BOO KS
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to appreciate the rare marriage of wit and generosity he has managed
to carry off during these last unlamented years. Such a mixture would
be impossible to sustain were it not firmly grounded on taste and ex–
perience.
Like Heine, Poe and Byron, all of whom he resembles in one way
or another, Mr. Jarrell would doubtless subscribe to the notion that any–
thing worth saying is worth exaggerating. His enemies have a way of
becoming goblins and gnomes with a subtle if somehow harmless malig–
nancy: his heroes-Goethe, Frost, Corbiere, Marianne Moore, Whitman,
et al.-are sometimes equally fabulous in their access to Wisdom. At the
same time, no modern critic has a more lively respect for that dying
species, the general reader.
If
you don't enjoy this poem, he tells us,
I know a very intelligent little girl who does.
He can show us more
vividly than anyone else the movement of life from kitchen to parlor,
from city to university, from the poem to the world, from the major
classic to the minor success. When tired, he merely insists that there is,
that there must be, such a movement. In other words, he is a better
exponent than most academic Aristotelians of the famous doctrine of
Imitation, a saving witness against the popular image of the Writer-as–
Scapegoat we hear so much about. Literature is his life.
You see me, sir,
a mad young fellow .
. .
but every inch a critic!
What is one to say about Delmore Schwartz's recent claim that in
his criticism of Frost and Whitman especially, Mr. Jarrell has seized the
baton from the failing hands of Eliot and the Eliotics and carried it a
stage further, that in applying Eliot's literary standards with the same
adventurousness of spirit, he has dispelled some of the hypnotic sterilities
of the Eliot cult? (Mr. Schwartz cites Jarrell's
quip
that to expect
Ransom's poetry to be influenced by Tate's and Warren's would be like
expecting "a daydream to be influenced by two nightmares" as a prime
example of his success in combining
wisdom with wit.)
Now, I think that
this
is a claim that had to be made by someone, if only because Mr.
Jarrell's confident, comprehensive taste urges it upon us. And I think
it is entirely justified if you take it in conjunction with Eliot's remark
about Twain, to the effect that Twain was "an adult when he wrote
like a child and a child when he wrote like an adult." Behind this super–
ficially brilliant
mot
is the unspoken
assumption
that a certain
subject
matter,
a certain range of experience,
is
ipso facto childish, and that the
best a genius like Twain can do
is
to dignify it with "adult treatment."
It
is just in this respect that, whatever their other disagreements with
him may be, the university critics have closed ranks behind Eliot and
united in patronizing and minimizing the genius of a large class of
