (never named) American girl. She lives in “the Arden Apartments” with her father, aunt, and younger brother; her mother has died, and her brother is ill, perhaps dying (CP 40). The poem consists of her memories, actions, and thoughts as she returns to the family apartment, reads, falls asleep, and dreams. The girl it depicts emerges as the opposite of the girl in the library—she is the most complex, and the most sympathetic, of Jarrell’s poetic alter egos.³⁵

Jarrell’s title tells us to expect a poem organized around notions of “before”—of anticipation, preparation, readiness, and unreadiness. This girl has had to assume the care of her brother, and to contemplate his death, before either could be ready. She stands “before” the rest of her life, and before his death, and stands, too, “before” the belief systems—Marxism, Christianity, the anthropological thinking of folktales—that she explores. Merging sophisticated poetic concerns with typically “girlish” set pieces, the poem is Jarrell’s most intricate demonstration of links among “adult” and “youthful” concerns. At the same time it responds (as Longenbach has suggested) to Jarrell’s New Critical mentors—and to high modernist long poems.

Broken up like dialogue in a novel, Jarrell’s uneven, short lines quote, distort, and incorporate what the girl has read—the Pink and Blue Fairy Books, the New Testament, Marx and Engels, Brecht, Kipling, the Gospels, John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power. Such density of allusion makes only one aspect of the poem’s style. Though much of the poem relies on chains of abstractions, it begins with an image almost filmic; as the girl comes home from school, she

The poem incorporates so many of Jarrell’s techniques—and draws on so many sources—that it is tempting to call it Jarrell’s Waste Land. Its open spaces, hints, and gaps (already one of Jarrell’s signatures) also come to represent “adolescent” potential itself: we do not know, nor does the girl yet know, which if any of the beliefs and fictions she considers can describe her life.

Like Louie, like “A Sick Child,” the girl is one of Jarrell’s cherished young readers—a role several one-line verse-paragraphs highlight: “She reads.” “She is reading a Factory Act, a girl in a room.” Her father moves instead in the realm of “the social”: he lives amid framed mottoes and belongs to a Moose Lodge. Thus the girl reluctantly wraps

The girl’s “regretful indignation” recalls the agenda—and describes the tone—of essays such as “The Obscurity of the Poet” and “The Taste of the Age,” decrying the gap between a “nonreading” majority and an imaginative minority. The father’s liking for slogans and wall placards clinches the analogy: these are what Americans use instead of quoting real poetry.³⁶ This girl cannot share her intellectual concerns with her father. What she does share with him, she realizes, is affect: “Still, he was sorry when my squirrel … / He was sorry as Brother when my squirrel … / When the gifts are wrapped she reads” (CP 43).

Reading, the girl identifies individuals and identifies them as helpless sufferers, in everything she reads: she also maps the scenes she imagines onto the Marxist theory she consumes. (In this she resembles the young Jarrell who wrote “The Patient Leading the Patient.”) Later the girl sees

It would be painful to touch iron in the cold weather the girl’s town is having; it would be more painful to be the child laborer the girl imagines; and it is painful, in another sense, not to do anything for child laborers other than read about them. The girl is more fortunate than those child workers, than the unlucky adult workers of the Thirties, than her sick brother, and even than her dead pet squirrel. Comparing herself to all of them at once, she “thought, as the living /Think of their life, “Oh, it’s not right!” (CP 47)

The girl has been worrying, in other words, about distributive justice and obligation, themes that dominate thirties literature: what can she do (and what can poetry do) to help “the poor”? These problems bleed into another, more immediate concern: what can the girl do for her brother? Alan Williamson has written appreciatively of the poem’s “adolescent sentimentality … which consists in the insistence that everything be special in the sense of precious, included, so that nothing will be … cast out” (Introspection 123). Christina Stead’s Louie charmed Jarrell almost as Jarrell’s fourteen-year-old charms Williamson, and for the same, ethically charged, reasons:

Remembering the ambiguities of “Eighth Air Force,” we can see in this girl’s “reaching-out-to-everything” a sense of moral responsibility that does not know where the limits of its powers and obligations might lie. The girl’s social liminality, her vertiginous position “before” social and sexual maturity, and her premature responsibility (for her brother) mean that she cannot really identify herself with any one age-grade or social role, and this unmoored status functions for her something like a Rawlsian Original Position, prompting her string of reflections on fortune, and guilt, and desert.

The girl’s “reaching-out” to understand her relation to family, state, and class is thus part of a larger (adolescent) project of trying to find out who one is, where one stands among others, and why. We saw in chapter 1 how Jarrell’s characters try and fail to do this with mirrors, whose representation of physical resemblances cannot show us our interiority: only our imaginative relations with others, and with our own pasts, can do this. The fourteen-year-old here wants to know both what she’s really like (interiority) and what she really looks like (an exact physical image), and she concludes that mirrors can show her neither:

Winnicott describes certain patients’ attention to mirrors as searches not for their own but for a mother’s face: the girl’s “adolescent phase of self-examination in the mirror” (Winnicott’s phrase) might in these terms be both a search for her own life as a subject and a search for the motherly caregiver she has had to become (116).

Shrinking into dimeters, those lines emphasize the girl’s frustrated desire to know who she “really” is: why does she feel she cannot? It is not just that mirrors reverse right and left, nor that the girl’s face and body have been changing. Nor is the problem solely (as Flynn implies) that she has had to behave like—hence identified herself with—her dead mother. It is also that she cannot know who she is without help both from fictions and from real other people. Is she a fairytale princess, like the people with “beautiful golden hair” in the Pink and Golden and Blue fairy books in her bedroom? Or are those books “Anachronisms / East of the sun and west of the moon,” which she ought to abandon for class struggle? Various fictional modes compete in her mind, and the poem’s tableaux bring them into tenderly ironic conflict:

The charm, and the oddity, come from the juxtapositions—Strachey against gold string and tissue paper—and from the competing stories about the world these competing details represent. The girl’s uncertainty about how she looks and who she is seems inseparable from her uncertainty about which symbols fit her life.³⁷

The girl and the poem depict her adolescence as a process of self-discovery but also as a progressive discovery of helplessness. As she invokes political and ethical dilemmas much larger than she is, her particular feelings of futility come to look like special cases of general human helplessness—of the helplessness of young people among adults, of everyone before death, of thirties art before capitalism and war, and of literature in general, which for Jarrell may aspire to social efficacy but produces, at best, interpersonal empathy. Of the fictive modes the girl has available, fairy tales are the only ones that promise neither this-worldly nor otherworldly happy endings. The poem thus ends neither with Christ nor with Marx but with the Babes in the Wood:

Here (as in the wartime dream poems) Jarrell grafts modernist stream-of-consciousness syntax to the vocabulary of children’s stories: the effect is of strained or failed reassurance, of words—repeated, incantatory words—that work as inadequate shields against death. If “a dream is the fulfillment of a wish,” part of the wish expressed here (as in “The Black Swan”) is that the girl join her sibling in death. Yuletide “snow” thus indicates (like Joyce’s snow in “The Dead,” like the leaves in the fairy tale) a universal helplessness and mortality. Her brother is dying, and she can no more prevent his death than she can help Victorian laborers, or save the squirrels, or educate “Martha Janitor.”³⁸ She dreams (in a nod to Peter Pan) of flying along with her brother and then of returning to the forest to read, to him, gravestones:

The poem ends here, in tears. The girl’s imagined posthumous whispers echo what she had said, awake, to her brother: “When I was your age I read them all the time.” Aging seems, here, hard to tell from dying: the right reactions to dying—the girl’s reactions—include both sympathy and fantasy, reading and holding hands.³⁹

To be buried in the snow or (like the Babes in the Wood) amid the leaves is one way for the girl to imagine sharing her brother’s fate, but it is also a way for her to imagine not growing up. Flynn seems to condemn her for not wanting to grow up, and even for wearing boys’ pajamas, with which she “reverts to pre-aware, presexual childhood” (Lost 61). There is no reason to think she would be better off without her boys’ pajamas, just as there is no reason to wish she were not reading the Fairy Books or the Factory Acts: for her to be more grown-up, farther from fairy tales or more womanly, would only, in the world of the poem, bring her farther from imaginative consolations and closer to death. It seems better to say that for her, as for Jarrell himself, the sources of imaginative power have to do with the consciousness of the child as it is both recollected and recreated in later life. The mind of Jarrell’s sort of poet mediates uneasily between the childhood we can no longer have and the adulthood we are obliged to assume. This adolescent protagonist of Jarrell’s ars poetica thus learns to use tools from children’s and from adults’ books to interpret, without quite accepting, a world full of tragic “adult” facts: facts like child labor and like the deaths of squirrels, and boys, and mothers.

Refusing compression, masculine “hardness” and “toughness,” and surface sophistication, “The Night Before,” Longenbach writes, “represents [Jarrell’s] most ambitious effort to write against … his teachers[’] … strategically limited reading of modernism” (62). Alternating humanistic sentiment, realistic detail, fairy-tale pathos, and tactical vagueness, the poem also constitutes Jarrell’s implicit answer, not just to the Marxian doctrines of his own youth but to modernist long poems.

Introducing William Carlos Williams’s 1948 Selected, Jarrell compared Williams’s extended sympathies to the narrow ones evinced by Eliot’s Four Quartets; when Williams published the first book of Paterson in 1946, Jarrell, delighted, called it in potentia “the best very long poem that any American has written” (Age 241, 233). Between Eliot and Williams stood Ezra Pound, whose Pisan Cantos circulated in manuscript as early as the fall of 1946.⁴⁰ Jarrell reacted to Pound’s 1948 Bollingen Prize by drafting “The Pound Affair.” In April 1948 Jarrell wrote Williams a chatty, admiring letter, announcing his intention to visit Pound at St. Elizabeth’s and calling Williams’ comments on Jarrell’s work “the most interesting thing anybody’s ever written about my poetry” (Letters 190–191). The same letter included a draft of “The Night Before.”

These circumstances suggest, and the poem confirms, that “The Night Before” emerged not only from long thought about childhood and youth but also from Jarrell’s readings of modern long poems. In considering, and in rejecting, both thirties left politics and Christian doctrine, Jarrell’s first significant long poem amounts to a troubled liberal answer to the ambitious social, philosophical, or theological projects envisioned in Pound and Eliot, more ambiguously in Williams, and in thirties writers from Brecht to the young Jarrell.⁴¹ Like the Cantos and Paterson and Four Quartets, Jarrell’s poem sometimes imagines its protagonist as the ironically powerless incarnation of premodern culture-heroes (such as Odysseus or Sidney Carton). Much of the “plot” of Jarrell’s poem consists of the girl’s attempt to apply the ambitious works she has been reading—the Gospels, Capital—to her particular waking and dreaming life. As she looks out her window,

The girl’s attempts to imagine a basis of contact with the “less fortunate”—from the “Martha Janitor” in her building to the squirrels outside her room—recall Eliot’s efforts at Little Gidding, Williams’ efforts in Paterson, and Pound’s in confinement at Pisa to find a basis of solidarity stronger than history (CP 46). Readers move, with the girl, from grand moral and political frames for making sense of experience to the more intimate contexts of the girl’s family history, from public “values” to interpersonal ones: as James Atlas put it, the poem’s “effect is to localize history” (27).

The poem thus enacts the turn Jarrell’s criticism takes, away from large-scale political questions toward the interpersonal. We have seen that turn in essays such as “The Age of Criticism” and in “The Pound Affair”: another excerpt from the latter reads:

“The Night Before” is Jarrell’s way of giving such feelings their due—of representing them accurately, and of framing them in the less public concerns that seemed to Jarrell more important. At the same time, “The Night Before” enacts the turn Jarrell’s earlier work had suggested, away from modernist isolation and toward “other people.” Jarrell had objected that Eliot’s “I” in Four Quartets never really met or touched anyone else.⁴² “The Night Before” responds even to that: “She feels, in her hand, her brother’s hand. / She is crying” (CP 51). Moving, with relentless intertextuality, from other people’s books and histories to a dream scene where the only speakers are the girl and her brother, “The Night Before” arguably moves from a top-down, deductive ethics based on interpretations of laws, rules, and history to a relational ethics based on immediate sympathy. Sympathetic readers of the Pisan Cantos in 1946–49 found themselves making the same move, from Pound as overambitious historical projector to Pound as private artist: Jarrell in “The Pound Affair” became just such a reader.

The poem’s search for pathos and for the interpersonal (as against modernist ambition and isolation) finally returns us, and it, not just to Jarrell’s use of adolescence but to Jarrell’s Wordsworthianism. Its equivocal parallels between historical, socioeconomic deprivation (as represented by Capital, by “Martha Janitor” and “Martha Locomotive-Engineer”) and inevitable or natural loss (the mother’s death, the brother’s illness) sketch out a position on the nature and purpose of poetry very close to that of a later Wordsworthian, Geoffrey Hartman. On the one hand, Hartman writes, “poetry … cannot confirm or disconfirm specific remedies concerning social and political reorganization” (Fateful 62). On the other hand, “art, beginning with romanticism, reflect[s] a deepening tension between something elegiac … a mode of being that is lost … and culture as a creative and contestatory force, helping to cancel old and form new institutions” (Fateful 190). The genius of Jarrell’s long poem—and of the girl he creates—is to side with the elegiac while giving the institutional ambitions their due.

The girl’s ultimate helplessness to do anything but sympathize thus comes to stand not for the limits of politics but for the limits of poetry. The texts and theories invoked in “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas” offer the girl in the poem not clear rules for public action but models of sympathy and solidarity, analogies and examples for the attention and care poems can provide. Such care, in turn, seems to belong especially to persons whose place in the public world is ambiguous, marginal, or powerless—to persons who cannot be quite be considered children, but who are not full citizens, not adults. The attitudes and ethics recommended by Jarrell’s kind of literature—as against those of high modernist public poems—seem peculiarly the property of adolescence: if adults cannot share them, so much the worse for adults.

Are these attitudes peculiarly proper, not just to young people but to girls? Freud notoriously assigned women and girls to “the interests of the family,” men to “the work of civilization” (21:103). Nancy Chodorow (citing Juliet Mitchell) explains that “the social organization of parenting has meant that it is women who represent the nonsocial … and men who unambiguously represent society” (Mothering 81). The values and ethics I have found in “The Night Before,” and elsewhere in Jarrell, may also recall the relational ethics Carol Gilligan associates with women’s experience, which “recognize[s] for both sexes the importance throughout life of the connection between self and other, the universality of the need for compassion and care” (98). Certainly a girl who is powerless, caring, and crying would be more acceptable to fifties readers, and perhaps to Jarrell himself, than a boy with the same props, books, and feelings. (He seems to have turned the speaker in “The Face” from man to woman for such reasons.) If to be male is (in the words of the song the girl quotes) to be someone who “must be READy to take POWer,” women’s and girls’ space is by contrast suited for a poetic defense of private affections (CP 45).

Femininity, in “The Night Before,” stands for private as against public life and values and represents intersubjective affections (and an ethics, and a poetics, based on them) as against political programs. To see this is to see only one of the many ways in which Jarrell used the concept of gender—a category as important to him as age (though no more so) and one no less tied up with family structure. This chapter has shown how Jarrell used ideas and categories that sort individuals by age; the next will show how his work examines, from the perspectives of children and of grown-ups, gender difference and the workings of families. These children and families in turn produce the past that adults can remember: the child’s past, emerging from the family, creates the foundation for Jarrell’s adult self.