120
PARTISAN REVIEW
And finally, Mr. Randall Jarrell. Of the new generation of Amer–
ican poets there are few whom I should set ahead of him-probably only
one, Mr. Robert Lowell. Mr. Jarrell is extraordinarily gifted, as
Blood
for a Stranger
proved three years ago. The new poems, nearly all of them
dealing with the war, are an extension of range and a toughening.
He
seems less brittly nervous than he did; whereas the first book was ex–
plosive, the vigor of fragmentation,
Little Friend, Little Friend
shows
~n
increasing power to sustain and develop: witness the firm line of
'2nd
Air
Force,' unbroken from beginning to end, and the harmonious
shaping of the great strophe in 'Siegfried.' And he is capable, thank
God!, of a wise silliness. 'The State' is a gag, all right:
When they took my cat for the Army Corps
Of Conservation and Supply,
I thought of him there in the cold with the mice
And I cried, and I cried, and I wanted to die
...
but it is laughter that comes very close to the
lachrym.ae rerum-how
close, one may perceive by comparing it with another poem in a far
different key, 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.' The poems play
back and forth upon one another: the helpless anonymity hosed out of
the turret is the scared anonymity in his dwindling house, the giggle and
the nightmare combine in a moral judgment that is as bitter as it is
hopeless. 'Each man died for the sins of the whole world'; but Mr.
Jarrell's
Qui tollis
is a desolate one, as rayless as his book's beautiful
epigraph:
...
Then I heard the bomber call me in: <Little Friend, Little
Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see me, Little
Friend?'
I said <I'm crossing right over you. Let's go home.'
But even
if
this is all, and home turns out to be only another version of
the ball turret, the perception is in itself a kind of catharsis. And there
is something to be said for a mapped damnation.
Oh very well, sure, I'll agree that there is too much ebullience, that
the gaga of 'The Boyg, Peer Gynt, the One Only One,' like the dada
of 'Mother, Said the Child,' should have remained in the notebook.
A
man who can write that single line about air-force armorers in their
faded green:
·
And the green, made beasts run home to air,
with the immense implications of that Tacitean 'made,'-such a man has
no right to splash as boisterously as he does. And so forth. But
I
cannot,
in all honesty, find anything seriously wrong here. This is an intelligent,
tragic, witty, profoundly tender book.
Ad multos annos.
DunLEY FrTTs
