Volume 27, Number 14 · September 25, 1980
He Had What It Takes
By Robert Towers
Kipling, Auden & Co. Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964
by Randall Jarrell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 381 pp., $17.95
The title of this fourth and final collection of Randall Jarrell's essays and reviews excited my expectation of being at last able to read the remarkable lectures on Auden that I, as a graduate student, heard him deliver at the Gauss Seminars in Princeton in the early 1950s. The title excited memories too—memories of a lean, sunburned man with a mustache, a poet in sports clothes who roared around town on a motorcycle, played tennis with rich local ladies, and, when he lectured, quoted Whitman, Auden, and Frost in a high, twanging, nearly lachrymose voice. I recall the salvo of laughter that greeted his complaint (voiced this time in a hilarious, deep-country Southern accent) that the attitude of most high-brow critics toward practicing poets was, 'Go away, pig! What do you know about bacon?'—a line that subsequently appeared in the essay called 'The Age of Criticism.' And I remember overhearing one of his tennis partners remarking that she found him moody, difficult to make conversation with.
Review, 2008 words
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