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PARTISAN REVIEW
No, it won't do. Jarrell couldn't have written the essays on Marianne
Moore in
Poetry and the Age
if he took seriously the crude disjunction
between life and art, sense and eccentricity, he mailed to Bishop. It
is a gaucherie. But it is nearly a welcome blemish in an otherwise
wartless portrait.
Jarrell's last year was appalling. For months, he was haggard
and dazed, no longer the golden boy but a listless middle-aged poet
suffering from hepatitis, a sacroiliac injury, and vague distress. He
and Mary separated, but she continued to visit him in hospital where
doctors tried various elaborate medications without much success.
He sank into depression, cut his left wrist in a suicide attempt.
Editing these last letters, Mary Jarrell gives in to the cruelty of sug–
gesting that the suicide attempt was caused by a certain reviewer's
dismissive commentary, in the
New York Times Book Review,
on her
husband's work. The reviewer is not to be blamed for malign coin–
cidence. IfJarrell had been in good health, he would have tossed the
review aside. In any case, the wrist didn't heal, and the doctors made
arrangements for Jarrell to enter the Hand House of the University
of North Carolina Medical School. Three days after he was received
there, he went out for an evening walk. On his way back to the Cen–
ter, he was knocked down by a car and killed. He was fifty-one.
DENIS DONOGHUE
GOING THROUGH THE EMOTIONS
YOUNG HEARTS CRYING. By Richard Yates. Delacorte Press. $16.95.
LIVES OF THE POETS. By E.
L.
Doctorow. Random House, Inc. $14.95.
All the characters in Richard Yate's workaday new novel
are mildly cultured and well-bred and absolutely uninterested in
anything beyond themselves; all, in fact, are relentlessly social ani–
mals with no grander concern than the presentation of self in every–
day life. On the surface (which is their spiritual home), they are all
artists-after a fashion; at heart, however, they are committed to
nothing save self-expression. Theirs is a world in which epiphany is
a compliment and tragedy a social gaffe. Sauntering along in limpid,
supple prose,
Young Hearts Crying
chaperones these common crea-
