More Than "A Nice Idyllic Thing To Do": Jarrell's Work for Children

Abstract

More Than "A Nice Idyllic Thing To Do":Jarrell's Work for Children Richard Flynn (bio) Griswold, Jerome . The Children's Books of Randall Jarrell. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1988. In 1962, Randall Jarrell, age 47, was at the height of his fame as a writer for adults. He had served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1956-58, received the National Book Award for Poetry for The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), and had gained a certain notoriety as a curmudgeonly social critic by publishing his collection of essays, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962). Jarrell's star as a critic of poetry had risen so high that in 1962 he was invited to deliver the major lecture at the National Poetry Festival, entitled "Fifty Years of American Poetry." Despite these outward indications of success, Jarrell was experiencing great difficulty with his writing, particularly with writing poetry. As a way out of this impasse, encouraged by Michael di Capua, Jarrell began writing for children, which had a salutary effect on his writing for adults, and resulted in at least two excellent children's books. Jarrell's work as a whole has received scant critical attention compared with that of his exact contemporaries, particularly Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Despite the publication last year of William Pritchard's Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, this remains true. In the past ten years, Ian Hamilton's excellent biography of Lowell has appeared as well as several full-length academic studies, and Berryman has been the subject of two major biographies, and several critical books and essays. By contrast, Jarrell has received slighter and less satisfactory attention. The relative marginalization of Jarrell's work among academics may well be due, in part, to Jarrell's writing for children. Lowell, for one, characterized Jarrell's children's stories as "a nice, idyllic thing to do" (Pritchard 314). In his preface to The Children's Books of Randall Jarrell, Jerome Griswold raises the question of Jarrell's literary status and laments that "the standard entry for Jarrell in literary reference books...makes no mention at all of his books for children." Griswold's study serves as a corrective to this oversight by giving sustained attention to each of the four original children's books—The Gingerbread Rabbit (1964), illustrated by Garth Williams, and The Bat-Poet (1964), The Animal Family_(1965), and Fly By Night (1976), all illustrated by Maurice Sendak. But Griswold's assertion that "Jarrell's children's books can be seen as the final fruition of his life and of his career as a notable twentieth-century American writer" is more problematic. Because Lowell, like critic Jeffrey Meyers, sees Jarrell's children's writing as a failure rather than a fruition, it is important to show that Jarrell's writing for children was an essential rather than a peripheral activity. Though he promises to do otherwise, Griswold relates the children's books to Jarrell's larger enterprise only sporadically. This strategy threatens, at times, to backfire. By isolating the children's books from the work for adults, Griswold runs the danger of unintentionally lending credibility to those who wrongly argue that Jarrell's children's books contribute to his lesser status among die poets of the so-called "middle generation." However, Griswold is the first Jarrell critic to give the children's books the attention they deserve. Combining biographical criticism with excellent close-readings of the texts and illustrations, Griswold's study is an "appreciation" written in a familiar style, which is relatively free of academic jargon. Exquisitely designed, with profuse reproductions of the original illustrations by Garth Williams and Maurice Sendak, the book is strongest when Griswold analyzes what he calls the "conversation" between text and pictures. Griswold is quite convincing when discussing the problems of illustration that Jarrell's texts presented to the artists. For instance, while admitting that The Gingerbread Rabbit is easily the least successful of Jarrell's children's books, he demonstrates the expertise of Williams's illustrations, noting how, in the cover illustration, Williams captures the Jarrellian theme, apparent in poems like "A Quilt...