424
PARTISAN REVIEW
Chichikov had his Gogol, but McCarthy has yet to find his. Mean–
while, Messrs. Buckley and Bozell will do very well as minor comic
characters in the mock-heroic epic of McCarthyism, an interlude in our
political history so weird and wonderful that future archeologists may
well assign it to mythology rather than history.
Dwight Macdonald
A TALL EPIGRAM
PICTURES FROM AN IN'STITUTION.
By
Rondoll Jorrel!. Knopf. $3.50.
I don't know when colleges first began to give courses in
creative writing (as distinct from English Composition): the practice
was already established when I went to school. Those who taught these
courses were generally young writers themselves. Literature profited
from this arrangement by a spate of short stories about the relations
of instructor and student written by the former-it certainly did not
profit from the students' side, at least in any observable way, the re–
sults of writing courses, like the results of psychoanalysis, being im–
possible to ascertain with any assurance. Since then more and more
writers have been invited to join teaching staffs, especially by the pro–
gressive colleges, and another genre of story promises to arise in which
the writer-teacher bites the hand that fed him for a semester or so.
Randall Jarrell's gallery of
Pictures from an Institution-it
is not
a novel-is in this genre. He snaps amusingly at the institutional hand
of Benton, a progressive college half of whose "campus was designed
by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe." But, as
we shall see, when his teeth do close on its fingers it is only to forbear
and merely scratch the skin. Mr. Jarrell's book contains an innovation.
Pictures from an Institution
is not only a case of biting-the-hand, but
also of the biter bit: the chief person satirized is a fellow writer–
teacher, Gertrude Johnson, who is herself writing a satirical novel about
Benton-a woman, we are told, who greatly admires Swift but cannot
understand why he suddenly went soft on the Houyhnhnms.
Mr. Jarrell has a well-deserved reputation for wit; he lives up to
it, he more than lives up to it, in this book, fulfilling and overfulfilling
his quota on every page. He is best, however, with the formidable Ger–
trude, whose great fault as a writer was that "she did not know--or
rather, did not believe-what it was like to be a human being." When
the suffering president of the college (a former Olympic diving cham-
