BOOKS
147
At the End of Our Good Day
RANDALL JARRELL: A LITERARY LIFE. By
William Pritchard. Farrar,
Straus
&
Giroux. $14.95.
I
first read Randall Jarrell's poems in the back of a Baltimore bookstore
fourteen or fifteen years ago. His publisher had also released a collected
volume of Elizabeth Bishop's: Both books were wildly out of
alphabetical order, but shelved, weirdly enough, side by side. Some po–
etry reader who knew a great deal more than I did must have been
browsing and then, distracted or in a hurry, left them that way.
I'd heard of Lowell, but not Jarrell or Bishop: Now that all three
are dead, one name conjures up another with almost familial insistence.
During their lifetimes the lion's share of notice went to Lowell, though
his breakdowns, marital resolutions and irresolutions attracted as much
attention as his work. If from time to time Jarrell and Bishop smashed
their lives to pieces (in Jarrell's case, William Pritchard's biography gives
little evidence of this), they lived away from the magnifying-glass scrutiny
of literary gossip, Bishop's Brazil, Jarrell's Greensboro fantastically far
from Lowell's Boston and New York. Bishop's drinking, Jarrell's
breakdown and putative suicide at fifty - in a letter written when he was
thirty-three, he describes himself as leading "an odd, independent, unso–
ciallife remarkably unlike other peoples' lives, the life of someone whose
principal work-and-amusement is writing and reading and thinking about
things."
Lowell's "one life, one writing"; his "words meathooked from the
living steer"; his late ungainsayable
ars poetica,
"Yet why not say what
happened?" - all this depended on something having happened. In one
of Jarrell's last poems, "The Player Piano," his perennial alter-ego, an
older woman, says, " If only, somehow, I had learned to live!" And in a
letter written after his breakdown and a month before his death: "I 've
always wanted to change, but not to change into what you become
when you're mentally ill."
At some point, most poets' lives go dead on them -
to
paraphrase
Lowell, they reflect, moralize, imagine: Some single faculty keeps on
moving and fanning the air, but the whole-man has stopped. Of course
Lowell's illness kept him from the "immunity to soil, entanglements and
rebellion" which he praised, envied and quietly censured in Jarrell:
Wasn't his old friend a little above it all? Bishop's unhappiness, valor, and
humor - how often her critics have commented on the sheen of her
poems' scoured surfaces! And yet something heartbroken stares back from
her stoical, self-contained gaze, a terror like Jarrell's snow-leopard, "the
