Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell - Hardcover

Jarrell, Mary Von Schrad

4.07

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780061180118: Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061180114 ISBN 13: 9780061180118

Publisher: Harper, 1999

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When Randall Jarrell died in 1965, he left a critically acclaimed body of poetry, fiction, and criticism that has earned him a permanent place in the pantheon of American letters. A Library of Congress Poet Laureate and National Book Award winner, he had a formidable intellect and wit that endeared him to--or infuriated--the finest minds of his day.

Now, in the nine essays collected in Remembering Randall, his widow, Mary von Schrader Jarrell, offers a distinctive portrait of the esteemed poet-critic as only she could have known him. Capturing the essence of this complex, brilliant man, she writes knowingly about the wellsprings and character of Jarrell's poetry, particularly his last and best book, The Lost World; his courageous endeavor, after suffering from hepatitis, to create the celebrated children's books The Bat-Poet and The Animal Family; his lifelong friendships with fiction writer Peter Taylor and poet Robert "Cal" Lowell; his commitment during the last eight years of his life to completing his translation of Goethe's Faust, Part One; and, finally, their marriage.

From their home in North Carolina to Washington, New York, San Francisco, and London, Mary von Schrader Jarrell vividly describes the restless mind and free spirit they shared in their marriage. As she writes, "To be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him." This engrossing, intimate collection could not serve as a better tribute.

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Review:

In the years since his death in 1965, Randall Jarrell has inspired a wealth of tributes. Robert Lowell and John Berryman commemorated their friend and fellow poet in verse, while a lovely 1967 festschrift included contributions by the likes of Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, Marianne Moore, Maurice Sendak, and Elizabeth Bishop (who recalled that Jarrell "always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.")

Still, none of these homages have quite the intensity or immediacy of Mary Jarrell's Remembering Randall. The author was married, after all, to her subject. And as she relates, their relationship involved a very high level of playful symbiosis:

To be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him. He wanted, and we had, a round-the-clock inseparability. We took three meals a day together, every day. I went to his classes and he went on my errands. I watched him play tennis; he picked out my clothes. Sometimes we were brother and sister "like Wordsworth and Dorothy" and other times we were twins, Randall pretended.

This isn't, on the other hand, a tell-all. Like her late husband, Mary Jarrell has an old-fashioned and very attractive sense of propriety. So there's no lurid accounting of bedroom behavior, and the author handles her subject's nervous collapse with supreme, sympathetic tact. What we do get is a close-focus portrait of a poet, his personality, and his career. There are many fine insights about the work: "To open Randall's Complete Poems at any page is to find in some degree a Faustian world of disappointment or self-disappointment; and it is to look in vain for that moment so fair that he'd say to it, 'Stay!'" (Her prose, by the way, it itself a kind of tribute to the poet, echoing his mannerisms right down to the Jarrellian ellipsis.) And while Remembering Randall stays pretty firmly focused on the subject at hand, it includes glimpses of fellow authors that no reader will want to miss, like this one-sentence snapshot of Jack Kerouac: "He took no food while he was with us but kept a six-pack of beer always within reach, even carrying one in each hand the day we walked to the zoo." No fan of Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" can read this detail without realizing that one writer's inspiration is indeed another writer's hangover. --James Marcus

About the Author:

Mary von Schrader Jarrell was born n St. Louis, Missouri, and brought up in California. She graduated from Stanford University as a philosophy major. She edited Randall Jarrell's Letters and is the author of Jerome: The Biography of a Poem and The Knee-Baby, a book for children. Her essays hove appeared in Harper's, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Shenandoah, and elsewhere.

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