'But in Them There Is a Different Look'

Berating people seldom works. Mostly it keeps the berater amused. Few of us revise our thinking or behavior because someone tells us we should. Rather, over time, we come to see there might be a better way to go about things. As Dr. Johnson puts it in The Idler: “Let those who desire to reform us, shew the benefits of the change proposed.” The most efficient way is to embody the suggested changes, live the virtues you wish to encourage, don’t preach. In 1955, in his “Year in Poetry” feature in Harper’s, Randall Jarrell wrote: 

“Sometimes when I can’t go to sleep at night I see the family of the future. Dressed in three-toned shorts-and-shirt sets of disposable Papersilk, they sit before the television wall of their apartment, only their eyes moving. After I’ve looked a while I always see—otherwise I’d die—a pigheaded soul over in the corner with a book; only his eyes are moving, but in them there is a different look.”

 

Jarrell is probably best known for his put-downs. He was the wittiest of critics. Consider his dismissal of the South African poet Roy Campbell: “If the damned, blown willy-nilly around the windy circle of hell, enjoyed it and were proud of being there, they would sound very much as he sounds.” And about Ezra Pound: “Many writers have felt, like Pound: Why not invent an art form that will permit me to put all my life, all my thoughts and feelings about the universe, directly into a work of art? But the trouble is, when they’ve invented it it isn’t an art form.”

 

Yet Jarrell is one of the great critical celebrators. Read again his reviews and essays on Kipling, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Robert Frost and Marianne Moore, among others. Above he celebrates the “pigheaded soul,” the stubborn, lonely reader of the future that has now arrived. I assume most readers of Anecdotal Evidence are just that – readers, soon as vanished a species as the passenger pigeon. Berating and nagging the majority among whom we live, the non-readers, is presumptuous and futile.  

 

Less than three months before his death in 1965, Jarrell published “Speaking of Books,” ostensibly a traditional list of suggestions for summer reading, in The New York Times Book Review. The essay, in fact, is a distillation of a life’s engagement with books. Read with the knowledge of Jarrell’s imminent death, it’s a poignant human document but we shouldn’t allow poignancy to diminish its worth as a paean to passionate reading:

 

“May I finish by recommending -- in no tone -- some books for summer reading? Giradoux' Electra; Bemelman’s Hotel Splendide; Kim; Saint-Simon’s Memoirs; Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South; the new edition of A.L. Kroeber's textbook of anthropology, and Ralph Linton’s The Study of Man; Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches; Colette’s Julie de Carneilhan and The Last of Cheri; Pirandello’s Henry IV; Freud’s Collected Papers; Peter Taylor’s The Widows of Thornton; Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; Goethe’s aphorisms; Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Letters to Robert Bridges; Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge, and Chekhov’s plays, stories, letters -- anything.”