BOOKS
151
In
The Lost World,
Jarrell's search for origins finds an ending both
happy and unhappy: His grandparents, the Mama and Pop of his child–
hood poems. But his adult journey backward to childhood is counter–
balanced by the book's other concern: Woman.
But a Jarrell Woman, not the highly individuated women in
Lowell's or Bishop's work. In Jarrell, women often serve as opportunities
for charming, self-ironic commentary on men 's unreal expectations of
them: That they verge on stereotype can make his wit seem labored. At
times one wonders how a man who taught most of his life in a women's
college, married twice, his second marriage making him the stepfather of
two daughters, could be , in these poems, so blase and predictable. And
yet Jarrell's use of a female persona is almost always interesting: Why this
access to feeling denied him in his own voice?
In part, when Jarrell writes about women in his own persona, the
supercilious tones of the critic keep intruding - he becomes chatty and
loses the immediacy and power of direct presentation. But more to the
point is the source of Jarrell's defensiveness : In his essay on "Home
Burial," Jarrell conflates the husband's sexuality with the spade that he
used to dig his own child's grave. For a Freudian like Jarrell, the con–
nection must seem obvious. But Jarrell's animus, ostensibly from the
wife's point of view, about her husband's "tool," makes one wonder:
"Her next words, 'and still your spade kept lifting,' gives the man's tool
a dead, mechanical life of its own; it keeps on and on, crudely, remorse–
lessly, neither guided nor halted by spirit." And yet the grave needs to be
dug. Shouldn't it be enough to do the shoveling of your own child's
grave without worrying if the spade is guided or halted by spirit? The
man can't afford to pay someone else. For a progressive liberal like Jar–
rell, he takes an awfully dim view of this hard-pressed farmer's sweat and
labor.
Perhaps Jarrell's superior rambling, his torturous, half-joking elabora–
tions of male and female stereotypes, masked his anxiety about his own
sexual nature. In these lines from "Woman," his edginess about the
physical nature of sexual love makes his wit seem a little forced, even
prudish: "When, like Disraeli, I murmur/ That you are more like a mis–
tress than a wife,! More like an angel than a mistress; when, like Satan, I
hiss in your ear some vile suggestion,! Some delectable abomination,!
You smile at me indulgently: 'Men, men!' " This exchange between
husband and wife makes sexual desire seem like a game of talking dirty -
though in this case the dirty talker is an extremely literary one who says
"vile" and "delectable" instead of something more direct. (This is Low–
ell: "We stand to leave,! your breasts touch my chest;! under our clothes,
our bodies/ are but as bodies are. ") And instead of hissing back, the wife
- at once playmate, mistress, mother - only murmurs indulgently
