Volume 46, Number 19 · December 2, 1999
Keeping the Reader Alive
By Michael Wood
Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell
by Mary von Schrader Jarrell
HarperCollins, 173 pp., $22.00
No Other Book: Selected Essays
by Randall Jarrell, edited and with an introduction by Brad Leithauser
Michael di Capua Books/HarperCollins, 376 pp., $27.50
The boy, leaning slightly forward, looks eagerly out of the frame, as if waiting for the next move in a game he likes, or for the next hypnotic gesture of his favorite magician. The eyes gleam; the smile is full of excitement. The photograph is in one sense quite conventional, a studio portrait of a boy in a sailor suit, circa 1916. But the look is extraordinary. The child's happy expectation, the sense that he has seen something delightful and is about to see more, is unmistakable. The child is Randall Jarrell, aged two and a half years, and by all accounts this look stayed with him for another forty-eight years or so. There was always something delightful to see, and he was the person to see it. Soon after he turned fifty Jarrell went into a severe depression, with extravagant manic episodes. He tried to kill himself, but seemed to be on the mend when he was struck by a car while walking on a road in North Carolina, and died as a result of the blow.
Review, 7178 words
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