Every family, John Demos writes, “is (and was) both a system of gender relations and a system of age relations” (12). Chapter 5 looked at children and at adolescents in Jarrell’s poems and prose; this chapter will examine women and men, mothers and fathers, the families they constitute, and how children fare within them. We have seen already how Jarrell, like his culture, associated femininity with private life and with sympathy—and how he associated himself and his work with all three.1 Jarrell’s later poems depict some men and women who long for private connections and sympathies such as those articulated by the girl of “The Night Before.” When those connections work as we would wish, they define intersubjective recognition. When they go wrong, they turn the relations that comprise the family—relations of supposed intimacy—into constricting, obligatory roles.
Jarrell’s concerns about mid-century culture moved him to view the family as a refuge from the impersonal, instrumental “social” world. At the same time his psychoanalytic concerns helped him find a vocabulary for pathologies of motherhood, fatherhood, and the nuclear family. In Richard Flynn’s apt phrase, Jarrell’s “happy families are all invented”: these families make space for the imagination Jarrell ascribed to children and for the intersubjective trust all Jarrell’s characters seek (Lost 99). Jarrell’s works explore the relations among childhood, adolescence, and families; among memory, play, reading, imagination, and intersubjective experience. They draw on, and find forms for, all these concepts in their effort to define and defend the self. That self turns out to require—and Jarrell’s formal devices turn out to describe—at once attention from others, links to the personal past, and an ability to play.
The closer Jarrell gets to households and mothers, the more important gender seems to become. Some of Jarrell’s best poems in the voices of women could almost have been spoken by men. In others, the interesting category is not woman but some smaller class.2 Several poems of the fifties and sixties, however, try to comprehend “woman” as such: in them, as Helen Hagenbuchle put it, “Jarrell is likely to fuse actual women with his idea of Woman” (138). In doing so the poems show what male ideas of Woman are, and (at their best) how those ideas come to be.
Jarrell worked for over a decade on a long and diffuse verse essay called “Woman”—the poem (in all its versions) comprises not so much an argument as an anthology of ideas, short arguments, and quotations concerning women (as such) and femininity. Elizabeth Bishop declared the whole poem “dreadful” when she saw it in Botteghe Oscure in 1952; Jarrell excluded the poem from his next book but published a very heavily revised version in The Lost World (1965) (One Art 242). “Woman” includes essentialist axioms about what “man” and “woman” really are; speculations tracing adult gender differences to early nurture; musings on “your soap operas, your Home Journals,” and domestic consumption; fragments of a poem on marital love; aphorisms about Man, who “searches for his ideal, /The Good Whore who reminds him of his mother”; and even Freud’s declaration that women’s “‘superego’—he goes on without hesitation—/ “Is never so … independent of its emotional / Origins as we require it in a man’” (CP 324–329).3 For Suzanne Ferguson (who admires the poem) “Freud’s indictment is itself a form of praise” (Poetry 203). The 1952 version anticipates more recent readers’ doubts: in it, Jarrell asks, “Have I husbanded uneasily the incarnate / Universal? … Or is all this not at all about /Woman, but about myself?” (383, 386). He goes on to identify men with means and women with ends: women “are what all uses /Are made for,” while man’s “work shall be his life” (389).
The much shorter, later “In Nature There is Neither Right Nor Left Nor Wrong” offers perhaps Jarrell’s least convincing female speaker—she begins the finished poem by declaring, “Men are what they do, women are what they are” (CP 331). Drafts struggle to articulate something more complicated: one worksheet begins,
Men are valued for what they do, women
For what they are; this I am _________, these ________
are money with which I buy
men’s deeds jut into world
they made like pieces jigsaw
puzzle women emerge from, _____ into
The interstices like animals
inhabiting a geometry problem
(Berg Collection)
These lines, and the blanks within them, suggest that women enter the representational system men construct (a system coextensive with society) and find themselves uncomfortable within it. That system also compels women to behave like mothers: as the finished poem has it,
We women sell ourselves for sleep, for flesh,
To those wide-awake, successful spirits, men—
Who, lying each midnight with the sinister
Beings, their dark companions, women,
Suck childhood, beasthood, from a mother’s breasts.
(CP 331)
Jarrell’s grown woman opines that women are more practical than men—that men have forced them to be. Men, however, see women as “dark,” intuitive, bodily, maternal; under the rule of such archetypes, John Brenkman writes, “The real-life mother is misrecognized … and the reality she has had for the son is transformed into images of a dreaded oceanic oneness” (183).
Why do men and women, children and mothers, conflate “woman” with “mother,” mothers with motherhood, mothers with their families? Vendler finds in Jarrell repeated versions of “the child who was never mothered enough, the mother who wants to keep her children forever” (Part 112). Presenting such sentiments, Jarrell’s poems also examine them. His clearest prose on the subject introduces Eleanor Ross Taylor’s A Wilderness of Ladies, a book of poems Jarrell helped Taylor assemble.4 “No poems can tell you better what it is like to be a woman,” Jarrell wrote (with the odd implication that he knew); “none come more naturally out of a woman’s ordinary existence” (SH 205). Taylor’s poems, like Jarrell’s own Washington Zoo, show how “The world is a cage for women, and inside it the woman is her own cage”:
First there were her own family’s demands on the girl, and now there are the second family’s demands on the woman; and worst of all, hardest of all, are the woman’s demands on herself—so that sometimes she longs to be able to return to the demands of the first family, when the immediate world was at least childish and natural, and one still had child allies in the war against the grown-ups. Now the family inside—the conscience, the superego—is a separate, condemning self from which there is no escape except in suicide or fantasies of suicide.… And which, really, is the I? The demanding conscience, or the part that tries to meet—tries, even to escape from—its demands?
(SH 197–198)
Adrienne Rich presented her prose work Of Woman Born as an attempt to rescue real-life mothers from just such a “family inside”: “in the eyes of society,” Rich objected, “once having been mothers, what are we if not always mothers?” (Born 37). Motherhood under patriarchy, Rich argues, instructs the mother to sculpt her personality into an instrument for the use of the child. If this creates resistance in women with other ambitions, it also creates mothers and former mothers who feel they can be nothing else.5
This cultural problem drives Jarrell’s poem “The Lost Children.” The mother who speaks that poem feels that, with her children dead or grown, nobody can really see who she “is”; she feels adrift or lost with respect to the course of her own life. As she recapitulates Jarrell’s other poems on aging, her experience raises the questions Rich would later pursue: how and why did motherhood become a permanent identity, and what can such a concept do to mothers? Of this mother’s “Two little girls, one fair, one dark,” one has grown up and moved away; one is long dead. In the mother’s dream, however, both girls
are running hand in hand
Through a sunny house. The two are dressed
In red and white gingham, with puffed sleeves and sashes.
They run away from me … But I am happy;
When I wake I feel no sadness, only delight.
I’ve seen them again, and I am comforted
That, somewhere, they still are.
(CP 301)
“The dream of the sunny house,” Mary Jarrell wrote, “was a dream I told him, and those were my photographs of my daughters” (Remembering 123).6 Evolving from Mary’s account, “The Lost Children” became one of Jarrell’s talkiest poems but also one of his most intricately crafted, dependent throughout on repeated phrases and words.
These repetitions offer several ways to read the mother’s troubles. The poem could be viewed through Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” since its mother has failed to give up “the work of mourning in which the ego is absorbed” (14:245). Yet her nostalgic grief focuses less on the “dark one’s” death than on the way that both girls grew up and away: “the fair one … Is lost just as the dark one, who is dead, is lost.” The “objects” (in the psychoanalytic sense) she grieves are not her daughters, exactly, but her daughters-as-children. She thus speaks as if trying to retrieve them, and to understand how they—and she—got “lost.” A child reaching her teens (the mother recalls)
argues with you or ignores you
Or is kind to you. She who begged to follow you
Anywhere, just so long as it was you,
Finds follow the leader no more fun.
She makes few demands; you are grateful for the few.
(CP 301–302)
Repetitions portray the woman’s reverie through interlocking sets of ordinary words, often at line breaks: you … to you … to follow you … you … follow the leader … few … you … few. The poem seems, like the aging mother’s memories, to double back and repeat itself, as if searching for the vanished girls. Verbs evoke the same concentration on memory: except in the poem’s last line, this mother is the subject of action verbs (braided, was driving) only when those verbs take the past tense. In the present, and in the recent past (“the other day”), all she can do is contemplate and perceive—know, look, stare, realize, believe:
The girl from next door, the borrowed child,
Said to me the other day, “You like children so much,
Don’t you want to have some of your own?”
I couldn’t believe that she could say it.
I thought: “Surely you can look at me and see them.”
(CP 303)
This aging mother seems really to have expected her motherhood and her “lost” children to be visible in her person. (Rich might say that to look at a mother and see, always, her children is exactly the expectation the institution of motherhood creates.) In the same way, the mother expected her “lost” fair-haired child to be visible in her grown daughter: “I stare at her and try to see some sign / Of the child she once was. I can’t believe there isn’t any” (CP 302). The girl from next door should have seen the children in the mother, she feels, just as the mother should have seen the child in the adult. The family this nameless mother began has recreated her in its image—shouldn’t she look like what she is?
In Jarrell’s poems, however, nobody looks like the person she feels she is. The borrowed girl’s gaze, and the daughter’s old photograph, work like more of Jarrell’s unsatisfactory mirrors: people in Jarrell have to be understood, properly recognized, through shared speech—intersubjectively or not at all. And (as in “Seele im Raum”) this speaker feels she can be recognized only in the alternate world she remembers, a world of imaginary companions—the lost children of the title. She can be with them—and hence feel like herself—only in the past her dream life recaptures.:
When I see them in my dreams I feel such joy.
If I could dream of them every night!
When I think of my dream of the little girls
It’s as if we were playing hide-and-seek.
The dark one
Looks at me longingly, and disappears;
The fair one stays in sight, just out of reach
No matter where I reach. I am tired
As a mother who’s played all day, some rainy day.
I don’t want to play it any more, I don’t want to,
But the child keeps on playing, so I play.
(CP 303)
The mother, “reaching” back to her dream, says she is as tired as a mother, as if to remind us that she only plays at remaining one. In doing so she is playing (as children “play house”) at a maternal role—a role in whose absence she feels she has disappeared. “Playing,” and playing at being a mother, comprise an alternative not to work but to nonbeing. As in “The Player Piano,” when the “play” ends, the poem does too.
“The Lost Children” and “In Nature” explored the conflation of woman with mother. Other poems and stories see mothers, fathers, and children from other points of view. Jarrell reminded readers of The Man Who Loved Children that even a “single separate” “man on a park bench”
is separated off, not separate—is a later, singular stage of an earlier plural being. All the tongues of men were baby talk to begin with: go back far enough and which of us knew where he ended and Mother and Father and Brother and Sister began? The singular subject in its objective universe has evolved from that original composite entity—half subjective, half objective, having its own ways and laws and language, its own life and its own death—the family.
(Third 3)
Families give Jarrell both psychoanalytic starting points for his thought about childhood and gender and alternatives to the public, “social” world.
Social researchers have found that Americans often attribute to families the characteristics of privacy and care that Jarrell sought in art. The sociologist Chaya Piotrkowski (citing A. Skolnick) asserts that by the 1970s “the family [had] become idealized as the realm of affectivity, intimacy and significant ascribed relations, in contradistinction to the public work world, which is impersonal, competitive, and characterized by the instrumental rather than the expressive” (6). For John Brenkman, Freud’s oedipal “household provided a scene of individual male authority distinct from, yet complicit with, the political scene of potential or supposed male equality” (234). Rather than buttressing a public space of male equality, Jarrell’s private enclosures—in households, in scenes of reading within those households, even in the stacks of libraries—compete with that public world, providing at their best an alternative space in which intersubjective relations, and “play” in all its meanings, become possible. In Jarrell’s time and place, such a space seemed by default or assumption feminine.
Feminine household space also seemed (at that time and place) to hold its own dangers. If “The Lost Children” represents Jarrell’s closest approach to later analyses of motherhood, “Windows” links his anxieties about the family to the mass-culture critique of his own time. In this and a few other poems from the 1950s, the nuclear family leaves no room for change or speech: either one stands outside it, painfully lonely, or one enters it and thereby loses individuality and consciousness, falling asleep in a fantasy of incestuous union with a mother or womb. (Jessica Benjamin describes this binary choice as a failure of intersubjective play; Williamson and Kinzie find something like it elsewhere in Jarrell.) One of the achievements of “Windows” is its way of making a complex, Rilkean syntax sound natural and spoken. Another achievement lies in its exploration of maternal and familial fantasies, linking them to the particulars of mid-century geography and technology.7
Like “The Lonely Man,” “Windows” was written in Princeton in 1951–52. Like that poem, “Windows” begins with a lonely adult on a suburban road, surveying the outdoors, then moving inside, into homes:
Quarried from snow, the dark walks lead to doors
That are dark and closed. The white- and high-roofed houses
Float in the moonlight of the shining sky
As if they slept, the bedclothes pulled around them.
But in some the lights still burn. The lights of others’ houses.
Those who live there move seldom, and are silent.
Their movements are the movements of a woman darning,
A man nodding into the pages of the paper,
And are portions of a rite—have kept a meaning—
That I, that they know nothing of.
(CP 232)
In many famous springtime poems, the speaker laments his inaction amid nature’s forms of growth. Coleridge complained that in a late-February “dream of Spring,” “I the while, the sole unbusy thing, / Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing” (Poetical 1:447). Jarrell torques that tradition by presenting an active speaker uneasy in the presence of tranquil inaction. Comforting, unreachable, and self-contained, the families he sees recall families on television:
As dead actors, on a rainy afternoon,
Move in a darkened living-room, for children
Watching the world that was before they were,
The windowed ones within their windowy world
Move past me without doubt and for no reason.
These actors, surely have known nothing of today,
That time of troubles and of me. Of troubles.
Jarrell’s lonely speaker wants to join the families he watches. But what he imagines goes on in them is not intimacy (they don’t speak) but assimilation, unconsciousness:
If only I were they!
Could act out, in longing, the impossibility
That haunts me like happiness!
Of so many windows, one is always open.
Some morning they will come downstairs and find me.
They will start to speak, and then smile speechlessly,
Shifting the plates, and set another place
At a table shining by a silent fire.
When I have eaten they will say, “You have not slept.”
And from the sofa, mounded in my quilt,
My face on their pillow, that is always cool,
I will look up speechlessly into a—
It blurs, and there is drawn across my face
As my eyes close, a hand’s slow fire-warmed flesh.
It moves so slowly that it does not move.
(CP 232–333)
And that is the end of the poem. The lonely man wants to be close to someone else, close enough to feel intimate with them, but cannot imagine himself entering any such relation without joining a family whose attractions return us to infancy and put us to sleep.
Once we enter the house, the poem leaves behind all its abstract nouns and all its reflective verbs: it consists, like a child’s story, of people, actions, and things. The poem moves, as the speaker finds his “happiness,” from speech to less speech, from reflection to naïve description to no words at all: it moves from ordinary loneliness to what Melanie Klein calls (in “On the Sense of Loneliness”) “an unsatisfied longing for an understanding without words—ultimately for the earliest relation with the mother” (301). Chodorow writes that in such a model “the internalized experience of self in the original mother-relation remains seductive and frightening: Unity was bliss, yet meant the loss of self and absolute dependence” (Mothering 194). “Windows” thus displays, and knows it displays, a male fantasy or fear in which joining a family becomes the same as engulfment by feminine feeling. The experience that the lonely man in “Windows” imagines is one he wants desperately to have. Yet (as with the Prince in “Variation”) we might find it disturbing, even threatening: this particular sleep, in its ultimate immobility, looks much like death.8
If the sources here are psychoanalytic, they are also sociological. The poem’s lit-up, snowed-under households suggest that a nuclear family—in particular the suburban, middle-class, “Freudian-American family” (Rich’s phrase)—can duplicate within itself the “social ethic,” the reduction of people to roles, that Jarrell and others saw in the larger society (Born 25). The same assimilation of people to roles, which in the workplace is called “professionalization” or “scientific management” or “cooperation,” is in the family a submission to roles that look like instincts and that we act out in some fairy tales and dreams. Those satisfactions become in “Windows” a wish for the loss of the self. And yet we do not want to live without roles; most of us do not want to live without some relation to parents, or siblings, or children, if we have them. The poem asks how we can carry on those relations without being programmed by them, and the answer “Windows” gives is that—in the milieu the poem describes—we cannot. That milieu is the postwar American nuclear family, in its own family home: in 1946, writes Elaine Tyler May, “for the first time, a majority of the nation’s families lived in homes they owned” (304). The new “suburban home,” May continues, “was planned as a self-contained universe.… Family members would not need to go out for recreation or amusements, since they had swing sets, playrooms and backyards with barbecues” (305). Jarrell makes that new family environment see all too “self-contained,” its enticements at once infantilizing and seductive.
If “Windows” worries about new homes and suburbs, it also introduces social concerns specific to television, whose pictures (unlike stage plays or movies) enter the home. In September 1949 only 13 percent of households in the American Northeast had televisions; by July 1951 the figure was 45 percent, and a year later 59 percent (Bogart 108). The cultural historian Richard Butsch has described an “early 1950s … belief that television was very powerful and would turn the worlds of leisure, culture and education upside down” (237). Jarrell likens television (home of the “darkened actors”) to picture windows (home of the children who watch them): when this lonely man slips into his comforting fantasy, it is as if he had slipped inside television, whose business, Jarrell thought, was to provide enveloping, passive fantasies. “The Taste of the Age” imagines what such fantasies would have done to Queen Victoria and Albert: they end up
sitting before the television set, staring into it, silent; and inside the set, there are Victoria and Albert, staring into the television camera, silent, and the master of ceremonies is saying to them: “No, I think you will find that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota!”
(KA 297)
The art critic Thomas Keenan describes “the double incorporation by which television at once contains the world and is then recontained by the home, a home that can then be reintegrated into the world home-system to the extent that ‘all’ the homes share this new inhabitant—the television light” (130). Jarrell’s passage about Prince Albert, and his poem about a snowbound home, imagines just such “recontainment.” And such a “world home-system” sounds comforting but also totalizing. If the whole world works as a home, there can be nothing outside to discover: no youth and no growing up. “The ubiquitous TV antenna is a symbol of people seeking—and getting—the identical message,” the market researcher Leo Bogart remarked in 1960 (99). Familial roles in Jarrell’s poem, too, welcome anyone and obliterate differences—they are roles, the poem suggests, anyone could learn to play, if only by giving up what distinguishes him or her from anyone else.
This critique of motherly households and of television recalls many other mid-century portraits of “mass culture” as a threatening maternal Blob.9 “Windows” does repeat, from a man’s point of view, the familiar identification of motherhood with “mass culture” and with a dangerous oceanic oneness. But the poem can also be seen as a prescription. A better family, while secure, would enable its members, and especially its children, to leave and then to return, providing both clear boundaries between outside and inside and a durable alternation of security and adventure, reassurance, and change. Moreover, such a family would not restrict itself to a mother-child dyad: it might admit new members. Such families emerge in the extended household of “The Lost World”; in Jarrell’s last children’s book, The Animal Family; and in “The Owl’s Bedtime Story,” a poem from another children’s book, Fly by Night. Jarrell’s young owl finds a grown owl dead in the snow, and then rescues an orphaned owlet;
when he was near
And stopped, all panting, underneath the nest
And she gazed down at him, her face looked dear
As his own sister’s, it was the happiest
Hour of his life. In a little, when the two
Had made friends, they started home.
(CP 349)
Typically, for Jarrell, the adventure the owl contemplates, and achieves, involves the discovery and rescue of a companion. Less typically, this household maintains itself with a responsible, idealized mother: “All night the mother would appear / And disappear, with good things; and the two / Would eat and eat and eat, and then they’d play” (CP 350).10
“The Owl’s Bedtime Story” presents an ideal mother in an idealized household, even ending with the maternal rhyme words nest/ rest/ breast (CP 350). “Windows” encompasses a period’s fears about real mothers and households instead. Personal ideals and social fears interact in the long late poem called “Hope” (the second of two by that name), which follows the thoughts and actions of a young, well-to-do husband. The poem begins when he and his wife return to their Manhattan apartment “at two in the morning / Of Christmas,” and tracks his thoughts through the night, until husband, wife, and son eat breakfast. The earlier poem called “Hope” had simply wished something new would come in the mail. Here the narrator’s more specific “Hope” (we come to realize) is that he not replicate his own “first family”: in particular, he hopes that his wife will not seem to him like his mother. “Hope” considers at length a fear of mothers and what mothers represent—a fear of engulfment and domination. Some readers might see such fears as the subject of the poem (and, hence, the dissolution of those fears as its project). Other readers might emphasize, instead, the poem’s varied imaginings of play and childlikeness, or else the ways in which “Hope” shows how its frightening, transferential Mothers have been culturally produced.11 Sometimes diffuse, sometimes dense, the poem has largely resisted previous critics: to see how it works, and that it works, will require extended attention here.
The poem’s provocative opening compares pretended or fictive family “nests” (like the one in “The Owl’s Bedtime Story”) to actual family dwellings:
To prefer the nest in the linden
By Apartment Eleven, the Shoreham
Arms, to Apartment Eleven
Would be childish. But we are children.
(CP 305)
We have to hear the fourth line’s stress on “are” to make sense not just of the lines but of the household. To be “children” is to be able to play at adult social roles (like “mother” and “father”) without being reduced to them. And yet the lines are as anxious, perhaps as embarrassed, as they are hopeful: can mothers and fathers want to be children? Should they? One of Jarrell’s many worksheets invokes
HOPE AS CHILDHOOD
same story but ended differently
long run one gives up hope of growing up
marooned on island of childhood FLOE ice castle
getting smaller and end in water
but isn’t that where one wants to be?
(Berg Collection)
Do the adults—does this husband—“want to be” in the water or on the ice floe? Ought he try to grow up, or should he resist becoming his parents? The early parts of the finished poem dramatize just such questions: husband and wife
Walk up the corridor, unlock the door,
And go down stone steps, past a statue
To the nest where the father squirrel, and the mother squirrel, and the baby squirrel
Would live, if the baby squirrel could have his way.
Just now he has his way.
Curled round and round in his sleigh
Bed, the child of the apartment
Sleeps, guarded by a lion six feet long.
And, too,
The parents of the apartment fight like lions.
Between us, we are almost twelve feet long.
(CP 305)
The adults have quarreled, this evening, like real lions, but the child hopes they will behave like protective, good fairy-tale lions instead. And the husband seems to share those hopes. He imagines himself and his wife as storybook characters, rather as Jarrell imagined Mary: “Sometimes we were brother and sister like Wordsworth and Dorothy’ and other times we were twins, Randall pretended. The Bobbsey Twins at the Plaza,’ he’d say up in our room at the Plaza” (Remembering 135). This Jarrellian ideal of marriage is notably and deliberately nonsexual, “childlike”: close, in fact, to what Melanie Klein names “the universal phantasy of having a twin” (302).
Once it arrives inside the apartment, “Hope” portrays a multitude of possessions—a “cold / Hill of gifts” under a Christmas tree, Expressionist paintings, and this:
from a province of Norway, a grandfather’s
Clock with the waist and bust of a small
But unusually well-developed woman
Is as if invented by Chagall.
Floating on the floor,
It ticks, to no one, interminable proposals.
But, married, I turn into my mother
Is the motto of all such sundials.
The sun, shattering on them,
Says, Clean, clean, clean; says, White, white, white.
The hours of the night
Bend darkly over them; at midnight a maiden
Pops out, says: Midnight, and all’s white.
(CP 306)
Something is wrong with this “well-developed” sexualized timekeeper, which makes proposals, marks the passage of time, and dutifully produces, as if by nature, maidens devoted to keeping things “clean.” It is a kind of parody of reproduction—of childbearing and of what Chodorow calls “the reproduction of mothering.” In the clock, the production of maidens and mothers seems to be a mechanical, lawlike process. Girls “pop out,” become “unusually well-developed,” marry, and “turn into” their mothers; boys grow up to marry those mothers and eventually become “grandfathers,” as if by clockwork.
If this is the way that adults are produced, it might indeed be better not to grow up. And yet that alternative also makes this husband uncomfortable:
“A wife is a wife,”
Some husband said. If only it were true!
My wife is a girl playing house
With the girl from next door, a girl called the father.
And yet I am a father, my wife is a mother,
Oh, every inch a mother; and our son’s
Asleep in a squirrel’s nest in a tree.
(CP 307)
Here the man wishes his marriage were less like play, more comprehensible or ordinary. Wanting to feel more grown-up than he does, the man revisits, against his will, his first family. Asleep, the wife in the poem “resembled a recurrent // Scene from my childhood. /A scene called Mother Has Fainted”—the anxious scene all Jarrell’s critics read biographically, as a portrait of delicate, difficult Anna Regan (CP 309). Helpless here, the remembered mother elsewhere in the poem “governs the happy people of a planet.” Such a mother, as several critics have noted, fits a pattern of narcissistic mothers that Alice Miller (and other analysts) have described: conforming selectively to feminine stereotypes, such mothers control other people (consciously or not) by alternating helplessness with stern management. Such mothers constitute, in fact, a type blamed by various thinkers, especially during the forties and fifties, for all sorts of malaises in grown-up men.12 But this mother is also a victim herself, a woman trapped in the role she has become. If no husband would want her for a wife, no wife would want to be her either. Moreover, no husband would want to mistake his real wife for such a destructive archetype.
To realize he was making such a mistake, he would first have to understand how projection and maternal transference had affected him. “Hope” depicts, slowly, such an understanding; through hints and half-developed fantasies, readers discover the cosmology of the husband’s unconscious, the models of human development (or regression) that he comes to realize he has held. Canceled verse paragraphs from drafts of “Hope” show—more directly than anything in the finished poem—how the husband fears that he (like the man in “Windows”) has been absorbed by a family:
And why pretend
That I am the husband? I am the husband
And the wife and the child and Apartment Eleven
I am them all.
each other
We are a way for one another to be
And cling to each
a mode of the other’s being
3rd way: wish-fantasy identification with child
If you aren’t your mother or me somehow
I won’t be me
(Berg Collection)
As contemporary readers of “Hope” we may understand the husband but feel for the wife. And the poem seems to anticipate that we will do so. In particular we feel with her what Rich calls “the anxiety of the objectified (woman, mother) who realizes that however much she may wish to render herself pleasing and nonthreatening, she will still to some degree partake of the feared aspect of Woman, an abstraction which she feels has nothing to do with her” (Born 71; italics Rich’s). Much of “Hope” consists of the husband’s attempts to characterize his wife. Much of it, too, amounts to his realization that the descriptions, stories, and fantasies he has been unfolding have something to do with his wife’s personality but much more to do with his own. Elsewhere in the drafts the wife “hears or dreams that she hears, / Or I dream that she hears / Her father and mother. They are fighting in her sleep”: the middle line is the key.
Examining a husband’s structure of feeling, the poem asks what that husband might do to alter it. When he saw his newborn son, the husband remembers,
I saw what I realized I must have seen
When I saw my wedding picture in the paper:
My wife resembled—my wife was—my mother.
Still, that is how it’s done.
In this house everyone’s a mother.
My wife’s a mother, the cook’s a mother, the maid’s a mother […] (CP 310–311)
“Mothers” are threatening, practical, utilitarian, archetypal, sometimes dominating, and sometimes overwhelmed by their responsibilities (so much so that they faint). But how, “Hope” asks, did all the motherly people in his apartment come to be as they are?
Do all men’s mothers perish through their sons?
As the child starts into life, the woman dies
Into a girl—and, scolding the doll she owns,
The single scholar of her little school,
Her task, her plaything, her possession,
She assumes what is God’s alone, responsibility.
(CP 311)
Girls are brought up to share, and men encourage them to share, their mothers’ too practical, too selfless ethic of maternal responsibility. It is this ethic that creates frightening, Motherly mothers like Jarrell’s own, alternately dominating and helpless. If these patterns of behavior and thought were passed on by nature and inheritance, they would be unbreakable, converting girls into women, wives into mothers, and mothers into domineering archetypes, forever. The grandfather clock would then be a sufficient symbol for human inheritance. But beside the clock stands the green fir tree (drafts entitle the poem “The Fir Tree”): under the fir tree are presents, their contents unknown. If the patterns of parenthood are cultural, the tree and its gifts imply, we might surprise ourselves by seeing them changed.
Such changes (and here Jarrell stands on firm psychoanalytic ground) will come when we stop denying our resemblances to our parents, and start understanding them.13 The man in “Hope” finally tries to do just this. The associations and insistences in “Hope” work like parts of an actual psychoanalysis; we watch the husband, a sort of analysand, as he tries to teach himself to distinguish wife and son from mother and self. In its last scene,
When my son reached into the toaster with a fork
This morning, and handed me the slice of toast
So clumsily, dropped it, and looked up at me
So clumsily, I saw that he resembled—
That he was—
I didn’t see it.
(CP 311)
Is the occluded word here “me,” or “my father”? Or is it “mother,” as it is in “A Quilt-Pattern”? In that poem of Oedipal fantasy, biology becomes Freudian truth and psychoanalysis is destiny. The ethical, tonal, and psychological success of “Hope” is that it finds credible ways toward other conclusions. Finding new hope in uncertainty, the allegro concluding lines pivot on their repeated questions and on the new key words not, know, new:
The next time that they say to me; “He has your eyes,”
I’ll tell them the truth: he has his own eyes.
My son’s eyes look a little like a squirrel’s,
A little like a fir tree’s. They don’t look like mine,
They don’t look like my wife’s.
And after all,
If they don’t look like mine, do mine?
You wake up, some fine morning, old.
And old means changed; changed means you wake up new.
In this house, after all, we’re not all mothers.
I’m not, my son’s not, and the fir tree’s not.
And I said the maid was, really I don’t know.
The fir tree stands there on its cold
White hill of gifts, white, cold,
And yet really it’s green; it’s evergreen.
Who knows, who knows?
I’ll say to my wife, in the morning:
“You’re not like my mother … You’re no mother!”
And my wife will say to me—
she’ll say to me—
At first, of course, she may say to me: “You’re dreaming.”
But later on, who knows?
(CP 311–312)
Inevitability is for sundials and clocks—the right slogan for people is “Who knows?” As in a succesful analysis, this husband has talked (to Jarrell’s readers) until he found himself able to change by dissolving a transference. As Suzanne Ferguson puts it, “If he can convince himself, convince his wife, that she is not like his mother, not a Mother, perhaps … they can wake up new” (Poetry 208). That newness may look like “not growing up”; his family will seem to live at once in a squirrel’s nest and at Number Eleven.
“Hope” asks how a family might start to reinvent itself. Such reinventions take idealized, completed forms in Jarrell’s children’s books, which depict, in Flynn’s words, “the need for happy yet improbable families that do not exist in the real world but have to be invented” (Lost 101–102). Such an invented, adopted family comes together in Jarrell’s last and longest children’s book, The Animal Family. The book’s central figure, a hunter, meets and falls in love with a mermaid, who moves into his house on land; hunter and mermaid adopt and raise a bear, then a lynx, then an orphaned human boy.14
The book keeps up a paradoxical attitude toward the nuclear family it models. On one hand, hunter and mermaid duplicate and enjoy the normative family of the early-sixties American child who is Jarrell’s imagined reader. Jerome Griswold finds that in the book’s “repetition of generations, the hunter’s wish is answered”; “things have evolved to the way they used to be, the way families have always been” (102–103). Yet hunter and mermaid form a remarkably odd family, one not only adoptive but playful, fabular. Things have never been quite this way, and life on land, the mermaid discovers is unpredictable—parents bring up their children by making up stories, and no one can know quite how things will be.15
As in The Bat-Poet, the initial problem of The Animal Family involves a lonely artist. The hunter would be a storyteller, if only he could find a listener:
In spring the meadow that ran down from the cliff to the beach was all foam-white and sea-blue with flowers; the hunter looked at it and it was beautiful. But when he came home there was no one to tell what he had seen—and if he picked the flowers and brought them home in his hands, there was no one to give them to.
(8)
With his birth family gone by the start of the book, the hunter needs to construct, or to happen on to, a new family.16 The hunter dreams of his mother until he hears a mermaid, and then dreams of her. Mermaid and hunter find one another in waking life, and the hunter takes her in. “After the mermaid had lived with the hunter for a while,” he tells her another dream:
“My father was standing by the fire and he was double, like a man and his shadow—I was his shadow. And my mother sat there singing, and she was double too, like a woman and her shadow; and when I looked at it you were her shadow.” […]
Finally the mermaid said to him: “I know what your dream means. It means you want a boy to live with us. Then you’ll be your father’s shadow, and I’ll be your mother’s, and the boy will be yourself the way you used to be—it will all be the way it used to be.”
(33, 59–61)
Here the goal of a family seems to be to reproduce itself: a father (but not a mother) seeks to recreate himself as a boy and thus to become his own father. Griswold understandably finds the book “a tremendously complicated male fantasy” in which “the hunter takes his father’s place” (126; italics in original). And yet the family developed by the hunter and mermaid looks rather different from the one in his dream—it includes, after all, a mermaid and two wild animals. Part of the humor, for grown-ups, is the suggestion that the work of raising a first child is as overwhelming and strange to new parents as raising a bear. And part of the serious point of this part of the book is the (Jessica) Benjaminesque one that, with children as with grown-ups, to come to know someone better is not only to feel closer to them but also to appreciate differences. The lynx’s “notions of what the two of them would find interesting were rather lynxish notions, often ending in an Oh, is that all?’ from the mermaid or the hunter; but his notions of what would interest a bear were a bear’s—the bear gobbled it up” (118–119).
Part of the work the book leaves for its young reader is thus to figure out exactly how all families are alike and in what respects they can differ. The boy finds in his new family, as the hunter does, a complete household: “except for one or two confused, uneasy dreams, all the boy’s memories were memories of the mermaid and the hunter; he knew that the hunter was his father and the mermaid his mother and had always been” (156).17 A less complex children’s book would end there, with the child’s discovery of security and belonging. But Jarrell’s book is more attentive than that: after the boy is adopted, narrative interest returns to the mermaid, who considers the differences between her new life on land and her old life at sea. To form a family, as hunter and mermaid have done, is to replicate folkloric archetypes, but it is also to understand difference and change. Sea people, the mermaid avers, “don’t know how to be bored or miserable. One day is one wave, and the next day the next, for the sea people—and whether they’re glad or whether they’re sorry, the sea washes it away” (170). Our ability to grow dissatisfied, to want to make a future unlike the present, and thereby to change over the course of a life, is what makes “land people” different and interesting.
To want to be changed is to want to encounter difference; it is also to distinguish an outward person (whose attributes might be changed) from an interior self (which does, and remembers, the changing). The group that the hunter, mermaid, bear, lynx and boy form together thus represents the hunter’s deepest wish, but it is also a triumph of play and invention. The seemingly inevitable family bonds formed in the book are also a continuing form of play, a conscious fiction the boy and his new parents share:
[F]ar along the beach, by the little river, you could see the tiniest lynx there ever was. The boy looked and saw him and said laughing, “That’s where he found me!”
“Oh, we just told you that,” said the hunter, starting their old game. “The very first day your mother and I came to the house, there you were in the corner, fast asleep.”
“That’s right, fast asleep with him,” said the boy, giving the bear a push.
“Oh no,” said the mermaid, “that was years before the bear came. We’ve had you always.”
(179–180)
Jarrell’s last and most admired long poem, the triptych The Lost World, imagines another happy, artificial, and unusual family, the extended family of his grandparents and their friends, among whom the young Jarrell lived in Los Angeles in 1926–27, after his parents separated.18 Jarrell based the poems on his memories, and on the letters he sent his mother during his year there. The poem is full of remembered details, not only from the household of “Mama” and “Pop” (the grandparents) and “Dandeen,” (the great-grandmother) but from the Hollywood of the last silent films: among its props are the artificial dinosaurs of the film The Lost World, from which the work takes its name.19 As it imagines its happy family, the poem connects familial relations to almost everything else Jarrell’s oeuvre considers: a study of Jarrell’s life work would be incomplete without a reading of the whole poem.
The Lost World depicts several kinds of intersubjective exchange—some successful, some frustrated. It experiments with imagined alternatives to a public, instrumental, social world: the poem’s household becomes one such alternative, and its various fictive “worlds” become others. As it explores maturation and memory, it recalls the lessons Jarrell learned from psychoanalysis, as well as from Proust and Wordsworth. The poem also responds, in ways critics have not yet noticed, to other poems and to the public events of the Cold War. The poem organizes itself around oppositions and boundaries—adult/child, childhood/ adolescence, work/play, fantasy/“real life,” past/present, sleep/waking, public/ private. Each transition hints at all the others, and all work together to establish at once a theory of “play” and a model of families.
The poem also, implicitly, sets Jarrell’s happy year in Los Angeles against both his earlier childhood in California and his subsequent life with his mother in Tennessee. Compared to the families in Jarrell’s previous poems, and to Jarrell’s mother’s household in Tennessee, the Lost World household also stands out for what it is not: it does not ask Randall to earn any money, and though it has a busy “Mama,” it does not include a mother-and-child dyad. Flynn has implied that Jarrell’s defense of the self requires a defense of the family. Yet the poems, and The Lost World most of all, do not so much defend as diagnose the particular form called the nuclear family, which had to be reinvented to meet its own goals.20
Part 1 of The Lost World, “Children’s Arms,” begins with perhaps the first child in all of Jarrell’s poems who seems happy when he is not reading. This is because he lives (even when he is not reading) in a Hollywood replete with imaginative fictions. And this is one reason the poem’s terza rima fits its matter: like Dante’s Commedia, the “Lost World” poems offer a tour of a spectacular other world.21 The same analogy explains the title. Hollywood is like the underground dinosaur-land of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, and of the silent film based on it:
On my way home I pass a cameraman
On a platform on the bumper of a car
Inside which, rolling and plunging, a comedian
Is working: on one white lot I see a star
Stumble to her igloo through the howling gale
Of the wind machines. On Melrose a dinosaur
And pterodactyl, with their immense pale
Papier-mâché smiles, look over the fence
Of The Lost World.
Whispering to myself the tale
These shout—done with my schoolwork, I commence
My real life: my arsenal, my workshop
Opens, and in impotent omnipotence
I put on the helmet and the breastplate Pop
Cut out and soldered for me.
(CP 283)
Between fictions and life in L.A. stands not a high wall but a permeable fence. The comedian’s “work” is attractive work, since it involves making things up. By the same token the best kind of howling gales are the ones from wind machines, and the best kind of “real life” is a collaborative participation in fictions—Pop makes the armor the boy wears, Homer and Virgil the scripts he follows.
As mock adventurer, mock Aeneas, the “armored” Randall seems to belong to the same class of fictions as papier-mâché dinosaurs and “Arctic” weather. These fictive realms merge with one another: all may seem, to grown-ups, faintly silly. Yet all seem, to the adult poet, collectively better than the world of adult work and power relations. If Jarrell once admired those fictions naïvely, he now admires them for the naïveté they connote and for the harmless powers they attribute to imagination. The poem thus classes together (as the child would not have) the silent movie, the backyard play, the “arms that arm, for a child’s wars, the child,” and the play the local high school puts on:
In the black auditorium, my heart at ease,
I watch the furred castaways (the seniors put
A play on every spring) tame their wild beasts,
Erect their tree house. Chatting over their fruit,
Their coconuts, they relish their stately feasts.
The family’s servant, their magnanimous
Master now, rules them by right. Nature’s priests,
They worship at Nature’s altar; when with decorous
Affection the Admirable Crichton
Kisses a girl like a big Wendy, all of us
Squirm or sit up in our seats … Undone
When an English sail is sighted, the prisoners
Escape from their Eden to the world: the real one
Where servants are servants, masters masters,
And no one’s magnanimous. The lights go on
And we go off, robbed of our fruit, our furs—
The island that the children ran is gone.
The island sang to me: Believe! Believe!
And didn’t I know a lady with a lion?
(CP 284)
One reaction to this passage might stress its comedy: the boys enjoy the play, but not the kissing. A second reaction might see it as a serious defense of children’s wish-fulfillment fictions. These fictions constitute equipment that adults salvage for continued use only through memory, by establishing that we are the same people who once lived on that island—just as the woman of “The Player Piano” is the same girl who once skinned her knee.22
So far “The Lost World” seems to be entirely about fiction and fiction-making—childhood idyll, amateur drama, professional moviemaking, even a mock Shakespearean Green World, with “dried leaves marked THIS IS THE GREENWOOD.” The poem then brings those properties into repeated contests with social, physical, and economic fact. Central to those contests will be the relations of children and families, as well as of the words play, work, belief/ believe, and habit, on which the poem pivots:
Each evening, as the sun sank, didn’t I grieve
To leave my tree house for reality?
There was nothing there for me to disbelieve.
At peace among my weapons, I sit in my tree
And feel: Friday night, then Saturday, then Sunday!
I’m dreaming of a wolf, as Mama wakes me,
And a tall girl who is—outside it’s gray,
I can’t remember, I jump up and dress.
We eat in the lighted kitchen. And what is play
For me, for them is habit. Happiness
Is a quiet presence, breathless and familiar […]
(CP 284–285)
Here is the second occurrence of “play,” and the first of several in rhyming position. These lines also introduce “habit” and “happiness”: how to make habit happy, the repeating days of adult life worthwhile?11 Young Randall and Pop ride a morning bus to
the dark
Echoing cavern, where Pop, a worker,
Works for our living. As he rules a mark,
A short square pencil in his short square hand,
On a great sheet of copper, I make some remark
He doesn’t understand. In that hard maze—in that land
The grown men live in—in the world of work,
He measures, shears, solders; and I stand
Empty-handed, watching him.
(CP 285)
“Echoing” beyond what terza rima requires, the iterated sounds (mark … remark, square … square, hand … understand … land … stand / Empty-handed) mimic factory-floor acoustics; they also suggest (as other repetitions will suggest) the echoes created by memory, which reinterprets “habit,” “play,” and “work” as it replays them.
The poem leaves Pop’s occupation purposely vague, though it is clearly a skilled (and noisy) craft: Pop becomes a Wagnerian “dwarf hammering out the Ring / In the world under the world.” Robert Watson writes that here “the child half-nurtured on make-believe tries to understand the habitual, work-a-day world of adults … by seeing it in terms of fiction” (RJ 268). If the child’s world, the tree house, of play is insufficient, the adult world of work is nothing, or mere habit, unless the child’s categories redescribe it. And if this “cavern” suggests hell, it is not a Christian hell but a pagan underworld (where all “grown men” eventually go). The problem the child will have to solve is not some dawning sense of sin but a growing awareness that there is a realm, a “world under the world,” in which fictions and “children’s arms” do not function, in which the relevant powers are not imaginative but industrial. That “world under the world” is what Marxian language calls a base—the secret source of power and structure for the family life it supports. The adult world is distinguished from the child’s not by sexuality or disillusion but by its different relation to production and wage labor:
The sooty thread
Up which the laborers feel their way into
Their wives and houses, is money; the fact of life,
The secret the grown-ups share, is what to do
To make money. The husband Adam, Eve his wife
Have learned how not to have to do without
Till Santa Claus brings them their Boy Scout knife—
Nor do they find things in dreams, carry a paper route,
Sell Christmas seals …
(CP 285–286)
Jarrell’s fifties essays distinguish private (aesthetic) life from the professions; these lines instead distinguish alienated, physical labor from the safer, and feminine, realm of houses and families. Divided (like the poem) into interdependent parts, the Los Angeles of factories, homes, and movie sets becomes a remarkably benign demonstration of such binaries as public/private and work/play—divisions themselves easily mapped onto the binarism adult/child.
The child understands Pop both as a Worker (in a world of Work as against Play) and as someone who can bring home real money: the child himself, by contrast, is noneconomic man. But the adult Pop is beloved because (unlike Uncle Howell) he can also participate in the world of children and play:
Starting his Saturday, his Sunday,
Pop tells me what I love to hear about,
His boyhood in Shelbyville. I play
What he plays, hunt what he hunts, remember
What he remembers: it seems to me I could stay
In that dark forest, lit by one fading ember
Of his campfire, forever … But we’re home.
I run in love to each familiar member
Of this little state, clustered about the Dome
Of St. Nicholas—this city in which my rabbit
Depends on me, and I on everyone—this first Rome
Of childhood, so absolute in every habit
That when we hear the world our jailor say:
“Tell me, art thou a Roman?” the time we inhabit
Drops from our shoulders, and we answer: ‘Yea.
I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, I appeal
Unto Caesar.”
I wash my hands, Pop gives his pay
Envelope to Mama; we sit down to our meal.
(CP 286)
Here Pop resembles not a kobold but the hunter boy from “Field and Forest,” the key to the inner life of the grown man. The remembered attitudes and ways of childhood serve Jarrell as Roman citizenship served Paul (Acts 22:25–29). Both represent invisible, permanent membership in a community based on origins, and both confer rights. Because we are, or have been, children, we may appeal from the judgments and ways of adulthood, of public social life, to the higher authority of childhood and play. (These rhymes—day, play, “I could stay,” say, yea, pay—recur at the end of the poem.)
We have seen how often Jarrell’s endings feature heightened repetition, multiple speakers, and verbal interaction; we have also seen how his repetitions track memory and consider time. All these effects let “Children’s Arms” end with another collaborative idyll. A local lady (“Mrs. Mercer”) drives Jarrell to the library along with “Lucky, / Half wolf, half police-dog”:
“Hello,”
I say to the lady, and hug Lucky … In my
Talk with the world, in which it tells me what I know
And I tell it, “I know—” how strange that I
Know nothing, and yet it tells me what I know!—
I appreciate the animals, who stand by
Purring. Or else they sit and pant. It’s so—
So agreeable. If only people purred and panted!
So, now, Lucky and I sit in our row,
Mrs. Mercer in hers.
(CP 287)
This “talk with the world,” in which each reassures the other of his or its bare existence, recapitulates the dialogue of “A Game at Salzburg,” but without the earlier poem’s resignation: this sort of exchanged confirmation seems fun. The animals here, like the cats in earlier poems, lead a satisfied, purely playful existence. They do not have to work for a living or to enter the public or “social” world at all. Better yet, this idyllic library (unlike the libraries elsewhere in Jarrell) seems relatively continuous with the rest of the city and relatively immune from what would threaten it—from masculine, public, work based on exchange value. Like the island world of the high school play, the car and the world he sees from it represent his “wish,” and like it they lack adult men:
The glass encloses
As glass does, a womanish and childish
And doggish universe. We press our noses
To the glass and wish: the angel- and devilfish
Floating by on Vine, on Sunset, shut their eyes
And press their noses to the glass and wish.
(CP 287)
Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” (first published in 1960) also featured a boy with his nose to glass, vanished tropical fish, the lost city of his childhood, automobile traffic, and a “bubble” that holds the past. But in Lowell’s poem the child’s wishes are bitterly ironized, opposed to the heroic, historical values the adult wishes he could recapture:
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
(LS/FUD 70)
If, as Michael Thurston writes, “For the Union Dead” “elaborates a … response to historical circumstance,” a public role for the personal lyric, The Lost World works to remind us that public, national history is never the only circumstance that has shaped us—we answer, also, to the history of a family, of a locality, even of an art form, such as the movies (105). Like Lowell’s aquarium, Jarrell’s fishy world represents an earlier “kingdom”; like Colonel Shaw’s “bubble,” Jarrell’s enclosed space shows the adult world what it has forgotten. But for Jarrell the “lost” values are not the (masculine) virtues of existential self-sacrifice but the (“womanish” and “childish”) virtues of caring, intimacy, and play.
Such play (as Jarrell wrote elsewhere) “demand[s] to be shared” and eventually to be shared outside the family (Age 22). Part 2, “A Night With Lions,” thus introduces “my aunt” and “my aunt’s friend” who owned a lion, “the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / lion”: “I’d play with him, and he’d pretend / To play with me. I was the real player” (CP 288). Aunt, lion, and owner persist in adult memory:
Now the lion roars
His slow comfortable roars; I lie beside
My young, tall, brown aunt, out there in the past
Or future, and I sleepily confide
My dream-discovery: my breath comes fast
Whenever I see someone with your skin,
Hear someone with your voice.
(CP 288)
The passage is as convincingly sexual as Jarrell ever becomes; for Flynn, “the child’s confusion is heightened by the sexual confusion of approaching adolescence” (Lost 124). But there is nothing menacing, or even chthonically mysterious, about the excited interest Jarrell remembers. It would be at least as right to say that the poem shows how connections made in “play” at one age get preserved in the next, as the people (or “time-slices”) we have been become part of the people we grow up to be. These continually changing and cumulative selves resemble the continually changing and accumulating connotations of the repeated complex words—“play” and “work,” “wish” and “pretend,” “habit” and “happiness”—that keep the old meanings out of which newer ones grow.
As in Jarrell’s other poems about the life course, this analogy between repeated words (that accumulate connotations) and growing or aging people (who accumulate experience) drives the words that drive the poem. “A Night With Lions” returns, not just to its initial rhymes but to its opening words, “pretend” and “friend.” After Jarrell has “been /Asleep a while,”
I remember: you
Are—you, and Tawny was the lion in—
In Tarzan. In Tarzan! Just as we used to,
I talk to you, you talk to me or pretend
To talk to me as grown-up people do,
Of Jurgen and Rupert Hughes, till in the end
I think as a child thinks: “You’re my real friend.”
(CP 288)
Is it the adult dreamer, or the child he dreams that he is, who thinks “as a child thinks” by the end of the poem? The dreamlike suspended state recalls “The Elementary Scene”; there, as here, grammatical special effects help the poem mull familiar, Proustian questions. How are the adult and the child the same person? The answer the dream provides is that they feel continuous as a web of previous interpersonal relations and of previous fictions: a “real friend” is someone with whom one can “pretend.”
Part 3 of the poem, “A Street Off Sunset,” begins with an olfactory memory trigger, an obvious nod to Proust’s madeleine and lime-leaf tea.24 Smelling the Vicks VapoRub of the old L.A. factory, Jarrell recapitulates his childhood year. This child, Jarrell is delighted to affirm, persists in the adult, where he can be identified as a capacity for intimacy and for fictions—
My lifetime
Got rid of, I sit in a dark blue sedan
Beside my great-grandmother, in Hollywood.
We pass a windmill, a pink sphinx, an Allbran
Billboard; thinking of Salâmmbo, Robin Hood,
The old prospector with his flapjack in the air,
I sit with my hands folded: I am good.
(CP 289)
At the end of the child’s day
I go to Mama in her gray
Silk, to Pop, to Dandeen in her black
Silk, I put my arms around them, they
Put their arms around me. Then I go back
To my bedroom; I read as I undress.
The scientist is ready to attack.
Mama calls, “Is your light out?” I call back, “Yes,”
And turn the light out.
(CP 290)
Repeated words—arms, silk, call, light, out—show off a verbal exchange, and frame the unusual, end-stopped, one-sentence line: “The scientist is ready to attack.”
Randall has been reading the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories, which he finishes in the morning, reading “how the good world wins its victory / Over that bad man.” That science fiction will govern the end of the poem. First, however, the poem must give one more example of “play,” a game Randall plays with Dandeen:
Her old face is slow
In pleasure, slow in doubt, as she sits weighing
Strategies: patient, equable, and humble,
She hears what this last child of hers is saying
In pride or bewilderment; and she will grumble
Like a child or animal, when, indifferent
To the reasons of my better self, I mumble:
“I’d better stop now—the rabbit …”
I relent
And play her one more game.
(CP 291)
The child here, pretending to play, resembles both the mother of “The Lost Children” and Tawny the (adult) lion: we see young Randall growing up.25
Dandeen cried, she remembers, during “the War Between the States,” when a “captain” put her on a horse. She might have cried again, the adult Jarrell decides, “because I didn’t write”—once back in Tennessee, young Randall never answered his grandparents’ letters. Turning from his present-day readers to Dandeen, and then back to us, Jarrell exclaims “I was a child, I missed them so. But justifying / Hurts too: if only I could play you one more game, / See you all one more time!”26 Here we are close to the core of the poems—to Jarrell’s urgent search for the links connecting memory to family, family to play, childhood to maturation to loss. How are these terms—these experiences—related? One answer might start from the next passage, which describes Randall’s pet rabbit:
His furry
Long warm soft floppy ears, his crinkling nose
Are reassuring to a child. They guarantee,
As so much here does, that the child knows
Who takes care of him, whom he takes care of.
(CP 291–292)
This is the promise of “families” in general—one broken where the mother keeps collapsing, or where the mother is impossible to know because she is a destructive archetype. It is a promise kept only in Jarrell’s adoptive families, most of all in this one: a promise of reciprocity and of safety, from which shared adventure and imaginative play become possible. But even this “guarantee” is less than certain after Mama enters the chicken coop,
chooses one,
Comes out, and wrings its neck. The body hurls
Itself out—lunging, reeling, it begins to run
Away from Something, to fly away from Something
In great flopping circles. Mama stands like a nun
In the center of each awful, anguished ring.
The thudding and scrambling go on, go on—then they fade,
I open my eyes, it’s over … Could such a thing
Happen to anything? It could to a rabbit, I’m afraid;
It could to—
“Mama, you won’t kill Reddy ever,
You won’t ever, will you?” The farm woman tries to persuade
The little boy, her grandson, that she’d never
Kill the boy’s rabbit, never even think of it.
He would like to believe her …
(CP 292)
Here the survival in question (as Flynn notes) is not just the rabbit’s, nor the parent’s, but Randall’s own: a canceled draft of these lines reads, “It could to Randall, I’m afraid” (Lost 128). As in Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” to discover who one is—who “takes care of” one, whom one “takes care of”—is also to discover that cared-for and caregivers are separate persons and that all will die. Thomas Travisano has found in Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Berryman “moments of profound loss that are also moments of conscious entry into selfhood” (Mid-Century 77).27 The “selfhood” Jarrell enters into here in this poem, with its climactic moment of loss, looks very like the selfhood that object-relations theorists imagine: it consists largely of the (imagined and real) other people Jarrell has known and of the events and words he has shared with them. He seems in the finished version of the poem to fear more for the rabbit, for Dandeen, for “significant others,” than he does for his own mortal body: death is a threat to objects and hence to oneself.
To preserve affective objects and fictions is, therefore, to preserve the self, even if this can be done only in memory. The poem ends as just such preservations take place:
Into the blue wonderland
Of Hollywood, the sun sinks, past the eucalyptus,
The sphinx, the windmill, and I watch and read and
Hold my story tight. And when the bus
Stops at the corner and Pop—Pop!—steps down
And I run out to meet him, a blurred nimbus,
Half-red, half-gold, enchants his sober brown
Face, his stooped shoulders into the All-Father’s.
He tells me about the work he’s done downtown,
We sit there on the steps. My universe
Mended almost, I tell him about the scientist. I say
“He couldn’t really, could he, Pop?” My comforter’s
Eyes light up, and he laughs. “No, that’s just play,
Just make believe,” he says. The sky is gray,
We sit there, at the end of our good day.
(CP 292–293)
In effects (and rhyme words) familiar from Jarrell’s other work, Pop offers, and the child accepts, a finally false—but credible—reassurance. The world could not end, the rabbit will not die, Pop is Odin (the “All-Father” of Scandinavian legend), and Randall knows, again, who takes care of him, whom he takes care of, and who can share his flights into Greek or Norse myth. Key words recur in a cascade of rhymes on “ay”; as Jarrell recapitulates terms and themes, time seems to contract, as if the triptych had confined itself harmoniously to one day.
That “good day” may remember a crucial day in Jarrell’s adult life. A few months before beginning the “Lost World” poems, in November 1962, Jarrell attended a White House-sponsored arts conference in Washington, where he delivered the lecture “Fifty Years of American Poetry.” The next day the Cuban missile crisis broke out. Mary remembers that while some writers went home, Jarrell, “inside his poetry bubble, felt no cause for alarm and stayed to the last” (Letters 460). A letter suggests, however, how seriously he took the nuclear threat. Jarrell wrote to Adrienne Rich in October 1963,
It is terrible in our time to have the death of the world hanging over you, but, personally, it’s something you disregard just as you disregard the regular misery of so much of the world, or your own regular personal aging and death. I get a real consolation out of looking at astronomical pictures.… The end of the earth isn’t the end of the world but more like the death of a person, or the fall of one leaf. I suppose this is a queer rather pathetic-sounding consolation but I mean it, really feel it strongly.… There’s something so inhuman and incommensurable about the likely end of most beings on earth that anything that can cancel it out needs to be inhuman and incommensurable too.
(Letters 481)
Jarrell’s fragments of an elegy for President Kennedy focus on the president’s nuclear responsibilities: they speak of his “Power to end, with a motion of his finger, / The union that he somehow had no share in,” and conclude: “Now, when man’s power is final / We are grateful to the governors of the world / To be alive—somehow, we are still alive” (Berg Collection). The lines must remember the Cuban crisis, the closest Americans came to a collective end.
The same nuclear fears inform “A Street Off Sunset.” The young Jarrell has just finished a tale in which an evil genius plots to blow up the world: “I say, / “He couldn’t really, could he, Pop?” My comforter’s / Eyes light up, and he laughs. “No, that’s just play.…” The day is good partly because the boy can end it still close to his extended family. It is good, too, partly because the boy understands that the world could not really end—that fiction and reality can be distinguished. But the nuclear menace of the sixties seemed to dissolve exactly that boundary. Making it really possible for science to create “the end of the earth,” the Cuban crisis must have seemed to Jarrell like bad science fiction made real.
Peter Brooks remarks that psychoanalysis, in general, credits “the vast role of fantasy and fiction in our self-conceptions as human beings” (10). The “Lost World” poems credit that role as few autobiographical poets have. And the poem’s ideas about that role fit well with object-relations theory. To read the science-fiction story, to imagine the end of the world, and to be reassured that the earth could not really blow up would be to experience the pretended destruction of a cathected object and then to confirm its actual survival. This is the process, Winnicott believed, by which a young child comes to discover the difference between himself and others and thus to learn how to share and to play in the world. In Winnicott’s somewhat fanciful summary, “The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ … Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived” (90).
This fantasized destruction and reassurance helps the child understand himself as a subject among other subjects, each of whom has both an inside (an inner life) and an outside (composed of appearance and action). For Jessica Benjamin, “this distinction between inner and outer reality—the result of successful destruction—is crucial to perceiving the other as a separate person who does not need to be perfect or ideal” (Bonds 213). In Winnicott’s own model of child development, this “successful destruction” can be superintended only by one caregiver, normatively the mother. In “The Lost World” the same process relies on a constellation of other caregivers—on Pop and Mama and “my aunt’s friend”—and on the agency of printed fiction. This move, or series of moves, from the mother as unique and obligatory caregiver to a potentially reciprocal network of objects—the move Randall made by living with his grandparents—is the move made in feminist revisions of Winnicott, such as Benjamin’s.
The chicken does not survive its destruction; the world survives its destruction in science fiction. Which is a better model for Randall’s family? To acknowledge one’s own eventual destruction (one’s mortality), as young Randall cannot quite do, is to accept a reality principle, thus in one sense to cease to be a child. But to accept the reassurance that an object will survive its imagined destruction is to be part of Winnicott’s optimistic model of growth. That model—the hen and the Cuban crisis suggest—will not quite take the measure of a world in which “all who love” are hypocrites, no reassurance can be relied on forever, and civilization may indeed come to an end. The model is instead a necessary fiction, like the hunter and mermaid’s “we’ve had you always.”
Winnicott maintained that children can learn to play only within an environment of relative responsiveness and security. Such an environment, as The Lost World presents it, relies on a complex interplay between trust and fact—between what is seen and what is made up; it relies—as the girl in “The Night Before” had—on a network of fictions. The Los Angeles family (in Jarrell’s retrospect) and the Los Angeles cityscape of 1926–27 both represent such environments. To grow up and out of this locale—by returning to Nashville, by becoming an adult—is to experience progressive disillusionment and loss, measured by psychic distance from this “good day.” To retain some aspect of its feeling is to be able to trust other people and to trust one’s inner life: to live in a world of “work” still able to “play.”
This is to say (as we have seen in other poems) that, for Jarrell, to have any sort of satisfying sense of our adult selves, we require both intersubjective confirmation and what we might call autobiographical confirmation, a sense of continuity among past and present, youthful and adult selves. Such a continuity with childhood seems required not only for the philosophers’ reasons I discussed in chapter 4 but also because of the special properties (imagination, “play,” distance from “the social”) Jarrell attributed to childhood—reasons discussed in chapter 5. And these properties render vivid and present not only wishes but also fears. We might even gloss “A Street Off Sunset” with Coleridge’s declaration: “If men laugh at the falsehoods that were imposed on themselves during their childhood, it is because they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the Past in the Present, and so to produce … that continuity in their self-consciousness which nature has made the law of their animal life” (Works 4:41; quoted in Coveney 45). The triptych Jarrell called The Lost World serves to demonstrate such continuity in its author, not least with its occasional breaks into the present time of writing: “the little girl is crying, here, now / Because I didn’t write …” Lowell in Life Studies rarely presents both child and adult in a single poem; in “The Lost World” their simultaneous presence is part of the point.28
In “Thinking of the Lost World” just that continuity seems imperiled. As an inquiry into memory, nostalgia, and time regained, the poem begins from the Proustian realization that the places of our childhood, when we return to them, cannot be the places we remember. When Proust revisits Combray in Time Regained, he is “distressed to see how little I relived my early years,” even though Combray itself has not much changed (3:709). Revisiting L.A., Jarrell finds objective correlatives for his failure to see his childhood’s city:
Back in Los Angeles, we missed
Los Angeles. The sunshine of the Land
Of Sunshine is a gray mist now, the atmosphere
Of some factory planet: when you stand and look
You see a block or two, and your eyes water.
The orange groves are all cut down …
(CP 336)
The cut-down trees recall Théodore de Banville’s famous les lauriers sont coupés, as well as Mignonette’s song, in Wilhelm Meister: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühm …”29 “Your eyes water” at smog but also at the absence of the past, as they might smart differently at its presence: “factory planet” tells us that the vocabulary of golden age science fiction has lasted longer than the sets and props of old Hollywood.
If only (the poem muses, as “90 North” had) the science fiction itself, and the adventure stories, retained their former power: “I say to my old self: “I believe. Help thou / My unbelief.” The poem brings in for contrast a leonine “mad girl,” picked up hitchhiking, who seems to believe entirely in her own fantasies. Jarrell invokes (as if it were the land where the orange trees grew) “the undiscovered / Country between California and Arizona / That the mad girl told me she was princess of.” Though that country sounds like Hamlet’s description of death, the girl’s madness nonetheless seems enviable, because it gives her confidence in her own imagination, a confidence the adult Jarrell lacks: “If I could find in some Museum of Cars / Mama’s dark blue Buick, Lucky’s electric, / Couldn’t I be driven there?” (CP 337). To lose one’s childhood commitments to fictions and fantasies is to lose a valuable part of existence, but to retain them unmodified is to go mad.
A subsequent chain of parallel “If only,” “If,” and “couldn’t I …” phrases enacts Jarrell’s wish to believe in his childhood’s fictions and demonstrates the continuing reality, not of the belief but of the wish. What lasts for the adult Jarrell (as for Proust) are not the “objects” nor the beliefs of the past but the language, the interior representations (introjections), and the wishes and fears our commitments to them accrete within us. Of Mama and Lucky and the “tall brown aunt,” Jarrell declares,
All of them are gone
Except for me; and for me nothing is gone—
The chicken’s body is still going round
And round in widening circles, a satellite
From which, as the sun sets, the scientist bends
A look of evil on the unsuspecting earth.
(CP 337)
After Jarrell has remembered the persons and the fictions of “A Street Off Sunset,” the interactions of Jarrell’s past (with Mama, with the late aunt, with a present-day interlocutor) seem to him to be unfolding still:
Mama and Pop and Dandeen are still there
In the Gay Twenties.
The Gay Twenties! You say
The Gay Nineties … But it’s all right: they were gay,
O so gay! A certain number of years after,
Any time is Gay, to the new ones who ask:
“Was that the first World War or the second?”
(CP 338)
The “new ones” don’t even remember the Second World War: it is not our individual past the present seems to lack, but the past in general, anyone’s past. Old people can therefore feel anew their links to their childhoods by listening to one another (as the woman in “The Player Piano” had done) or by telling the right listeners about the past.30 In doing so, they experience the continuity of their own lives, situating themselves and others in time.
This is why the poem begins with memories of places and other people (Lucky, Dandeen, the “mad girl”) but ends with “you” and then with “I”—with Jarrell’s long look at his present-day self. We have seen this part of the poem in chapter 1, where the boys recognize the older Jarrell as Santa Claus: this sort of misrecognition is preferable to looking in the mirror and not recognizing oneself at all. Having seen these two alternatives, readers of The Lost World are ready to seek a synthesis of the two, an introspective search that treats not the past recaptured as if it were present but the drive to recover that past and to make it seem present, as the source of continued interiority.
At the end of “Thinking of the Lost World” (and of the volume The Lost World) Jarrell thus seeks his child-self and finds himself instead realized in his ability to search for it and to interpret—for us—its absence. Paradoxically, though what he has lost is the child he was, the child was like him (and hence remains at his side) because the child, too, experienced loss:
I seem to see
A shape in tennis shoes and khaki riding pants
Standing there empty-handed; I reach out to it
Empty handed, my hand comes back empty,
And yet my emptiness is traded for its emptiness,
I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found
Columns whose gray illegible advertisements
My soul has memorized world after world:
LOST—NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD.
I hold in my own hands, in happiness,
Nothing: the nothing for which there’s no reward.
(CP 338)
“Empty-handed … emptiness” links the adult to the young Randall, who stood “empty-handed” as he watched Pop at work. (Drafts of the ending emphasize the “shape’s” identity: “it is as if I’d handed / Myself? hand something / the boy […] we’d handed each other something” [Berg Collection].) Though “Thinking” is not written in terza rima, its closing lines recall the “Lost World” triptych so closely in part because they echo its rhyming form: pants anticipates advertisements, emptiness-happiness, (no) reward- (no) reward. In comprehending estrangement, age, and loss, the later poem seems to have grasped, at last, some bits of the triptych’s verbal form, just as its speaker finally “hold[s] in my own hands” some form of personal memory itself. The “nothing” on which the poem concludes recalls the “nothing” of “90 North,” twenty years earlier—it, too, implies that adulthood, or simply experience, bring with it no new value. Yet this “nothing,” unlike the earlier poem, brings with it “happiness” and, along with that happiness, some sense of exchange, of communion, with a childhood self.
Jarrell here, Richard Flynn has written, “wishes (almost desperately) that the child may serve as a symbol of potential, as a redemptive figure to the aging adult, but since the usefulness of the child’s perspective for the poet depends on a rejection of such nostalgia, the speaker comes up empty” (“‘Infant Sight’” 115). Flynn sees farther into this poem than do the several readers who consider it a rewriting of Stevens’s “Snow Man”: “the nothing” here comes not from impersonal nature but from the course of a person’s life.31 Yet Flynn has perhaps missed the tone of Jarrell’s “And yet”: the difference between “my hand comes back empty” and “my emptiness is traded …” is a difference in feeling that allows Jarrell to treat them as opposites. The second independent clause describes a real, beneficial, trade. Adult and ghostly child exchange intangibles that exist only in memory, but their continued existence there yields a kind of ongoing “happiness.” The change of mood here allows Jarrell to do just what characters such as “A Real Ghost” and the woman of “Next Day” could not. At the end as at the beginning of the “Lost World” poems, Jarrell can see himself as part of a life course that connects him to the intimate affective relations and to the imaginative faculties of childhood. He can thereby manifest to others—to readers, to “you”—a life that can be articulated and shared.