Because I was already familiar with Jarrell's virtues, on this rereading his limitations were more noticeable than they were twenty-five years ago. He is much better at lobbying than at explaining. Only a few essays (like "Texts from Housman") go into detailed analysis of poems, and these are a bit leaden. More typical and effective are his celebrated deep-sea dives into a body of work, from which he resurfaces with a dripping netful of treasure. Most of his criticism consists, in effect, of saying, "Just look at that. Isn't it wonderful?" And it's clear you qualify as a fool in his eyes if you don't quite see it. Because of his intelligent exasperation and basic good will, you don't want to let him down by resisting his views, even when unsupported by evidence or argument. He had an odd habit of settling on single good lines to justify a whole poem. There's also his characteristic iron confidence, which, like all bullying, suggests secret doubt. Still, given the polemical task he'd assigned himself, it was a method that got results. We take the centrality of Whitman and Frost so much for granted, it's hard to recall that before Jarrell began stumping for them, critical orthodoxy didn't have much use for either. His essays were the first step in a rehabilitation that soon brought them to the front rank in American poetry. It's not often that credit goes to a single figure for a fundamental change in sensibility.

Jarrell didn't have the benefit of the insights made available by the feminism of the seventies, so, from our standpoint, he seems to go wrong when dealing with women authors. Sometimes the abuse is trivial, as when he says (in "Fifty Years of American Poetry") that he regards Moore and Bishop as "the best women poets since Dickinson." Why situate excellence in terms of gender? Well, that's the way men talked back then if they bothered with women writers at all. Granted, he was a strong advocate for Moore and Bishop (and in fiction, Christina Stead). But his Moore essay engages in the critical fallacy of castigating her too much for what she didn't do rather than focusing on the value of what she did. Moore never married and had a nineteenth-century sense of propriety, but that's no reason for viewing her poetry as a spinster's accomplished needlework, as Jarrell comes close to doing. He has plenty of good things to say about her and a few other women, but sometimes the praise is faintly oppressive because of its paternal tone and clear intent to control. Adoration is a poor substitute for equal rights or equal pay for equal work.

Mary Jarrell tells of her first meeting with Randall in the early fifties at the Rocky Mountain Writers' Conference, where she was an eager student. So far as I know, this memoir and her editorial framing of Jarrell's Selected Letters are the sum total of her publications. Both attest to solid literary skills; but the opening chapters of the memoir hint that whatever aspirations she had as a writer were quickly swallowed up in Jarrell's omnivorous talent. She joins that group of gifted women--Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, Zelda Fitzgerald and many others--who gave substance to male writers close to them, whether or not the debt was ever publicly acknowledged. Mary Jarrell recounts several instances in which she presented her husband with subject matter, much as a cat will bring birds or mice it has decided not to eat and lay them on the master's doorstep. Not that the results were always brilliant. Once, when the Jarrells were having breakfast at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Mary eavesdropped on a conversation from the next table, where three unmistakably rich and idle people were discussing various luxury problems. She reported the fruit of her eavesdropping to Randall, who used it as the basis for his poem "The Three Bills," among his weakest, and not just because of its mild homophobia. And maybe it was a mistake to satirize the neighboring Ritz crackers whose privacy had been invaded, considering that someone outside might have felt much the same about the Jarrells having their breakfast in the Edwardian Room before she went off to buy a dress on sale at Bergdorf's while he went off to spend a small fortune on records at Sam Goody's. Probably the best thing to do is to lump the poem together with Jarrell's love of English tailoring and spiffy sports cars as part of the eccentric baggage all poets carry around with them.

I don't doubt that Jarrell was liberal and even libertarian. But it's puzzling that, beginning with the 1954 antisegregation Supreme Court decision and on up through the genesis of the civil rights movement, neither Jarrell's criticism nor his poetry gives evidence that he was aware of progressive social movements or of any political concerns. All the inhabitants of his poems are white, with the exception of "Lady Bates," which is sympathetic in a paternalistic way to its subject but, like so many poems by white authors dealing with blacks, doesn't avoid using the N-word. Meanwhile, he never mentions African-American writers in his criticism. Someone who has the time may also want to check to see how many poems by African-Americans he selected for publication in this magazine. On the plus side, he suffered from no anti-Semitism at all; among the Jews, Freud, Kafka and Arendt were very high in his pantheon. His powerful "Jews at Haifa" is based on an incident when British authorities in Palestine denied sanctuary to a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Germany during World War II. Still, only in this poem and "A Prussian Camp in the Forest" does he deal with the Holocaust. The subject never comes up in his prose, and that fact makes it a little harder to digest his often expressed devotion to German artistic culture.

A hypothesis often discussed in private but never aired publicly is that Jarrell had repressed homosexual desires. Or not so repressed in the poem "The Bronze David of Donatello," in which Jarrell's customary cool yields to a passionate response to Donatello's nude version of David as a boy warrior about 13 years old. The statue gets this response from Jarrell: "The rib-case, navel, nipples are the features/Of a face that holds us like the whore Medusa's--/Of a face that, like the genitals, is sexless." But how sexless can genitals be? Attraction and repression both reside in the weird modifier "whore" for the mythological character whose gaze petrified anyone who returned it. Apparently Jarrell could allow homosexual desire to surface so long as it was sanitized by statue-fetishism and pedophilia. Meanwhile, none of his poems dealing with his feelings toward women are as drenched in desire. He expresses physical interest in a woman just once (without loss of cool) in "A Man Meets a Woman on the Street," where the woman turns out to be his wife--wearing the very dress she went out to buy at Bergdorf's, the memoir tells us. On the other hand, his interior monologue of an unnamed woman in "Next Day" soon gets to her aching disappointment that the grocery-store bag boy doesn't see her as a sexual being.

If Jarrell repressed his homosexual side, that might help explain the savagery of his essay about Auden, who'd been willing to take the rap for being gay during one of the most repressive periods in American social history. Auden's poetry has flaws, but so does Eliot's and Frost's and Williams's; the indulgence Jarrell was willing to extend to them was denied to Auden. I remember a reported comment of Auden's in response to some critic's hatchet job, to the effect: "Oh, he must be attracted to me, or he wouldn't be so nasty." The reviewer wasn't named. Could it have been Jarrell, who, even if not attracted to Auden himself, might have been tempted by Auden's freedom, not to mention the unsuccessfully repressed attraction to bronze ephebes and bag boys?

Mary Jarrell's account of their marriage is suffused with cheer, and you sense that he was kind, playful, thoughtful and affectionate with her. But passion and lust don't come into the picture. It's interesting that "The Meteorite," the first poem Jarrell wrote with Mary in mind, allegorizes her as a star, whom the poem designates as "sister." Jarrell was sufficiently Freudian to understand the mechanics of sublimation. His ardency was poured out in poems and essays, which don't do everything criticism can do but do some things very well. Even toward the end, there's no sign he had definitively closed up shop. I wish he had lived longer. Childlike in many ways, he kept the child's ability to continue learning and would probably have gone on to be even better as a critic and poet than he was.

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