BOOKS
RANSOM AND JARRELL
SELECTED LETIERS OF JOHN CROWE RANSOM. Edited with an In·
troductlon by Thomas Daniel Young and George Core. Louisiana
State University Press. $32.50.
RANDALL JARRELL'S LETIERS: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND
LITERARY SELECTION. Edited by Mary Jarrell. Houghton Mifflin.
$29.95.
They were never close companions, always master and
pupil, distanced. In October 1935 Jarrell wrote from Vanderbilt to
Robert Penn Warren - "Dear Red" - who had joined Cleanth
Brooks in ed iting
The Southern Review:
I've seen Mr. Ransom a good deal- he is engrossed in aesthetics.
We rather argue; he wants me to do a thesis on that, but I'm
afraid I could hardly make it experimental. I reread Croce and
said the original part in Croce (the intuition as expression) was
purely psychological, or to use a word he loves, behaviouristic;
he gave me a thoughtful look, with doubt, concern, and regret
mixed in, and said he had never seen it looked at from that point
of view before. I have more fun talking with him than I used to; I
like to talk shop, and aesthetics more or less is, politics and free–
ing the slaves not much.
Ransom found Jarrell pert, intellectually pugnacious, brilliant of
course but willing to wound in causes always deemed sufficiently
good because they were his. In the summer of 1937, Jarrell and
Lowell followed Ransom to Kenyon College, and the talk was re–
sumed, but Ransom was more at ease with Lowell. He wrote to
Allen Tate on October 10th:
Randall and Cal are pretty good company; both good fellows in
extremely different ways. Randall has gone physical and col–
legiate with a rush: tennis is the occasion; good for him. Cal is
sawing wood and getting out to all his college engagements in
businesslike if surly manner; taking Latin and Greek and philos–
ophy and, of course, English; wants to be really educated; and
personally is about as gentle and considerate a boy as I've ever
dealt with.
