Avenging Angel

By Christopher Porterfield

KIPLING, AUDEN & CO.

by Randall Jarrell

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 381 pages;

$17.95

A sensitive, humane poet, a comic novelist, a children's fabulist and an exuberant spirit, Randall Jarrell was the terror of his fellow writers when he sat down to review them. He once said of Oscar Williams' poems that they appeared to have been "written on a typewriter by a typewriter." He complained of Kenneth Patchen's heavyhandedness by saying, "When Mr. Patchen hints, the pigs run in from miles around." He described the neo-Victorian poets Leonard Bacon and Witter Bynner as "traditional in the sense that an index is traditional; they are the remains of something necessary under no longer existing conditions."

If Jarrell wrote like an angel, it was often an avenging one. But the same fierce gaiety that could make him lethal also made him the most generous of praisers. He proselytized ardently for Whitman and Frost a generation ago, when both tended to be dismissed, or admired for the wrong reasons. He upbraided Auden for sometimes frittering away magnificent skills: "Auden's laundry list would be worth reading--I speak as one who's read it many times, all rhymed and metered." But Auden's best, he maintained in a review reprinted in this new collection, was "some of the strongest, strangest, and most original poetry that anyone has written in this century; when old men, dying in their beds, mumble something unintelligible to the nurse, it is some of those lines that they will be repeating."

In a series of essays on Kipling, Jarrell echoed Mark Twain's remark that "it isn't what they don't know that hurts people, it's what they do know that isn't so." He urged readers to forget what they thought they knew of Kipling, the crude laureate of imperialism, and to replace it with a Kipling eloquently portrayed as "a great genius; and a great neurotic; and a great professional, one of the most skillful writers who have ever existed."

Jarrell, who died in an auto accident in 1965, aged 51, was above all an enthusiast of literature, but without any of the ingenuousness that the term implies. He devoutly believed in the healing magic and liberating wisdom of good writing, and seemed painfully surprised and let down when he encountered anything less. In discriminating between the two, he had virtually perfect pitch.

At his death he left two collections of his essays and reviews, Poetry and the Age and A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. In 1969 The Third Book of Criticism was published posthumously. Most of his last remaining pieces are now gathered in Kipling, Auden & Co. The result, inevitably, is a jumble of scraps and remnants: a portion of Jarrell's master's thesis on A.E. Housman, articles on music, painting and sports cars, a touching tribute to War Correspondent Ernie Pyle, dozens of poetry and fiction reviews and a few pieces from Supermarket, now out of print. Slight as it is, the book still soars above the kind of contemporary criticism that, as Jarrell said, could have been written by "a syndicate of encyclopedias for an audience of International Business Machines."

Jarrell's attacks on such criticism, and on the dullness and decay of a culture that processed the word like any other commodity, became a standard turn in his later years. Like most of his writing, it was emphatically a performance: insistently personal in tone, a little self-consciously dazzling. As represented by two essays in this collection, The Taste of the Age and Poets, Critics, and Readers, it was also a performance that succeeded too well. How could readers be persuaded by the argument that grace and wit were dying out, when it was advanced with all the grace and wit of a Randall Jarrell?

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