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gence, judgment, and intuition. I think Ramon is the man, unless
there is decisive evidence in favor of the Argentinian.
The editing of Jarrell's letters has proceeded, I infer, on a dif–
ferent principle. Mary Jarrell wants the book to stand as autobio–
graphical and literary evidence. Presumably she means to show her
husband in the form in which he would have wished to show himself
- a man who put some stock in his appearance - if he had written an
autobiography. A difficult project, indeed. Ransom's letters are in–
formal accompaniments to the formal thinking he was pursuing at
the same time in verse and prose: that is their chief interest. Jarrell's
letters are more personal, more a device for keeping in touch with
the people he loved and admired. He argued with Lowell, in several
letters, about free will and the Catholic doctrine of grace, but the
doctrine mattered to him, I think, not at all for its own sake but
rather as the theme upon which he engaged Lowell's interest for the
time being. There was nothing cynical in Jarrell's recourse to these
themes, but I think his interest in them was decently opportunistic.
Generally, the letters reveal his daily activities, his enthusiasms, his
Proust, Rilke, Mozart, Mahler, Hardy, Auden, his tennis and sports
cars and cats. Mary Jarrell has done well to put these circus animals
on show.
But the full portrait of her husband, the shape of the evidence
she has chosen, is nearly more winning than I can believe. Was he
always the golden boy, the F. Scott Fitzgerald of Princeton? Did he
never write a letter when he was sullen or dogged or jealous or other–
wise nasty? I am much edified by the care Jarrell took to help Lowell
revise his poems and to stimulate Adrienne Rich by indicating where,
in her poems, she was miming Lowell instead of projecting herself.
The only letter I find unpleasant, because the tone is so lavish that I
think the speech a diplomat's, is one he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in
April 1957, telling her that he liked her poems better than Marianne
Moore's:
I've quite got to like your poems better than Marianne Moore's
as much as I do like hers - but life beats art, so to speak, and
sense beats eccentricity, and the way things really are beats the
most beautiful unreal visions, half-truths, one can fix up by leav–
ing out and indulging oneself. That, too, is just half the truth
about her, but I've written the other half at great length and
don't need to do it all over again.
