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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
heart of heartlessness." But Jarrell's beautifully flashing, amazingly flexible
armor of European culture so useful to his criticism, his Freud, the
Brothers Grimm, Proust, Chekhov, Rilke - did he live perhaps a little
vicariously? Did he feel this in his forties, until at fifty, something in him
rebelled?
When Jarrell thinks discursively in his poems (dramatic monologues
generally in women's voices like "Next Day" or "The Woman at the
Washington Zoo"), he feels and talks like a woman who feels and talks
like JarrelL When he acts (his Rilke translations, war poems, and fairy–
tale fables), he is a child with an adult's intelligence searching for Mother
and Father. In all his poems - and surely in his last best book,
The Lost
World
-
his sexual identity is strangely indeterminate, an intellectualized,
tormented, half-joking androgeny.
In his dramatic monologues Jarrell's female speakers are thinly dis–
guised versions of himself: What woman - or man but Randall Jarrell -
quotes, while shopping in the supermarket, William James: "Wisdom,"
said William James,! / "Is learning what to overlook." But this woman–
as-Jarrell also haunts his criticism. His provocative essay on Frost's "Home
Burial," in which an estranged husband and wife try to mend the breach
caused by the death of their newborn child, is strangely severe on the
husband. In taking the woman's part in this poem, Jarrell tends to see
the man as slow, dull-witted, even physically and sexually brutaL
Frost isn't nearly so efficient in placing blame: Even if the man is
what Jarrell paints him, the reader still feels as much pity as scorn. Jarrell's
sense of his own superiority as a critic chills his feeling for the husband's
inarticulate, hurt, woefully desperate attempt to make contact with his
wife:
My words are nearly always an offense.
I don't know how
to
speak of anything
So as
to
please you. But I might be taught,
I should suppose. I can't say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
With women-folk. We could have some arrangement
By which I'd bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you're a mind to name.
Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love.
Two that don't love can't live together without them .
But two that do can't live together with them.
Jarrell is right to condemn the man's sensitivity as "a willing hopeful
form of insensitivity," but his ear misses the pitying, awkward grandeur of
the man's speech. In describing the husband's proverb about those who
do and do not love as a "partially truthful but elephantine aphorism that
