BOOKS
425
pion, a sort of enlightened stuffed sport shirt) remarks, with forced
good nature, that Gertrude's bark is worse than her bite, the author
comments: "This was foolish-Gertrude's bark
was
her bite; and many
a bite has lain awake all night longing to be Gertrude's bark." I am
tempted to hail this as, at last, the American epigram: American in its
farfetchedness and humorous overstatement, and yet neat and contained
as an epigram should be. We have had the tall story; this is the tall
epigram.
But the whole book is not as good as its parts, the chapters are
not as good as the paragraphs and sentences. The
mots
and metaphors
collect like pebbles in a heap; at the end there is just the heap of
sparkling pebbles. But why isn't a lot of wit good enough? The trouble
is with the form of the book.
Pictures from an Institution
is not a novel,
as I have said, but it arouses some of the expectations of one. It starts
like a story, but there is none--just the machine-gun rattle of witty
definitions and descriptions. Its people start out like the people of a
novel, but then get defined right off in a
mot;
their types are summed
up neatly enough, but their life is missed, and the meaning is the same
at the last as in the beginning. What was wanted, perhaps, was a kind
of form that fulfilled itself in this play of witticism and epigram; but
what exactly this form might be I do not know.
On Benton, the college itself, Mr. Jarrell is least satisfactory. "Most
of the people of Benton would have swallowed a porcupine, if you had
dyed its quills, and called it Modern Art; they longed for men to be
discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren't
prejudiced toward moon men; and they were so liberal and selfless,
politically, that-but what words of men, or tongue of man or angel,
can I find adequate to this great theme?" This doesn't really say much.
The truth is that the author has hardly more to tell about Benton's
liberalism than that it is absurd-Hthe absurdities of Benton were so
absurd." Benton's liberals are just reactionaries turned inside out, and
vice-versa: "In the world outside one met many people who were nega–
tives of the people of Benton: exact duplications, but the whites and
blacks reversed. They were people who thought anything but calendars
and official portraits Modern Art, and spoke of it with exasperated
hatred; people who wrote to the Chicago
Tribune
to denounce it for
the radical stand it had taken on some issue... ." This is to miss the
huge gap separating the prejudices of reactionaries-a sort of unques–
tioned sense of things-from an ideology of cultural and political self–
righteousness; it is, also,
to
miss Benton.
On this point I find Mary McCarthy's
Groves of Academe
a much
superior book. Miss McCarthy's plot-a rascally queer fish of an in-
