Randall Jarrell (1) (1914–1965)

Dwight Robbins, the trendy young president of Benton College, has hired Gertrude Johnson, “the brightest of our younger novelists,” to teach creative writing, and before the end of the academic year he is regretting it. Evidently, she is going to spear the entire faculty of the staidly “progressive” women’s college — which has long flown under everyone’s radar with its discrete reputation for educational methods that get good results out of even the dimmest daughters of the show more wealthy — in her next novel. And there’s not much anyone can do about it.

The distinguished poet Randall Jarrell’s only work of prose fiction was clearly inspired by the year he spent teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in New York after the end of his military service in World War II, and some of the characters are obviously at least loosely based on real people (Robbins has similarities to progressive educationalist Harold Taylor, and Gertrude is said to have been partly based on Mary McCarthy, who taught at Sarah Lawrence the same year as Jarrell), but it doesn’t quite manage to be the bitter satire the set-up would lead us to expect. Jarrell was just too nice a person to write satire: his real affection for the college and all the people in the book, even the slightly soulless Gertrude, constantly shines through the surface of the jokes.

The book might have appeared in the same year as Kingsley Amis’s campus novel Lucky Jim, but it has far more in common with the genteel and slightly ponderous style of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, written forty years earlier. A very pleasant experience, but reading it feels oddly like attending a tea-party with a delightful elderly maiden aunt… show less

i liked the way this started, and i liked the middle parts about the bear and lynx, but otherwise didn't really enjoy this much. it also felt weirdly...colonist, but i'm sure that's because of all i've been reading lately. like the mermaid coming to land and finding it better and superior in every way; it just felt icky to me. but the open hearted stories of living with animals were sweet. i just wish it had all been like that.

Soft and strange and lovely in many many ways...and at the same time, the fantasy of a totally sufficient white* heterosexual family in a pristine and entirely unpeopled wilderness to which they have all come within the last generation is a colonialist one. It doesn't stop being a colonialist fantasy because Randal Jarrell wrote beautiful prose.

*The mermaid, of course, is technically not white. Her skin color is not specified but is mentioned as being dark. I do not think this invalidates show more the above critique. show less

Let’s see if I have this straight. Mary McCarthy spent a year teaching creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1940s. In 1952, she published The Groves of Academe, which some credit as being the first faculty novel. In the years since, the shelf devoted to that inbred genre stretches into the next valley. Ms. McCarthy has a lot to answer for.
It happens that the poet Randall Jarrell taught at Sarah Lawrence that same year. Two years after McCarthy’s book appeared, Jarrell show more published this satire about a novelist of repute who spends a year teaching at a progressive women’s college and uses that year to gather material for a savage novel.
I haven’t read Groves, but I’m sure Jarrell’s book is funnier. I haven’t guffawed while reading so often since the last Mark Twain I read. I don’t know if McCarthy ever spoke to Jarrell again. In addition to being a good writer, she seems to have been a top-notch feuder.
Jarrell’s telling jabs at the foibles of institutions of higher learning balance between merciless and affectionate. Many are the observations of his own alter ego, the narrator, but the most telling blows are landed by the novelist, Gertrude. In singing the praises of Benton College to the Committee on Aims, she declaims: “Beautiful spot! So young, so lovely! So unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!” (p. 211).
In one of my favorite scenes, Gertrude dissects a visiting lecturer at the reception in the home of the college’s president. The lecturer, Daudier (pronounced Dod-yer), seems to be an amalgam of Clifton Fadiman and Mortimer Adler. This scene comes near the end of the book, just as I was beginning to wonder whether Jarrell’s love of paradox didn’t border on the perverse (“you had to hear it not to believe it” - p. 25). The book is witty and insightful from beginning to end. show less